By Janmojaya Barik

About The Author

Janmojaya Barik is a student of Political Science with specialization in Mass Media and Journalism. He writes extensively on culture, politics, and elections and has industry experience contributing to CSR publications such as ClearCut alongside serving as a Campaign Management and Policy Research intern for the Hon’ble MP of Bargargh.

On ideology, identity, and why British politics keeps having the same argument with itself

Let’s start with the accusation, because it comes up with remarkable regularity.

Every few years, usually around election season, someone on the British right describes the Labour Party as communist. We compare the rose to the hammer and sickle. Everyone wonders for three days and nothing is resolved.

The accusation is almost always wrong. But the reason it keeps being made is more interesting than the accusation itself. Because underneath the bad faith and the political theatre, there is a genuinely fascinating question about what Labour actually is, what it was meant to be, and how far it has travelled from where it started.

That question deserves a real answer cause we need to understand everything red isn’t communist.

Where Labour Actually Came From

The Labour Party was founded in 1900, and its origins tell you almost everything you need to know about what it is and what it isn’t.

Its founding figure, Keir Hardie, began working in the coal mines at age ten. His journey into politics started through trade unions, where he became a miners’ union agent and eventually helped found the Independent Labour Party in 1893, before being instrumental in establishing the Labour Representation Committee, which evolved into the Labour Party itself.

Hardie was a socialist. But here is the crucial detail, the one that gets lost every time someone calls Labour communist: most historians see his socialism as an undoctrinaire outgrowth of advanced Liberalism, ethical rather than economic in its basis. He was never a Marxist by an economic perspective.

His biographer Kenneth Morgan described him as someone whose political philosophy was “a very generalised socialism based on a secularised Christianity rather than Marxism,” and who “made war on a system, not a class.”

This is the origin point. Labour was built not on Marxist dialectics or the inevitability of violent revolution, but on something considerably more English and considerably more pragmatic which is the idea that working people deserved political representation, that the system was unfair, and that it should be made fairer through Parliament. Not dismantled. Made fairer. Through Parliament.

That distinction matters enormously. Communism, in its theoretical form, has no patience for Parliament. It regards parliamentary democracy as a mechanism through which the ruling class maintains control, a structure to be dismantled rather than reformed. While commies believe that the system is corrupt and unfixable, The Labour, from its very beginning, accepted the structure and worked within it. That is not communism. That is, at most, social democracy.

Clause IV: The Closest It Ever Got

The most substantive version of the communist accusation has always rested on one thing: Clause IV.

The original Clause IV was drafted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1917 and adopted by the party in 1918. It committed Labour to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange,” which was widely seen as the party’s commitment to socialism, even though the word socialism is not explicitly mentioned. The Manchester Guardian heralded it as showing the birth of a socialist party.

Common ownership of the means of production. That does sound, on the surface, like something Marx would have approved of. And in a narrow sense, it was. Nationalisation of major industries is a socialist policy. But Nationalisation is not communism. The NHS is nationalised. Clement Attlee’s post-war government nationalised the railways, coal mines, and the Bank of England. These were social democratic policies, implemented through democratic elections, in a country that remained a multiparty parliamentary democracy throughout. Sweden did roughly the same things. Nobody calls Sweden communist. Bet you wanna move to Sweden and try those whipped cream mini burgers.

The more important story is what happened to Clause IV, because it tells you where Labour ended up.

In April 1995, Tony Blair succeeded in rewriting Clause IV, removing Labour’s commitment to common ownership of the means of production, which had originally been ratified in 1918. To Blair and his supporters, this change was a long overdue sign of Labour’s modernisation.

At a special conference in April 1995, the clause was replaced by a statement that the party is “democratic socialist.” Blair abandoned Labour’s attachment to nationalisation and embraced market economics. One must imagine Keynes Happy.

To put it simply, The leader of the Labour Party, in 1995, rewrote the party’s founding commitment to collective ownership and replaced it with an embrace of market economics. New Labour’s political philosophy was influenced by Anthony Giddens’ Third Way, which attempted to provide a synthesis between capitalism and socialism.

A synthesis between capitalism and socialism. That is, definitionally, not communism. That is not even particularly radical socialism. That is the ideological position of most centre-left parties in Western Europe, the belief that markets work, but need regulating, and that the state has a role in providing public goods that markets will not

The Corbyn Years: A Genuine Complication

This is where the argument gets more interesting, and where intellectual honesty requires acknowledging some real tension.

Jeremy Corbyn, who led the party from 2015 to 2020, represented a genuine lurch leftward. He had spent his political career on Labour’s hard left, voting against his own party repeatedly, and held positions on nuclear disarmament, on nationalisation, on foreign policy that were well outside the post-Blair consensus. His economics were genuinely redistributive.

Was he a communist? No. He described himself consistently as a democratic socialist, and his policy programme, while well to the left of New Labour, was not outside the range of mainstream European social democracy. Nationalising water and rail, taxing the wealthy more heavily, expanding public services, these are not communist policies. These are policies that exist in various forms across Scandinavia, Germany, and France without anyone suggesting those countries have abolished capitalism.

The accusation of communism during the Corbyn years was, in most cases, a rhetorical device rather than a political analysis. Calling something communist in British politics functions as a conversation-stopper, it is designed to produce a reaction, not to illuminate an ideology. It’s how we treat corruption in India, a tool of slander.

What Labour Actually Is

It is a democratic socialist party with a complicated history of disagreeing with itself about what democratic socialism means. It was founded by trade unionists who wanted Parliamentary representation, shaped by Fabian intellectuals who believed in gradual reform, pulled leftward by figures like Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn, dragged rightward by Blair’s New Labour project, pulled left again by Corbyn, and now governed by Keir Starmer, named, reportedly, after the party’s own founder who has positioned the party firmly back in centrist social democratic territory ? Frankly, I don’t know what Starmer’s doing, nor the entire UK.

Hardie’s Independent Labour Party was the first socialist group having a genuine Christian, English, and working-class appeal. It was neither middle class and intellectual, as was the Fabian Society, nor specifically Marxist and thus foreign in inspiration and atheistic.

That description, written about 1893, still captures something true about Labour in 2025. It is a party whose socialism has always been distinctly English in character such as empirical, ethical, uncomfortable with theory, deeply invested in Parliament, and perpetually uncertain about how radical it actually wants to be.

That is a lot of things. It is not communism. It is a confused teenager

Why the Question Keeps Getting Asked

To be honest, I was bored but the reason the communist accusation persists is not really about ideology. It is about political strategy.

Calling Labour communist is effective precisely because most voters do not know the difference between communism, socialism, and social democracy. These are distinctions that matter enormously in political theory and barely at all in tabloid headlines. If you can make someone feel that voting Labour is somehow equivalent to endorsing the Soviet Union, you do not need to engage with the actual policy debate.

It is lazy. But it works. And so it keeps happening cause most of us believe that the USSR was an evil empire.

The more honest version of the critique is that Labour’s left wing wants significantly more state intervention in the economy than the British right is comfortable with and it is is a perfectly legitimate political disagreement. It is the disagreement that British politics has been having, in various forms, for over a century.

It just doesn’t fit on a headline as neatly and it’s just easy to call them commies.