What's Happening With MayDay?

May the 1st or MayDay is an important day in Europe. Loosely based on a Pagan festival celebrating the start of spring it's widely celebrated in country life with May Fayre's and agricultural shows. It is also International Workers Day where Trade Unions celebrate the progress that has been made in workers rights and campaign on areas where progress still needs to be made. In recent years and especially in Britain it has also become associated with anarchists and they're sometimes spectacular protests.

Against a backdrop of recession and economic cuts and following the student riots, the "Ritz Blitz" on the March 26 TUC march and recent events in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol many people may be expecting MayDay 2011 to be a big event. The problem is that this year MayDay falls on a Sunday in the middle of a four day holiday weekend. That makes it quite difficult to smash the state and destroy capitalism on account of them being closed.

Also because I've been a bit busy with everyone else's revolutions and civil wars I've not really had time to find out what's being planned in Britain. However in London on May 1st there will be the International Workers Day march. This is a long standing and state authorised march that starts at Clerkenwell Green at 11:00 before marching, in an orderly fashion, to Trafalgar Square at for around 13:00. There will then be a short rally with speeches before everyone packs up and goes home.

In Bristol on April 30th some people from the anti-cuts alliance will be holding a "Defend Our Mayday" protest. The idea of this is to hand out leaflets explaining the history of Mayday in order to generate opposition to the idea that was recently floated by the right-wing, nationalist Conservative Party to abolish the MayDay Bank Holiday and replace it with a Trafalgar Day Bank Holiday in October. When this protest was originally organised I think it was just meant to be a few people, possibly with a banner, handing out leaflets to passers by. However after the riot in Stokes Croft on April 21st I wouldn't like to hazard a guess as to what will happen.

The largest event though appears to be taking place in Brighton on April 30th. On Saturday April 23rd the South Coast Climate Camp* http://brightonclimateaction.org.uk/ set up in a disused school in Lewes near Brighton. During this week they will be doing the standard Climate Camp things of holding discussions on climate change and what to do about it, skill sharing, holding performances like music and poetry and reaching out to the local community to educate them about the environment. This will culminate on April 30th when the Climate Campers will take part in a day of mass direct action. This could be to take part in the "Brighton MayDay" protest http://brightonmayday.wordpress.com/ that will begin at around 12:00 at an, as yet, unspecified location in the city. I think the original plan was for this to be a local protest policed by the local police. However if numbers are swelled by people from outside of Brighton the London's Metropolitan police have made a point of inviting Sussex police and neighbouring Hampshire police up to every major protest in London since 2009's anti-G20 protests in order to train them in the latest public order policing techniques. As a result they are now much better then they used to be so should be able to deal with this on their own.

Personally I'm actually a bit annoyed about the Brighton protest. Before I'd heard about it I'd arranged to use the public holiday created by the Royal Wedding to go down to Brighton to catch up with my mates. This is not going to make that any less complicated. As for the Royal Wedding itself it appears that nothing is being planned. Of course this doesn't mean that some idiot won't turn up and try something stupid but they're certainly not part of the mainstream.






*Now that it looks like the world is on the verge of doing something about climate change and Climate Camp played a role in that key people within the UK Climate Camp movement have suddenly decided to pull out. Without their financial and logistical support it looks unlikely there will be another Climate Camp in the UK on scale of what we've seen in previous years any time soon. However smaller, local groups are working to change that. This is one of those efforts and should be considered the main Climate Camp for 2011.