Why is the wording of Labour’s Clause IV such a conference issue?

Whatever Clause IV might eventually say, the Labour Party is being upended and the baggage of public ownership loaded back on board, writes Sean O’Grady

Even for Corbyn, trying to restore Clause IV is a step too far – for now (AFP)

When Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015, many of its members, old and new, felt as though they had “got their party back” – not least the ancient belief in public ownership, once enshrined in Clause IV of the party’s constitution, the party’s original “mission statement”, as it might be termed nowadays.

In substance, so it has proved, in the sense that much of the old Blairite, social democratic, centrist settlement – itself an accommodation with market capitalism and Thatcherism – has been denounced, its totems trashed, and “socialism” is once again the language and policy of the wider Labour movement. Four years ago, Corbyn cheerfully volunteered: “I think we should talk about what the objectives of the party are, whether that’s restoring the Clause IV as it was originally written or it’s a different one, but I think we shouldn’t shy away from public participation, public investment in industry and public control of the railways.”

However, there has until now been little real pressure to reinstate the party’s historic constitutional commitment to “common ownership”, or nationalisation, muscular as the policies of John McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey may be. It is that constitutional formality that some constituency Labour parties are now hankering after and agitating about. They argue the original, poetic text of Clause IV, dating back to 1918 – with all the transformative ambition attached to it – should be restored, like an Edwardian frieze that had been ripped from the facade of a beloved temple by some “modernising” philistines.