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Mayday cancelled again this year!

The London Mayday collective | 31.01.2005 19:22

Following a meeting held in mid-January the London Mayday Collective decided not to proceed with plans for an anti-capitalist event this year. This will be the second time in 6 years that there has not been an event of its kind in London and we hope what follows will help to explain the reasoning behind the decision and perhaps begin some discussion into the prospects for planning future Mayday events, keeping in mind what has gone before.

What follows is a personal reflection from a couple of participants in this year’s collective rather than a statement issued by the group as a whole.

The decision to postpone London Mayday 2004 was taken only after several disappointing and poorly attended meetings that had produced little in the way of either a concrete proposal for gathering around or a strong unifying theme that could lead to ideas worth developing. In these circumstances we feel not calling an event this year is the right thing to do. This may disappoint many, least not those Met officers who had already factored their overtime into this year’s summer holiday budgets! It will also allow those who have argued against an annual Mayday event the opportunity to put their arguments to the test. Whatever the feeling for Mayday activities, we now have the opportunity of at least a year’s breathing space to review where we are as a movement, to discuss some of the problems associated with the event in its current form and to look to what opportunities lie ahead.

Before we begin with the issues we inherited in this year’s collective, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the context within which the anti-capitalist Mayday emerged. Without understanding the context and composition of the collective, any discussion of attendant successes and failures of recent Mayday events is somewhat limited - as is any discussion of the future of the event.

The London Mayday collective