Political Commentary: Time to ask what's this clause IV

CONSIDER this true story, revealed here for the first time. About five years ago, apparatchiks at Labour Party headquarters discovered that the annual membership cards had been printed without an excerpt from clause IV of the party constitution. This excerpt - the only information that appears on the cards except the member's name, number and constituency party - commits Labour to 'the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange'. It has appeared on membership cards since 1918, even though, for at least 40 years, it has been an anachronism that large sections of the party would be happy to dump.

When proofs of the clause IV- less cards arrived at headquarters, Labour's organisation department assumed that the change had been made on the orders of the modernising and powerful director of communications, Peter Mandelson. The change was not, therefore, questioned and the proofs were simply passed on to the communications department itself. Mr Mandelson and his lieutenants concluded, in turn, that it was a bold stroke by the organisation department and happily ticked the proofs through. The new cards were duly printed.

Only later did it emerge that the omission was merely a printers' error. Larry Whitty, the party's general secretary, ordered the reinstatement of clause IV at a cost of pounds 9,000. There was then a further argument over who should pay - Mr Mandleson and Joyce Gould, head of the organisation department, insisted that the money would not come out of their budgets - before the cost was eventually met from the party's petty cash. The members got their usual cards and, until this day, were none the wiser.

Clause IV remains a numinous symbol in the party's collective unconscious. Nobody, not even Labour's deadliest opponents, believes the party is still committed to its objectives; yet it lingers on like an ancient talisman, as if its abandonment would bring down some unimaginable vengeance by the party's founding fathers.

The political damage that Hugh Gaitskell inflicted on himself when he tried to persuade the party to scrap clause IV after Labour's election defeat in 1959 is not forgotten. Some of the circumstances then apply also now. Labour had been defeated for the third time when it had expected to win; the Shadow Chancellor during the campaign (it had been Harold Wilson) was blamed by some for the defeat; a section of the party, including its leader, was determined that the party should embark on reform of its constitution as a symbol of its modernity.

But there was at least one great difference. In 1959 there were still leading figures in the party prepared to argue against the abandonment of clause IV on idealistic grounds. When Aneurin Bevan made his last great conference speech on the subject he declared unapologetically: 'Our main case is and must remain that in a modern complex society it is impossible to get rational order by leaving things to private economic adventure. Therefore I am a socialist. I believe in public ownership.' It is all but impossible to imagine a Shadow Cabinet member using such language today.

Bevan, in the words of a leading historian of the period, justified nationalisation 'on grounds which seem extraordinary now but provided the underpinning of left-wing idealism then, namely, that nationalisation and state planning had been triumphant in the Soviet Union and vastly superior to capitalism as a means of ordering and modernising an economy.'

It happens that the historian, Professor Ben Pimlott, is one of a group of Labour's great and good who, under the aegis of the Fabian Society and the chairmanship of Lord (Peter) Archer, today publish a draft of a new constitution for the Labour Party.

It would create an elected office of party president to relieve the leader and deputy of organisational burdens to allow them to spend their time 'persuading electors rather than having to resolve internal party matters'. In anticipation of Wednesday's crucial national executive meeting on the links between unions and party, it rejects the notion of a second tier of trade unionist 'registered supporters' of the party and proposes that MPs should once again alone elect the party leader.

It says that the union block vote should be abolished, and that constituency selections of parliamentary candidates should be on a full one-member one-vote basis. And it proposes scrapping clause IV in favour of 'aims and objects' that describe Labour as a 'democratic socialist' party and include the 'redistribution of wealth from the few to the many' and a 'community in which the liberty of each is the concern of all'.

John Smith is likely to commit himself this week to some reform of the party-union link. But he is reluctant to revive the argument over clause IV. Jack Straw, who has been planning a speech calling for abolition for some weeks, has certainly not been encouraged to make it. There are other reasons, beside the resonances of 1959. One is the view that to embark unnecessarily on abolition elevates the importance of clause IV; as it is so irrelevant you might as well leave it where it is. Another is a creditable impatience with negative revisionism.

The organisational and policy changes heroically wrought by Neil Kinnock largely and necessarily consisted of the junking of old ideologies rather than the embrace of new ones. Put at its most high-minded, the argument against abolishing clause IV is that it is about image; it is time to worry about the substance.

All of this is understandable but not, in the end, persuasive. First, there is no reason why positive and negative revisionism should not go together. Indeed the first is under way: in significant speeches this week Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the two shadow cabinet members most associated with the pressure for reform of the party constitution, have begun to sketch a new intellectual framework for social democracy in the 1990s.

Mr Blair, tuning a long- planned speech on rights and responsibilities to the mood of national horror over the crimes of the past fortnight, went some way to rescuing the concepts of community and society from the dark limbo to which Margaret Thatcher consigned them.

Mr Brown asserted a role for the state that has little to do with the command economics of the Sixties and much to do with the advancement of the individual. (He may have clarified that Labour, like Bill Clinton's Democrats, will fight the next election on a programme that promises not to tax middle-income groups. But he is a long way from demonstrating that Labour will not, again like Clinton, reverse its pledge as soon as it assumes power).

In this grander context, clause IV of the Labour Party constitution appears a prosaic and trivial irritant. After all, had Labour's spin doctors not briefed political correspondents that Mr Smith's Bournemouth speech two weeks ago had itself banished the spirit of clause IV?

But there are times when politics cannot live by briefing alone. Sometimes a battle, however modest, has to be fought, even if it is against an opponent that is largely illusory. There is every reason to suppose that, if Mr Smith took the advice of the Fabian committee and proposed the replacement of clause IV at the next party conference, he would carry it with ease. And, at the very least, it would be a cathartic piece of theatre, exorcising once and for all the ghosts of 1959.