Universal Basic Services – The New Clause IV?
Central to the history of the Labour Party is what is commonly known as Clause IV, a key element of the party’s rule book. The original Clause IV was drafted by Beatrice and Sidney Webb in 1917, and calls for the common ownership of industry. It was adopted by the party the following year.
Clause IV came of age politically in 1944 when the Labour Party committed to public ownership of industry, and this was endorsed by the electorate in the first post-war General Election when Clement Attlee led the party to victory.
The programme of nationalisation began in 1946, and over the next five years, a number of strategically important industries were taken into public ownership, and this was crowned by the creation of the NHS which opened for business in 1948.
When Labour lost the 1959 General Election, then leader Hugh Gaitskell claimed that the defeat was a result of disillusionment with nationalised industries from the general public, and proposed to amend Clause IV. Gaitskell’s proposal was met with resistance though, and Clause IV remained as originally drafted.
That changed when Tony Blair became leader of the party in 1994, and he committed that he would develop a new Clause IV, in an era when we were told that there was no alternative to the market.
Following his election as leader of the party in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn spoke about revisiting Clause IV in the context of failing public services, but that this should be part of a wider debate within the movement.
Fast forward to 2023, and our country is in a state of perpetual crisis.
Energy costs have skyrocketed and are central to the cost of living crisis, putting huge pressure on households and businesses, with businesses passing on costs to households in the form of higher prices, thus compounding matters.
Our rail network has been shambolic, expensive and inefficient for years, while important aspects of the service are now being brutalised in the name of ‘modernisation’.
Bus services outside of the big conurbations are a social disaster, all thanks to Thatcher’s 1985 Transport Act.
Our water and utilities infrastructure is falling apart, we have filth in our rivers and on our beaches, and we pay heavily for the privilege.
Communications technology is absolutely critical to people’s lives and how the economy functions, yet we are still not at the stage where we have high-spec, high-performance infrastructure and universal coverage.
The NHS is creaking and flailing, our social services lurch from one huge problem to another, and we have a totally dysfunctional housing market which has led to a crisis, at the heart of which is the loss of millions of public homes via Right to Buy and its spin-offs and the failure to replace them.
These services are the very foundations of people’s lives and underpin the effectiveness of the economy in terms of productivity and viability, and they have all been broken by privatisation.
When people start to talk about nationalisation, in some quarters you inevitably hear, “I don’t want to go back to the days when you had to wait six months for a phoneline to be installed. It’s a tired old cliché that completely misses the point. It’s 2023 not 1973, and the prevailing model of the past 40 years or so has demonstrably failed, as evidenced by the continued fiasco of rail franchises, the recent collapse of Thames Water, and locally with the First Potteries bus debacle.
If we want our people and economy to flourish, then they need solid foundations, and so the time has arrived to consider the adoption of Universal Basic Services. The more efficient and affordable that life’s basics are, the more there will be for other things, be it for businesses to invest in innovation and their workforce, or for households to spend in the wider economy.
But this is not going to be an easy challenge to solve. These various crises have been more than 40 years in the making, and there are many entrenched vested interests that are quite comfortable with the status quo. But while they’ve got the guns, we’ve got the numbers.
A good start would be to commit to change: a new Clause IV that would promote the development of Universal Basic Services, and a roadmap setting out how to get there.
There will be those that say that it’s simply not possible. History would suggest otherwise.
DP
10th July 2023