The Full Fruits

Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, Charles Moore, writes:

As the Labour party wrestles with self-definition in hard times, I wonder if it was wise to ditch Clause 4. In 1994-95, it was important for Tony Blair to win a symbolic victory over the left. This undoubtedly helped get him into Downing Street. Clause 4 of the party’s constitution was considered a doctrinaire text of nationalisation. But the key contentious words do not have to bear that interpretation. The clause promises ‘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’.

Today, in the era of the credit crunch, the question of the ownership of wealth has returned to the centre of debate, and rightly so, because the many — to adapt a Blairite phrase — have had to pay for the rescue of the few. The great question in the debate between capitalism and socialism about how people can best obtain ‘the full fruits of their industry’ is unresolved. Labour would surely be in a stronger position if it were able to stand on the ground of common ownership and then modernise it in the least state-oriented way possible (a new look at cooperatives, wider share ownership, workers’ equity etc). The Blairites were right about the need to modernise, but their dreadfully vague talk about ‘values’ has disabled Labour from having alternative answers to the key question of who actually owns, and therefore controls, the wealth of nations.

The old Clause IV did not mention nationalisation, although it certainly allowed for it; it had been framed so that people who already had nationalisation in mind could read that presupposition into it, even though no one could have read that presupposition out of it. But Tony Blair and his fan club thought that it was about nothing else. So, in repudiating it, they repudiated public ownership in order to repudiate everything that public ownership delivered and safeguarded, notably national sovereignty, the Union, and the economic basis of paternal authority.

Likewise, in repudiating trade unionism, they repudiated controlled immigration, and the moderating influence of the wider electorate in the affairs of the Labour Party. Mercifully, that latter, at least, reasserted itself in the victory of Ed Miliband over the Blairite candidate. But it still needs to be reasserted that requiring the production of a union card is no different from requiring the production of a British passport or a work permit, while the closed shop was as important for that as it was for giving the Tory 45 per cent of the industrial working class a moderating influence in the selection of Labour candidates for the safe Labour seats in which they lived.