The Labour4Clause4 campaign is touring the country, gathering momentum in the months leading up to this year’s Labour Party conference. Help restore Clause 4 – Labour’s commitment to socialism!
Last year, left-wing Labour MP Chris Williamson ran a “democracy roadshow”, in which Williamson and other leading Labour activists toured the country discussing how to empower grassroots members.
Inspired by this, the Labour4Clause4 campaign – launched last year to bring back Labour’s constitutional commitment to socialism – is setting off on its own roadshow.
Having raised the idea at our fringe meeting at the last Labour Party conference, the proposal has been enthusiastically taken up by local supporters of the campaign. Suggestions and offers to host meetings have poured in from all over Britain.
Markus Keaney, the chair of Luton South CLP, organised a successful meeting in Luton back in November. Other meetings have already also taken place in Canterbury, Dagenham and elsewhere. And Labour4Clause4 speakers have spoken in Labour Party branches and CLPs across the country. In Wakefield, for example, the relaunch of the local Labour youth group was based around the topic of restoring Clause 4.
And now, with the new year in full swing, we are planning to hit the road again.
The first Labour4Clause4 Roadshow meetings of 2019 are taking place this weekend in the North East:
- Saturday 26th January in Bedlington, Northumberland – organised by Wansbeck CLP. 2pm at East Bedlington Community Centre. More details on Facebook.
- Sunday 27th January in Redcar, Teeside – organised by Momentum Redcar and Middlesborough. 11am at the Claxton Hotel. More details on Facebook.
Both of these meetings will feature guest speakers Ian Hodson, president of the BFAWU bakers’ union, and Rob Sewell, the Labour4Clause4 campaign coordinator, amongst others.
Further meetings are also planned for Sheffield and Liverpool, with many others to come in the run up to Labour Party conference 2019, where a constitutional amendment to bring back the original Clause 4 will be debated.
If you would like to arrange for a Labour4Clause 4 Roadshow event in your area, please get in touch straight away at contact@labour4clause4.com.
Return to our roots
These are exciting times. The need for a socialist transformation of society is more relevant than ever before. The labour movement needs to return to its roots.
When the Labour Party adopted Clause 4 in 1918, the party fought an election with a programme entitled Labour and the New Social Order. In it, the party explained:
“We need to beware of patchwork. The view of the Labour Party is that what has to be reconstructed after the war is not this or that government department, or this or that piece of social machinery; but, so far as Britain is concerned, society itself…
“The individualist system of capitalist production…with the monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces and the degradation and brutalisation, both moral and spiritual, resulting therefrom, may, we hope, indeed have received a death-blow…
“We of the Labour Party, whether in opposition or in due time called upon to form an administration, will certainly lend no hand to its revival. On the contrary, we shall do our utmost to see that it is buried with the millions whom it has done to death.”
We need to return to these fighting words. Our task is not to patch up this crisis-ridden capitalist system – but to overthrow it. That is the message of the Labour4Clause4 Roadshow.
