It is with a sense of irony that a Christian Socialist approaches the present discussion on Clause Four of our party’s constitution and therefore the fundamental principle of common ownership of the world’s resources.

Our present leader is himself a comparatively recent recruit to the Christian Socialist Movement and therefore may be aware of the rich Biblical basis for common ownership. He may also be aware of the continual attempts by the rich and powerful who seek to control the Church to continually deny and betray this Biblical basis.

Whatever the beliefs of present day Labour Party members and supporters we cannot deny that many of those who established the Labour Party at the beginning of this century were motivated by a Christian belief.

It is worth looking carefully at their beliefs to understand why the concept of common ownership, eventually expressed in clause four had, and still should have, such a powerful hold on the aspirations of socialists.

In our twentieth century capitalist society we take the concept of private property for granted. Individuals and organisations are able to claim exclusive “ownership” of a defined piece of property.

This has not always been so. It is clear that the earth’s resources are not the exclusive domain of individuals. In Psalm 95 v 5 we are told “The earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof’. We are reminded that “The Land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and sojourners here” Leviticus 25 v 23. Specifically we are told “that the profit of the earth is for all” Ecclesiastes 5 c 9 – though that text mysteriously disappears from some modern translations!

The people of Israel recognised that individuals performed differently in their approach to using that wealth. Some would use resources much better than others. So they created a crude and effective form of redistribution which acknowledge common ownership and accepted individual and corporate enterprise.Each seven years there would be a ‘Year of Release’ when debts would be cancelled, and special efforts were made to assist the poor. (Deuteronomy 15 and Leviticus 25).

Every forty nine years there would be a much more fundamental redistribution ofland, the end of all debt and liberty for all (Leviticus 25). Of particular importance during both the year of release and the year of Jubilee was a specific concern for the poor – not as objects of charity but as partners with access to the community’s resources Within this system it was recognised that economic equality and economic power were the basis of each persons’ civil rights and access to social justice.

The system allowed for natural differences in ability and different degrees of entrepreneurial spirit, but at the same time it prevented extremes of greed and poverty through continual redistribution which reasserted social cohesion.

Yes, these laws were often ignored. The rich and powerful constantly found reasons to ignore them. Successive old testament prophets – frequently and conveniently characterised as concerned only with personal sin – constantly called the people of Israel back to social justice and the necessary prerequisite of economic redistribution.

A few thousand years later Jesus began his public ministry by making a direct reference to the forgotten teaching of the year of jubilee (Luke 4 v 18 quoting Isiah 61 v 1-2). Constantly during his ministry he sided with the poor and oppressed against the rich and powerful. That was why the local bourgeoisie was so keen to get rid of him.

Immediately after Pentecost one of the first actions of the early Christians was to establish a Commune, a socialist state within Jerusalem. Everything was held in common and distributed as each had need (Acts 4 v 44).

It was no accident that the first Christian Martyr was a man called Stephen. He was targeted by the local ruling class because it was his job to handle the redistribution. The early church faced enormous persecution precisely because it was attempting to re-establish a socialist society.

In the late twentieth century there is a lie that the concept of ‘common ownership’ is an unnatural Marxist imposition upon the Labour Movement. Somehow it is alien to Western democracy.

I hope I’ve shown that even within a fairly primitive society common ownership was seen as an aspiration to be valued and nurtured.

Leaders of Socialist parties now see any commitment to common ownership as an embarrassment. In recent weeks we have heard people within our own party try to ridicule and rubbish our own Clause Four because it had been written in 1918 and was indicative of values more akin to the 19th and early twentieth century.

The attack on Clause Four is not simply an attack on the Morrisonian concept of centralised state control. There is plenty of room within the wording of that Clause to look at common ownership as embracing co-operatives, local authority intervention, friendly societies and the like.

I believe that common ownership is critical to our own politics for the future. We must understand that the world’s vast resources are not the exclusive property of any individual, group or nation.

Unless we fully understand that we cannot manage the process of respecting the poor and economically weak within our own borders. This has enormous implications for social policy and the objectives of economic activity.

Within an international framework the issue becomes even more acute and our perspectives even more critical. A rejection of the common ownership of the earth’s resources legitimates past imperialist oppression and first world aggrandisement.

In turn this means turning our back on the developing countries and retrenching into the xenophobia of Fortress Europe.

We cannot trust capitalism to deliver social justice. Our experience of the eighties in Britain has shown just how oppressive and irresponsible unrestrained capital can be.

At the very least capital needs to be aware that there always remains a political alternative to their ownership of resources.

Without a firm commitment to common ownership and therefore seeing ourselves as “stewards” rather than potential “owners” of the world’s resources we risk unleashing forces that have caused so much havoc throughout history.

I make no apology for saying that the aspirations of Clause Four should remain keystone of the Labour Party’s programme and philosophy as we enter the next
century.

Any amount of drivel has been spouted about what Sidney Webb’s formulation of clause four did or did not mean. Here, in an edited form, is what the man actually said.

The proposal to reorganise the Labour Party, formulated by its National Executive, and circulated to its constituent societies for their consideration, may well prove an event offar-reaching political importance. Instead of a sectional and somewhat narrow group, what is aimed at is now a national party, open to anyone ofthe 16,000,000 electors agreeing with the party programme

More important, however, than any of these changes in the constitution is the change of spirit that has inspired them. The Labour Party, which has never been formally restricted to manual­working wage-earners, is now to be publicly thrown open to all workers’ by hand or by brain’ .

Its declared object is to be, not merely the improvement of the conditions of the wage-earner, but ‘to secure for the producers, 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, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’.

The only persons to excluded (and that, of course, only by inference) are the unoccupied and unproductive recipients of rents and dividends ­ the so-called’ idle rich’ – whom it is interesting to find The Times editorially declaring to be of no use to the community.

The Labour Party of the future, in short, is to be a party of the producers, whether manual workers or brain workers, associated against the private owners of land and capital as such.

Its policy of ‘common ownership’ brings it, as a similar evolution brought John Stuart Mill – to use his own words in the Autobiography – ‘decidedly under the- general designation of Socialist. ‘

But it is a Socialism which is no more specific than a definite repudiation ofthe individualism that characterised all the political parties of the past generation and that still dominates the House of Commons.

This declaration of the Labour Party leaves it open to choose from time to time whatever forms of common ownership from the co­operative store to the nationalised railway, and whatever forms of popular administration and control of industry, from national guilds to ministries of employment and municipal management, may, in particular cases, commend themselves.

What the Labour Party at present means by its Socialism is revealed in the remarkable pamphlet which it has published on its ‘After the War Programme’, setting forth in a dozen Sydney Wehh.

detailed resolutions passed at the Manchester Party Conference exactly what it wishes done with the railways, the canals, the coal mines, the banking system, the demobilisation of the army and munition workers, the necessary rehousing of the people, the measures to be taken for preventing the occurrence of unemployment, the improvement of agriculture, the taxation to be imposed to pay for the war, the reform of our educational system, and what not.

Opinions will naturally differ as to some of these sweeping proposals, but no one of any education can safely denounce them as unpractical or despise them as ill-informed.

It is, indeed, one of the claims of the Labour Party that science is on their side; that it is their proposals, not those of the Liberals or those of the Unionists, that nowadays receive the general support of the ‘orthodox’ economists; and that, as a matter of fact, it is essentially their proposals to which
every Minister of State, when he is brought up against a difficult problem – of administration, has actually to turn – and then to lose his nerve, emasculate what would have got over his difficulties, and produce an abortion which has the advantages neither of individualism or collectivism!

But the programme of the Labour Party is, and will probably remain, less important (except for educating the political leaders of other parties) than the spirit underlying the programme, that spirit which gives any party its soul.

The Labour Party stands essentially for revolt against the inequality of circumstance that degrades and brutalises and disgraces our civilisation.

It abhors and repudiates the unscientific and immoral doctrine that the competitive struggle for the means of life is, in human society, either inevitable or requisite for the survival of the fittest; it declares, indeed, in full accord with science, that competition produces degradation and death, whilst it is conscious and deliberate co-operation which is productive of life and progress.

The fate of Clause Four hangs in the balance. In a bid to establish beyond doubt their political coming of age, Labour’s so-called ‘modernisers’ are keen to shake off any hint that they may be clinging to a tattered, socialist security blanket which should have been consigned to the bin during the adolescent eighties.

An examination ofthe Party’s constitution is overdue. Clause Four, as it currently stands, will probably go. Resistance to the move is not however, as some would imply, based on a touching, if misguided beliefthat what is being lost is the Labour equivalent of the wisdom ofthe ancients. Rather, there is a genuine fear that the Labour Party is about to divest itself of the principles of common ownership and popular control at the very point at which they are being installed at the heart of the search for a sustainable future.

The two UN World Summits set up to address the need for sustainable development, the Rio Summit in 1992 and the Social Development Summit which takes place in 1995, both identify the need to devolve decisions to the people who have to live with them, particularly to the most marginalised such as the poor and women. Terms which have entered the jargon are ’stake-holders’ and ‘a sense of ownership’. The search is on to find new models of development and growth measured against quality of life and sustainability indicators, rather than the largely meaningless and absurdly unreliable yardsticks of the ‘markets’.

Instead of a ’shareholding democracy’, the Labour Party could choose to create a ’stakeholding democracy’ in the UK. Throughout Europe and the so-called ‘Third World’, organisations such as credit unions, workers’ councils, employee ownership schemes and cooperatives have proved that ordinary people have not only the ability but also the integrity to exercise common ownership with a sense of responsibility for the present and the future. It may be that a revived Clause Four at the heart of a new constitution is Labour’s best hope of generating the elusive’ big idea’, the vision which so many in the UK and beyond desperately seek.

The essence of clause is the pursuit of control over the economy for an improved common good. A next Labour government will face a world where trade liberalisation and capital flight will allow it very little control. Today’s massive capital and technological transfer to low wage ‘but highly trained workforces in Asia and to some extent Eastern Europe raises the question of what industries and services need to stay in relative high wage Europe and the US. This is particularly so when GATT (which to Labours shame it supports) is set to dismantle further existing protection against cheap importers.

Of course not all industries and services will actually move. But the threat of relocation is now used against anything business feels might render domestic producers uncompetitive. A Labour Government will be under pressure to backtrack on implementing minimum wages, on promises to improve social infrastructure and on introducing adequate regulations to protect workers, consumers or the environment.

A key goal for all countries must be the provision of jobs and security by diversifying the local economy. In coalition with centre left parties everywhere, Labour must develop policies which concentrate on producing as much as can be produced on a local, national or regional level. These should involve gradually increasing barriers to imports of goods and services that can be produced regionally. In addition countries abilities to gain more control over their economies should be enhanced by demands for example, that business ’site here to sell here’, that capital predominantly ‘invest here to prosper here’, that internal competition be ensured by limits on the size of market shares. Such a transition will be costly, but considerable funds would be available from energy and other resource taxes.

To ensure that such ‘new protectionism’ is not to the disadvantage of poorer regions in the world, it must be part of a package of changes to the priorities of aid and trade rules such that they nurture and strengthen local economies. Present patterns of trade and aid increase pressure on countries from Bangladesh to Bulgaria to slash social expenditure and pour resources into ever cheaper exports, in order to compete with every other country. The result is increasing poverty, insecurity and inequality virtually everywhere.

Labour must begin this process by putting the clause four debate within such an international context. If Labour is elected with its present inadequate policies of retraining for a mythical high-tech future to fund jobs and more welfare, the iron grip of international competitiveness could soon throttle such delusions. Instead it will be made to walk the plank of continued deregulation and public expenditure cuts. A duped and vengeful populous will be likely to throw Labour out.

Any rethink of Clause Four will have to make the tackling of this new international reality its major focus. As today’s freer market model increasingly fails to deal with unemployment concerns and the concomitant decline in people’s ability to purchase so many goods and services, then the question of how to protect and rebuild economies will move to centre stage. Either that or we all collude in widening inequalities.

The Citizen – Issue 1 – front page

In this issue:
For a Global Clause Four
Common Ownership and Social Justice
A Green Clause Four

Campaigning for Socialism: Spring 1995

The decision of Tony Blair and his acolytes to try to write out parts of the Labour Party constitution which would dilute its commitment to socialism, is based on an arrogant assumption which does not bode well for the future democracy ofthe Labour Party. That as­sumption is that the leadership knows best and that the party needs this change.

But despite the applause of the media, despite consider­able Labour Party resources diverted from more important campaigns to back the Leadership’s position, despite the praise of ex Labour right wingers of the SDP and ex-communists of the Democratic Left, the party membership in Scotland has made it crystal clear that they will not allow clause fourto be ditched.

Almost two dozen resolutions poured in for this year’s con­ference in Inverness affirming support for the need for com­mon ownership. And contrary to what the spin doctors of the Blair entourage have tried to tell us, this is not some veneration of a meaningless idol, which can be replaced by the fatuous phrases of Brian Wilson’s empty journalism.

Supporters of clause four recognise that common owner­ship is a means to an end and that end is the destruction of the primitive, exploitative, capitalist system, which vision­ les sections of the Labour Party now want to tell us is “dy­namic” and the basis of better world under Labour!

It is not a question of a form of words. The real debate is a debate about how the Labour Party can play its part in transforming soci­ety. Blair wants to take us back to pre – Labour Party days when the power of capital was not challenged by the existing two party structure. We insist on moving forward to a future free of the blight of capitalist greed and oppression.

This year’s Scottish party conference is important because it will give Labour Party members the first real opportunity to tell the leadership what they think of the so called re­forms. It is not too late for the leadership to accept that for

Blair’s arrogant assumptions threaten party democracy many in the party and that includes most of those who ac­tively campaign before, during and after elections, clause four represents an important reason for remaining in the Labour Party and that without it, would be difficult to distin­guish Labour from those parties whole heartedly commit­ ted to promoting the interests of big business and wealth.

Please note that all signed articles in The Citizen are in a personal capacity. The Citizen welcomes debate and will gratefully receive contributions to the clause four debate and other issue important to Labour and Community activists.