The vanished referent

Posted on: 1 May 2026

May Day in Britain is a bank holiday, not a memorial. While Italians fill Piazza San Giovanni in Rome with rallies, while CGT marches block central Paris, while Spanish unions process through Madrid behind worn banners, Britain holds barbecues. The shopping centres open as usual, the parks fill with portable grills, the Tube runs a Sunday service. There is no march, no memorial, no public acknowledgement that the date marks anything beyond the right to a long weekend before summer arrives properly.

It would be tempting to read this as British eccentricity, the same temperamental distance from continental ritual that produced cricket instead of football and Wimbledon instead of Roland-Garros. It would also be wrong. The absence of May Day from British public life is not a quirk of national character, it is the visible trace of a deliberate erasure carried out across forty years through three successive political projects, and the fact that the erasure has now become invisible to most British citizens is itself the most successful part of the operation.

Haymarket Square, Chicago, 1886. A bomb thrown into a workers' rally demanding the eight-hour day, four police officers killed, seven men sentenced to death on fabricated evidence, four hanged. May Day was born there, from a specific event in a specific industrial moment: factory capitalism, the worker as a sociologically compact figure who shared hours, space, exposure to risk and above all an identical structural position relative to capital. The continental ritual makes sense because it commemorates a subject that genuinely existed, with clear edges, converging interests, and the capacity for collective coordination based on physical co-presence.

That subject no longer exists, and not in the rhetorical sense used by right-wing polemicists when they declare the working class finished, nor in the defensive sense used by their opponents who insist it has merely changed form. It has dissolved in a more radical and more uncomfortable way: the political category "worker" as a unitary subject has fragmented into structurally incompatible regimes that share only the name.

From where I sit, watching this fragmentation produce paradoxes that twentieth-century vocabulary cannot describe, the British case is the most advanced version of a continental drift. The Deliveroo rider in Hackney pedalling through rain for three pounds a drop, the McKinsey consultant invoicing four thousand pounds a day from her flat in Notting Hill, the warehouse picker on a zero-hours contract in a Midlands distribution centre, the freelance UX designer working from a Cornish village for a San Francisco client paid in dollars: all are nominally workers, all are nominally citizens of the same labour market, but they inhabit four economies with four incompatible regimes of skin in the game. The rider has no contractual leverage but possesses media visibility; the consultant has individual contractual leverage but zero class solidarity; the warehouse picker has residual statutory protection while watching the productive base that justified it evaporate; the freelancer enjoys autonomy that twentieth-century unions would have called employer-grade but lives in economic insecurity that no twentieth-century employer would have accepted for himself.

The point is not that they are all workers in different ways, as the progressive version of the ritual likes to console itself. The point is that the unitary political category which once held these four social bodies together has dissolved, and what remains in continental Europe is a ritual searching for a subject that is not there. What remains in Britain is even more telling: the ritual itself was abolished before the dissolution became fully visible, leaving the country without the diagnostic instrument that May Day, however ceremonially, still provides.

The British erasure happened in three phases. Margaret Thatcher dismantled it structurally through the Trade Union Act 1984 and the prolonged confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers from 1984 to 1985, breaking not only the unions' material capacity to mobilise but the public legitimacy of class language as a frame for understanding social reality. Tony Blair then completed the operation rhetorically through the Third Way, declaring that we are all middle class now, dropping Clause Four from the Labour constitution in 1995 and rebranding the party as a custodian of aspiration rather than of labour. Keir Starmer now governs the institutional residue: a Labour Party with historic majorities in Parliament but membership at its lowest in decades, a party that wins elections by occupying the centre while the disaffected working class drifts towards Reform UK, which speaks about immigration and tax but never about labour as such.

More clinically, the mechanism is adverse selection applied to political representation. Those who possess individual contractual leverage, because their skills are scarce or because they operate in global markets, do not need May Day: their protection comes from bilateral contracts they negotiate directly, from non-compete clauses they sign personally, from client portfolios they cultivate over careers. Those who would desperately need May Day in its original sense, the rider, the warehouse picker, the agency-employed cleaner moving between three sites a day, are precisely those with the least capacity for collective coordination, because they work in isolation, because they change employers every six months, because their contractual category was designed specifically to prevent the formation of a union subject. The continental ritual celebrates a mobilisation capacity that has been structurally dismantled exactly where it would now be most necessary; the British absence of ritual celebrates nothing at all, but at least it does not lie about what has happened.

There is another element, less discussed but perhaps more decisive. The May Day of 1886 made sense because there was an identifiable capital sitting on the other side of the table, an employer with a name and a surname, a factory with a gate in front of which one could picket, a power asymmetry that was geographically concentrated. The Hackney rider protesting against Deliveroo today is not protesting against an employer, he is protesting against an algorithm operated by a holding company headquartered in Luxembourg, owned in part by Canadian pension funds that manage the retirement savings of Toronto schoolteachers. The counterparty has become so distributed, so impersonal, so wrapped in layers of financial intermediation, that the ritual gesture of going to the picket line resembles increasingly a superstitious tap against a wall that does not push back.

This brings us to the British political moment, which is sharper than most observers recognise. The local elections held on 1 May 2026 produce an ironic coincidence the continental calendar does not permit: on the day that the rest of Europe traditionally dedicates to commemorating organised labour, British citizens vote, and the polling suggests they will reward a party that does not speak about labour at all. Reform UK does not march, does not picket, does not invoke Haymarket or Tolpuddle or the General Strike. It speaks about immigration, taxation, the erosion of national identity, the perceived asymmetry between those who work and those who claim. It speaks, in other words, the dialect of resentment that fills the vacuum left by Labour's withdrawal from class language; and it does so on a calendar date whose original meaning has been so thoroughly erased that the coincidence itself escapes public notice.

The British working poor today operate inside a calculation that the architects of the welfare state never anticipated. For a significant cohort, particularly in regions where entry-level employment pays barely above minimum wage and housing costs consume disproportionate fractions of net income, living on Universal Credit and ancillary benefits is marginally more attractive than working full-time. This is not a moral failing on their part, it is a predictable response to incentives that successive governments have allowed to compound. The middle class, meanwhile, pays the highest effective tax burden in proportion of any cohort and finds itself politically homeless: too prosperous to claim victimhood from the left, too squeezed to feel the prosperity that the right insists it should defend. Old money continues, as old money always does, untouched by these dynamics. The recent abolition of the non-dom regime has displaced perhaps a few hundred newly-arrived billionaires towards Milan, Dubai or Monaco, but the genuine wealth of Britain has never been domiciled through the non-dom mechanism, it sits in landed estates and offshore trusts that domestic taxation does not reach, and it watches the redistributive theatre with the calm of someone whose position has not been seriously threatened since 1945.

What the British silence on May Day reveals, then, is not the absence of class conflict but its conversion into an unspeakable language. The conflict is still there, only it has lost the institutional framework that would allow it to recognise itself. The middle-class tax revolt, the working poor's quiet exit from the labour market, the riders' digital coordination through Telegram channels rather than picket lines, the persistent and uncomfortable fact that household wealth in Britain is now more unequally distributed than at any point since the Edwardian era: all of this is class conflict in a country that has agreed not to use the word. The barbecues that fill suburban gardens on the first Monday of May are not a celebration of leisure, they are a private ritual that has replaced a public one, and the smoke rising vertically from a thousand portable grills across the South East is the ghost of a collective that no longer knows itself as such.

The argument I have just made is straightforwardly falsifiable. If the next five years see a revival of class language in British politics that successfully reintegrates the rider, the consultant, the warehouse picker and the freelancer into a common political platform capable of producing concrete legislative outcomes, then my analysis was wrong and the referent was merely dormant. If instead, as seems considerably more likely, we see further fragmentation of protections, further erosion of the institutional channels that once translated work into political voice, and the continued displacement of class language by identity language on both left and right, then the British silence on May Day will simply have confirmed its diagnostic accuracy. The country stopped celebrating May Day not because it had solved the problem the day commemorated, but because it had agreed to stop seeing it.

In my view, and here I speak as someone who has watched dozens of sociological categories enter and leave the public vocabulary across forty years, the most interesting feature of the British May Day is what it conceals. The continental ritual at least preserves the memory of what it has lost; the British absence of ritual erases even the memory of the loss. The day a political force in this country has the courage to commemorate the first of May not as a celebration but as a public reckoning with what was dismantled and what replaced it, will be the day on which something resembling a contemporary representation of labour becomes thinkable again. Until then, the smoke from the gardens will keep rising, the shopping centres will keep their Sunday hours, and the polling stations will close at ten with results that nobody quite manages to read as the labour question they so transparently are.