CENTRE POINT
Has Blair no sense of history? Is he a dangerous radical or something?
SIM ON JENKINS
Ihave lost my Labour Party card and sud- denly I rather miss it. I bought the thing for five shillings when I was 18 and carried it in my wallet for months. I was strangely exhil- arated. To have that card next to my breast brought me a little closer to greatness. With those clarion cadences of Clause Four on the front, it was my direct link with Keir Hardie and the Webbs, with Ruskin and Morris. The card came through the post like a summons from Sebastian. It was an entrée to a Bohemian bliss of ideological disputation, all-night parties and rigged Labour Club elections — the Brideshead of Sixties socialism. Somewhere I would meet Comrade Camilla of the Cadres and who knows . . . happy days, now gone, all gone.
My Labour Party career was brief. I rose swiftly to the exciting post of social secre- tary of the Oxford University Labour Club, a distinction previously held by one Rupert Murdoch. My sole duty was to stage the annual dance. This took place in the Union cellars and proved to be a disaster of gate- crashers, beer, vomit and crippling com- pensation to the Union treasurer. I realised that politics was not for me.
That year the Conservative Club held their rival party, a black-tie ball at Blenheim Palace. I sneaked a ticket and went along, telling myself I was 'sounding out the opposition'. The sight of a middle- aged duchess doing the twist must have thrown some political trip-switch. I saw a new potency beneath the cracked surface of old Toryism. That night the little red card went from my pocket to the mantelpiece and eventually into a drawer. I joined the Fabians, that always comforting way-station for travellers on a rightwards road.
I kept the card as a talisman. Disillusion with passing Labour governments could always be put down to Clause Four. The nationalisation commitment became an obsession with those of us still dawdling on the Right of the party. A wit dubbed it Claws Four. Gaitskell had tried to get rid of it and failed. Wilson lacked the courage to try, later pointing out that it did not stop him winning four elections. But when in 1970 I gathered my political convictions together, stuffed them in a modest hold-all and voted Conservative, it was that clause, still legible on the cover of the card, that validated my departure. It waved me a faded goodbye. The card must have biode- graded, along with the ambitions to which it had given rise. Tony Blair has torn up Clause Four and with it a little chapter of my past. I am not surprised this has produced a reaction in Labour circles not unlike the Anglican response to the New English Bible. Forget the politics, say the old guard, and show some respect for our linguistic heritage. Clause Four had all the rhythmic majesty of the Authorised Version. 'Workers by hand and by brain' was a phrase that scanned, however mediaeval the dichotomy. The full fruits of their industry and the equi- table distribution thereof' was worthy of a 17th-century preacher. The clause sat on the party's platform alongside union ban- ners, protest marchers and Michael Foot's duffle coat, a precious monument to aspira- tional socialism. The Blair re-write is like a wine list in a steak house, frothy verbiage six times as long and merely filling space. Has the man no sense of history? What is he, a dangerous radical or something?
Now Blair has removed this fixed point in my political upbringing. He has pulled down the signpost and torn up the foot- path. Whenever Callaghan seemed particu- larly cherubic, or Kinnock exhilarating, or Smith statesmanlike, and the home team was raddled, all it took was a quick swig of `Well I think we should throw them back onto Clause Four and we soon came back to our senses. No floating voter could take seri- ously a party that blazoned 'the common ownership of the means of production, dis- tribution and exchange' on its masthead. It was as if the Tories boasted the creed of the League of Empire Loyalists on its man- ifesto cover at each election. Nor was it just the words. This was a party that would tear limb from limb any leader who tried to change the sacred text.
Even if no Labour government actually enacted Clause Four, its leaders always told their followers that, if an election fell right and the wind was fair, they would put nationalisation on the Cabinet agenda. I found this immensely reassuring. Voting Labour required a suspension of belief in words meaning what they said. It required an act of faith in political insincerity. Labour might claim to believe in nationali- sation but we had to pretend for a brief moment that they did not. Clause Four was just ritualistic window-dressing. It meant no harm, or so we were told to think.
Blair was right in seeing this as his oppor- tunity. He has destroyed the most potent psychological reason for not voting Labour: `You surely can't vote for a party that still has that on its card?' To ram the point home last week, he spent the following 24 hours rubbishing the other potent reason, the power of the trade unions in the coun- sels of the party. He is working his way round those worrying little items that peo- ple do not like to mention but which, in the secrecy of the voting booth, they allow to determine their choice. Meticulously he is ticking them off: one member one vote, fis- cal irresponsibility, Clause Four, the union share in conference decisions. One by one they go. All he has to do now is get rid of the minimum wage and give John Prescott the agriculture job. This puts every hesitant voter on the spot. In future, says Blair, no party can rely on tribal aversion therapy for dodging a Labour vote. The constitution of the Labour Party reads not unlike the mani- festo of the Conservative Party or even the eerie sweepings of Paddy Ashdown's mind. British politics has its slate wiped clean. It has returned to ground zero. Now those 14 million Conservative voters must have a positive reason for backing John Major, not just a negative one.
the beach.' Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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