Europe and Beyond

Abstract

The first day of May is earmarked in the calendar as May Day, ‘as a festival with dancing, or as an international holiday in honour of workers’.¹ Indeed, it is otherwise known as ‘Labour Day’, being ‘celebrated in honour of working people’.² As chance would have it, 1 May 1997 turned out to be a particularly notable day in the history of the Labour Party in Britain:

the Labour Party […] received only 34 per cent of the vote in the general election of 1992. Tony Blair, who became leader in 1994, supported private enterprise and promoted many reforms in the party, finally abandoning the ideological [trade] union-led principles of ‘Old Labour’ under a more popular and pragmatic manifesto which gave Labour a landslide victory in the [1 May] 1997 [general] election. Once in power ‘New Labour’, with an overwhelming majority [in the House of Commons], set about [among other things] providing a more positive approach to the [UK‘s] participation in the European Union. (Isaacs, 1998, p. 783)