“To secure for workers by hand or by brain, the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
So read clause 4 of the Labour party’s constitution. I say ‘read’ in the past tense because it no longer exists. One of the first things to fall under Tony Blair’s New Labour. He had it struck out altogether before he even became Prime Minister. I wonder what we were all doing at the time.
The present Labour Party are flailing about trying to discover what went wrong in the election or/and which new leader to elect that will bring voters back to the fold.
After the 1914-18 war many of the men who had gone through hell but survived, came home to discover the jobs that existed for them were so lowly paid they could barely survive, while profits for the company owners rocketed. They sacrificed so much apparently only to be forgotten. The Labour movement grew out of the injustice.
Almost a century later injustice does in fact still flourish, 6% of the population have as much wealth as 20 million of the people in our country. The necessity for food banks grows, the bankers continue to get away with murder, having created financial mayhem for everyone but themselves and the ultra wealthy. While in parliament the lobbyists continue to dictate much of what goes on.
The present labour party still seem to be chasing Tony Blair’s idea of socialism, which is no idea at all. Who needs a slightly altered Tory Party?
If you want to get anywhere Labour, get radical.
Anne Raitt 
One response to “Clause 1V cornerstone of the Labour Party since 1918”
Hi Anne,
Thanks so much for your clear statement and exhortation. How can it be that so many have lost sense of the continuing importance and relevance of this principle? Or, what caused it to be lost before Blair? Because something must have happened for him to have been able to get away with its erasure.
I only came to begin to see these things by a chance hearing of Noam Chomsky in a documentary on corporations. I then joined my trade union and have been active since. But it’s a struggle. We moan and complain but we’ve no sense of ourselves as a collective, no sense of the common struggle. What will awaken us for this bread & circus?
And recently I watch a Ken Loach film and then one by Mike Leigh. Amazing! Who else is making films like them?
In solidarity,
N
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