If it weren’t so serious, you would have to laugh: 13 years after its demise, Clause Four is back. It was a defining moment in the creation of new Labour – Tony Blair ditched the party’s traditional pledge.

Written by Sidney Webb in 1917 and printed on every Labour membership card, it promised “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service”.

Even back then, few in the Labour Party thought that it meant nationalising the banks.

In the autumn of 1994 Mr Blair, the newly minted leader, announced to a stunned party conference that he intended to rewrite the totemic Clause Four, part four of the party’s constitution. Or, with the trademark half-truths that would become such a feature of his term in office, he hinted at it then his spin-doctors briefed journalists backstage about what he meant.

It took six months to persuade the party to back the change; a move described at an earlier attempt in 1959 by Harold Wilson as “being asked to take Genesis out of the Bible”. In 1995 new Labour agreed to put “power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many not the few”, through a “dynamic market economy”, the “enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition”. And how. The money flowed. Lots of people got rich. London was awash with cash. Whitehall floated on the bubbles.

We have seen new Labour come full circle in recent weeks. Peter Mandelson is back, Mr Blair is advising him (some turnaround there), Alastair Campbell is in the backrooms. Even John Prescott hovered over last month’s annual conference.

Now new Labour has grown old, however. Yesterday, 13½ years after the symbolic vote to ditch Clause Four, the end of the new Labour Government (for surely this is the end) dumped the market economy after the market economy dumped on it. It has all but nationalised the banks and put the wealth of the taxpaying many back into the pockets of the few. Wherever Sidney Webb is watching from, he could allow himself a rueful smile.

As Mr Blair might have said: a day like today is not a day for soundbites. But I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.

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