SIR Keir Starmer was accused of “reheated Blairism” today after he vowed Labour’s planned reforms would be like Clause IV “on steroids.”

The Labour leader referred to former PM Tony Blair’s 1995 decision to ditch the party’s constitutional commitment to “common ownership of the means of production” in a speech at the Progressive Britain Conference in central London yesterday.

He said: “This is about taking our party back to where we belong and where we should always have been… back doing what we were created to do.

“That’s why I say this project goes further and deeper than New Labour’s rewriting of Clause IV.

“This is about rolling our sleeves up, changing our entire culture — our DNA. This is Clause IV — on steroids.”

Grassroots group Momentum has condemned the speech and encouraged activists to join.

A Momentum spokesperson said: “Labour members and trade unions want what the public wants: transformative policies to fix the Tories’ broken Britain, from public ownership of public services to wealth taxes.

“By pursuing a path of reheated Blairism, the Labour leadership wouldn’t just be undermining party democracy. 

“It would repeat past mistakes, leaving intact a deeply unequal and unpopular economic system. It’s time for change.”

Shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds defended Sir Keir’s comments as showing the “level of ambition” of Labour’s “policy platform.”

He told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme: “It means that if you look at the scale of the challenge an incoming Labour government would have, it is, I would argue, bigger than any other point in British history.

“We’ve had an economy that hasn’t performed as it should have for 13 years, we’ve got public services where, let’s be frank, are there any public services today working better than 13 years ago when the Conservatives came to power? No.

“So the scale of what we’ve got to do is not only have the policy platform that meets that, have the courage to change the Labour Party to meet that, that is what Clause IV fundamentally was about. I think that is what Keir has done so far.”

Mr Reynolds insisted his party under Sir Keir is embodying a “classic Labour offer.”