Blair’s 1994 conference speech and Clause IV
Blair used his first Labour Party conference speech to fire a starting gun on amending Clause IV.
There’s a good reason why starting pistols don’t typically come with silencers. If you’re going to suppress it, why use a gun at all? Why not just whisper starting instructions into the wind and hope the athletes get the message?
This was the debate among Tony Blair and his inner circle in the build-up to the 1994 Labour Party Conference in Blackpool. Blair knew he wanted to revise Labour’s Clause IV, the 1918 constitutional commitment to nationalisation and the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” But he was struggling with how to initiate the debate, when to fire the starting gun, and whether to use a firearm at all.
It was, in the end, to be a silenced pistol—a delicate thud buried in the final few paragraphs of his conference speech, further muffled by the layers of communitarian rhetoric packed tightly around it. He stressed the need for an “up-to-date statement of the objects and objectives of our party… open to debate in the coming months.” Many in the room didn’t immediately notice exactly what had been proposed.
While a silenced pistol might be an odd choice as a starting gun, it is ideally suited for an assassination. And on Clause IV, Blair had already decided he was ready to finish off the left’s sacred cow.
“It’s time we give the party some electric shock treatment”
Clause IV was in Blair’s sights as soon as he became party leader. While he was trying to convince Alastair Campbell to join his office as press secretary—in a late night conversation in Provence France as Blair gatecrashed Campbell’s summer holiday—he mentioned his intention to abandon Clause IV as part of his pitch to the Today editor. Campbell “loved the brassiness of it, and by the time I left, I could see his mind whirring away on how to sell it,” Blair later recalled.
In early September, Blair convened his core team of insiders at Chewton Glen, a sprawling country house in the New Forest, for a deliberation session on new positions.
Most of the Chewton Glen discussion was devoted to how Blair could demarcate his political identity from his Labour predecessors and the Conservatives, but strategist Philip Gould recalls Blair laying out his ambitions for his first conference speech while the pair stood in the line for the buffet. “Conference must build ‘New Labour’,” he reportedly said, “it is time we gave the party some electric shock treatment.”
How new is ‘New Labour’?
The offhanded comment is insightful in more ways than one. The term ‘New Labour’ had clearly already become entrenched in the Blair team’s vocabulary.
‘New Labour’ as a term had been drifting around Labour circles for several years, but was fully embraced after the success of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats in 1992. Once Alastair Campbell came on board, he turned it into a central identity for the party.
Ahead of the 1994 conference, Blair’s office was spitballing slogan ideas. Alastair Campbell showed his knack for soundbites by coming up with, “New Labour, New Britain,” which Gould thought would connect with voters. The campaigns unit was nervous, however. They feared the slogan implied Blair was walking away from Labour’s roots, creating too hard a break with past and those that had come before him, a view shared by Deputy Leader John Prescott.
Both Campbell and Gould fought for the slogan’s inclusion. Prescott eventually came around to the idea after Gould effectively argued that public fear of a Labour government had been so pervasive that a clear break with the past was precisely why the slogan was needed.
In the end, the backdrop to the 1994 conference featured the slogan, “new Labour, new Britain”—deliberately lowercased to avoid appearing to be renaming the party. But Prescott’s concerns over Blair’s dismissal of Labour’s past also applied to Clause IV. And gouging a core socialist tenet from the Labour constitution carried greater risk to his leadership than a botched slogan.
Had Labour been dragging a dead cow?
Blair’s justification for abandoning Clause IV was that it had become a political relic. “What was mainstream leftist thinking in the early twentieth century had become hopelessly unreal, even surreal, in the late-twentieth century,” he reflected. As he saw it, culling the left’s sacred cow of Clause IV was essential for rebranding the party as a modern social democratic party.
Few beyond the hard left endorsed it as it was written. It had become, as David Ward, John Smith’s head of policy told IFTC, “an ideological icon that sat there but nobody really took it seriously.” The cow was practically dead in a policy sense. Labour weren’t about to commit to nationalising the whole economy or enforce worker or consumer cooperatives. But the party had been dragging it around for decades.
Clause IV was already lacquered in nostalgia when Hugh Gaitskell tried to revise it in 1959. Gaitskell had sought to broaden the party’s appeal beyond the labour movement and determined its attachment to the past and the narrow definition of socialism as written in Clause IV was hurting Labour’s electoral fortunes by rendering the party out of touch with modern voters.
That is not to say that announcing Blair’s intent to axe Clause IV didn’t come with political risk. Robin Cook, who would eventually become Blair’s foreign secretary, feared a fight over Clause IV could lead to an irreconcilable split.
A strong signal of intention at 1994 conference might expose a chasm between Blair’s ideas and those of the party’s rank and file. If he showed he was too far out in front of them too quickly, he could struggle to bring them with him. As such, Blair was unsure about including it in the speech at all.
If he was going to set up a fight over Clause IV, he knew he needed John Prescott’s endorsement more than anybody’s. Prescott, as the leading trade unionist in Blair’s circle with the strongest ties to traditional Labour values, was New Labour’s' keeper of the party’s conscience. Just a year after Smith’s push for One Member One Vote, once again a Labour leader was hoping Prescott would save the modernisers’ cause at the party conference.
Prescott was not convinced of the merits of dropping Clause IV. But, aware of the thorn George Brown’s perpetual public disagreement had become in Harold Wilson’s side, he had pledged during the leadership campaign that as deputy leader he would argue his case in private but support the leader publicly. And Prescott stood true to his word. The pair discussed the issue behind closed doors, but Prescott would ultimately support whatever Blair decided.
Alastair Campbell and Peter Hyman had been drafting the leader’s speech, but the Saturday before conference Blair was still unsure over whether or not to mention Clause IV. It was John Prescott who insisted that if Blair was going to try to change the Labour constitution before the following year’s conference, he needed to include it in the Blackpool speech.
Alastair Campbell spent the night before the speech marching up and down the stairs between his and John Prescott’s office making edits. Prescott suggested adding a section on the need to review the Labour constitution for a new age. They skirted around the issue by burying it at the very end of the speech, but it was in, and Blair would be laying out his intention to alter that hallowed document.
“The period from then until the end of Blair’s speech was the most uncertain in his political career.”—Philip Gould
Campbell deliberately omitted the last two pages from the version of the speech he gave to the press to minimise chatter. At 1 AM on Tuesday October 4, the day of the leader’s speech, Campbell reportedly called all the Labour press officers into a hotel bedroom and told them about Blair’s intention to drop Clause IV and that he would be setting out his intentions in his speech. “People started hyperventilating,” Gould later recounted, with some arguing it would be the end of the Labour party and couldn’t be supported.
Later in the day, Blair asked Campbell about what he thought the chances were that the speech would cripple him. Campbell put the odds at 5 percent.
If not that kind of socialism, what?
To soften the blow of the Clause IV bullet, the speech needed to do two things. Firstly, it had to show the party that Prescott was behind the proposals and would be involved in the revision process. Blair was sure to drop his name immediately after calling for an update to the party’s objectives.
“John Prescott and I, as Leader and Deputy Leader of our party, will propose such a statement to the NEC.”—Tony Blair, leader’s speech, Labour Party Conference, Blackpool, October 4, 1994.
The speech also needed to portray his vision as an outgrowth of traditional Labour principles, not as a completely new idea being foisted on the party. He needed to define his socialism and show that he wasn’t betraying the party’s values, but building on them. He could be out in front leading the party in the direction he wanted, but not so far out in front that they couldn’t see how he got there.
In this speech, and many subsequent, Blair attempted to strike this balance through his reference to community. He projected solidarity, collective responsibility, and altruism onto his community vision, tethering his project to Labour’s socialist past and serving as a counterweight to the fact that in Blair’s community, every individual had a duty to be self-reliant.
“It is not the socialism of Marx or state control. It is rooted in a straightforward view of society, in the understanding that the individual does best in a strong and decent community of people with principles and standards and common aims and values.”
However, as Eunice Goes has written, Blair’s communitarianism was distinctly conservative. In Blair’s vision, the family unit enhanced the social order and imparted strong values. It kept children on the straight and narrow, championed the importance of a career, and instilled a sense of individual responsibility. There was no mention of inequality in the speech—financial or in the distribution of opportunity— and the segments on work and unemployment were fiercely meritocratic.
“More and more I believe that, though of course ability plays a great part in life, what most distinguishes those at the top from those at the bottom is their life-chances. So much talent is wasted, so much potential under-developed, and I do not just mean the unemployed: I mean those who just have jobs, when what they should have is careers with prospects and a hope of advancement. We can learn these lessons from the family.”
He was also unashamedly pro-market, with “market” appearing 10 times in the 62 minute speech, and he confirmed that he would not roll back Tory trade union reforms—a moment that prompted the Guardian leader to proclaim there were moments when Blair “defied his audience to deny or disown him.”
“But they never did,” the Guardian concluded, “and in the end they stood and cheered with unexpectedly genuine fervour.”
Not with a bang, but with a whimper
That fervour might have been because many in the conference hall hadn’t immediately grasped that Blair had set out his intention on Clause IV.
Once it had sunk in, Arthur Scargill and Dennis Skinner criticised the move, with the latter calling it a “total and unnecessary diversion.” Ken Livingstone called it a “giant waste of time.”
The speech had achieved its aims and criticism was somewhat muted. In a display of how important it was that Prescott was seen to be involved in the Clause IV decision, and a preview of how the Blair office would handle the media, Campbell loudly and publicly dressed-down a BBC reporter who dared to suggest that John Prescott had only been told a few days prior that Blair would challenge Clause IV.
The Tribune rally the next day didn’t mention Clause IV and union bosses—including the GMB’s John Edmonds—didn’t bite. Edmonds even quipped, “I don't think too many people are going to worry about a change in some of the language in the constitution.”
That didn’t mean that the party was completely ready to cut Clause IV loose. The day after Blair’s speech, a resolution passed reaffirming Clause IV, showing that Blair would still have his work cut out. But Alastair Campbell’s 5 percent scenario had not come to pass. The fallout was far from cataclysmic. And the assassin emerged from his first conference unscathed and emboldened.
Before you go…
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Sir John Curtice analyses what Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation means for Scottish politics in the Scotsman.
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