Surely bank holidays have become an expensive and ill-conceived anachronism we can no longer afford and it’s high time they were abolished?

The fact is, no-one really knows why they were introduced in the first place. Some banker called Sir John Lubbock came up with the idea in 1871 when he created four extra days off for his colleagues, while key workers in other industries continued to slave away.

If there was ever a group of individuals who don’t deserve extra holiday it must be bankers, but apparently bank holidays were created so financiers could celebrate saint days.

Right from those earliest times it was bankers, lawyers, government officials and teachers who took advantage of this extra downtime while other essential workers continued to work.

There never has been any statutory right for any worker to have a bank holiday off, they are simply counted as a normal day’s holiday and there certainly isn’t any legal right for any employee to receive extra pay for working a bank holiday.

However, I can well remember tales of certain shirkers purposely choosing to ‘work’ bank holidays specifically to take advantage of triple time when in reality they did next to nothing as there was no-one around to monitor their work.

I suspect the days of being paid three times your usual daily rate are now long gone.

This arbitrary system where employers can choose who should, and shouldn’t, take extra days of holiday should be abolished in favour of a fairer, legally-binding system which sees all workers given exactly the same number of days of annual leave.

Many workers assume public holidays are granted in addition to their holiday entitlement. In reality some employers enhance their employee’s holiday entitlement, but this is a voluntary option, not a legal obligation.

Ironically British workers, with just 8 bank holidays, get less public holiday than almost every other country in the world.

Nepal gets the most with 30 days, closely followed by countries such as Sri Lanka, India, Iran and Myanmar.

Workers in Northern Ireland get 10 days and just about every other European country, with the possible exception of Switzerland, get many more.

Every time there is a bank holiday it causes massive disruption to the entire business world, and don’t even get me started on the chaos it creates on the roads.

No, we would all be much better off all round if these outdated, unfair and arbitrary reward days were discontinued and replaced by a fairer, nationwide holiday entitlement.