Defend Clause IV - Defend Socialism, c/o NUM, 2 Huddersfield Rd, Barnsley S70 2LS. For Tony Blair's team, Clause IV symbolises Labour's roots as a party that wants to limit the extremes of market capitalism through social planning.
That doesn't fit in with today's Labour Party. Blair & Co oppose nationalisation of industry. They believe the capitalist free market can somehow be managed to solve the problems it has created.
Even 'soft left' MPs like Peter Hain call only for basic industry to have regulating committees, like OFTEL which oversees the telephone companies. Today only the 'hard left' defends the call for nationalisation.
As we explain over the page, nationalisation on its own isn't the road to socialism: but it can protect workers from unemployment. It does begin to curb the rampant power of free market capital.
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And as everyone knows from their bills, it can protect everyone from being ripped off by profit-hungry privatised utilities.
But Blair's Labour doesn't want to challenge the profits of the rich.
Instead Blair has fired the first volleys in his battle to prepare Labour for office, by purging any element of socialism, effectively breaking up the party's historic links with the unions, and telling union leaders that they and their members shouldn't even bother to ask anything from a Labour government.
Every trade unionist and Labour Party member needs to confront this head on.
We will need to fight for socialist policies if we are to force any future Labour government to defend the rights of working people.
This also involves a fight for new leadership inside the trade unions. While we demand every union leader should stand up for Clause IV, we also understand the craven and cowardly role of many top union bureaucrats.
The trade union leadership which helped Neil Kinnock witch-hunt the left and impose the defeatist politics of new realAffiliate to the Campaign: send a minimum of $10 to ism will, in the main, side with a future Labour government. Their refusal to challenge the power of capital makes them, like Blair, effective political agents of the ruling rich.
Socialist policies By defending Clause IV, and linking that fight to the socialist policies needed for full employment, welfare rights and public services, working people can prepare for the battles to come under a Labour government.
Trade unionists can use this fight to regroup the fighting left, combat the wretched, defeatist leadership that has led to such a decline in union strength, and prepare for the kind of intensified class struggle we will face after the next election. show that working people have a say in the Labour Party." DAVID WINNICK MP: *If CLPs and particularly Trade Unions discuss and vote in favour of retaining the Clause, as indeed happened last time in 1959-60 we can win the day. The battle is by no means lost as was shown by the party conference this year."