So the weather lived up to bank holiday expectation with cold winds and a few ill-timed showers. But Salisbury celebrated May Day in style, choosing to mark International Labour Day with the second Fisherton Street Festival following hard on the heels of Downton’s Cuckoo Fair.

May 1st has been a national spring holiday in many European countries for nearly 200 years. May Day bank holiday was introduced in Britain in 1978 and in many countries, traditional celebrations marking the arrival of Spring have become overlaid with political meaning, producing a ragbag mixture of folk customs, street fairs and markets, union gatherings and the odd unruly political demonstration.

But it seems slightly bizarre to me that the world should celebrate the rights and power of workers by giving everyone a day off!

In recent times there’s been a renewed focus on the value of work - working for a living has been promoted as the route out of poverty and inequality. ‘Unemployment Benefit’ has been changed to ‘Jobseekers Allowance’ (no benefit in not working; just an allowance while you looked for work). Wholesale changes have been made to disability benefits, with controversial new tests introduced to assess claimants’ ability to work. Parents have become able to take advantage of benefits to pay for child care so that they can both go out to work: the benefit system has been re-engineered to ‘encourage’ people into work.

All well and good – except that it leaves those who are incapable of working (through infirmity, learning difficulties, or having sole caring responsibilities for dependents, young children or looking after elderly parents) undervalued and deeply impoverished. Lone parents are faced with an impossible choice: either become poverty-stricken and stay at home, or go out to work and pay someone else to bring up their children. And those who make the difficult choice to give up work to provide round the clock care for an elderly parent, know that they will face destitution as well as isolation.

So I would like to propose a new day of celebration – International Carer’s Day – a celebration of non-workers’ rights. Rather than everyone having a day off, those of us who have the luxury and good fortune to be in work donate a day of our wages (or a day of our time) for the benefit of those who work hard without adequate reward or recognition as full time carers. After all, it’s they who look after the next generation, who will in turn work and pay taxes to pay for our care when we need it. And it’s they who care for the generation that went before us, who fought two world wars, gave birth to a National Health and Social Security System to whom we are all deeply indebted.