Labour needs another Clause IV moment

This article is written by Luke Cresswell and Ian Pointon

Though a leadership election is under way, what Labour needs, and before too long, is a ‘Clause IV moment’ – but one recognisably different from that of 20 years ago. Here’s why.

It’s sad and frustrating in the aftermath of May 7th to hear party luminaries insist we must cap welfare, tackle immigration and renew some lost friendship with big business.  Do they seriously imagine that these are amongst the reasons that nearly 50,000 people – 50 in the South Suffolk constituency – have become new members of the Labour Party since the election?  Tory application forms have been available to fill-in for some time for anyone with a predilection for these priorities.

Of course, many of the policy messages are coded into meaninglessness. Supporting ‘aspiration’ and becoming ‘pro-business’ are bandied about without much elaboration. They triangulate assumptions that being on the side of the poor, the insecure and the disadvantaged ought not – for electoral advantage – to be publicly admitted.  And it’s ridiculous.  With ever widening inequality in income and wealth between top and bottom and social mobility long stuck at the lights, suggesting the status quo is anything less that OK is thought to be a vote loser.

Perhaps they believe that the big winners in our divided society were a disproportionate number amongst the 35% who failed to turn out at the polls in May.  And anyway, since when did helping people in greatest need and those doing well, but seeking better, become mutually exclusive or zero-sum aims?

People aren’t stupid. They realise that jobs and work, whether they have them or not, together with most of the essentials of daily life depend on business.  That doesn’t, however, mean they approve of unnecessary job insecurity dressed up as flexibility, in-work benefit dependency fostered by low pay, legally hamstrung trade unions and unjustifiable excesses of executive pay.

Where we should be mimicking the Tories is in deciding what’s wrong with the world as is, what we’d prefer it to be like and making a plan to change it.  That starts with an analysis of where we are now and our purpose in proposing identifiable change.  It’s precisely what Clause IV – though in singularly vague terms – set out in our 1918 constitution.

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

Yet no step back in history to the old Clause IV is needed.

One reason that the 1918 Clause IV was disposed of in 1995 was that ‘common ownership’ – largely limited to nationalisation on the Morrisonian model – had become so easily dismantled using cut-price giveaways of individualised share ownership.  By 1995 the party was no longer proposing any form of common ownership whilst failing to anticipate both the private abuse of monopoly power in energy, water, telecoms and the silly mirage that was Thatcher’s never-realised idea of a share-owning democracy.

What is needed is a watershed; a fundamental departure from replicating in slightly more palatable form, short term, apparently ‘common sense’ policies that shore up neoliberal capitalism.  The time  when what passes for opposition comprises splitting hairs on the fine print of New Labour initiatives – academies, college fees, NHS marketisation, spring most to mind – should be put well behind us.  In one sense it’s as fundamentally simple as believing that our future is best decided by electors voting in a polling booth than by unknown oligarchs aboard yachts moored in tax haven harbours.

In another sense it’s much more complicated; take a look at New Labour’s Clause IV.

In the teeth of ecological limits to growths and environmental degradation, will a ‘dynamic economy’ really serve ‘the public interest’ for the foreseeable future?   Are ‘the means to realise our true potential’ provided by marketised higher education?   And precisely how is a ‘spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect’ enhanced by the sale of red mugs emblazoned with scapegoating slogans about migration?

These are not just matters of policy they’re issues of morality; the work to provide answers and offer a renewed clarity of purpose for our party needs to begin soon.