"Clampdown" is a song by the English rock band the Clash from their 1979 album London Calling. The song began as an instrumental track called "Working and Waiting". It is sometimes called "Working for the Clampdown", which is the main lyric of the song and also the title provided on the album's lyric sheet. Its lyrics concern those who have forsaken the idealism of youth and urges young people to fight the status quo. The word "clampdown" is a neat cover-all term the writers adopted to define the oppressive Establishment, notably its more reactionary voices who were to be heard throughout the 1970s calling alarmingly for "clampdowns" by government and law enforcement on strikers, agitators, benefits claimants, football hooligans, punks and other perceived threats to the social, economic and moral wellbeing of the UK.

In 1980, "Clampdown" was released as a single backed with "The Guns of Brixton" in Australia. The single was not released in any other territories, with the exception of US promos.

"Clampdown" was written by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones.

The song's lyrics, written by Joe Strummer, refers to the perceived failures of capitalist society. The wearing of the "blue and brown" refers to the colour of the uniforms that are mostly worn by workers. This idea goes along with lyrics that refer to "young believers" who are brought and bought into the capital system by those "working for the clampdown" who will "teach our twisted speech". Alternatively, it could be suggested that the blue and brown refer to shirt colours, the fascist Blueshirts of 1930s Ireland and the Brownshirts of the early Nazis in Germany. Strummer wrote,

These lyrics are seen to refer to how one gets caught by the capital economic system and its ethos of work, debt, power, position and conformist lifestyle. Strummer, who proclaimed himself a socialist, also uses the song's closing refrain to highlight this mindset as a potential trap and offers a warning not to give oneself over to "the clampdown". This is emphasised in the coda by Jones's repetition of the words "work" and "more work" on the beat over Strummer's breathy repetition of the phrase "working for the clampdown". This reaffirms the idea that Strummer saw "the clampdown" as a threat to all who get caught up in the modern economic wage-hour system. Bass player and Clash co-founder Paul Simonon, in an interview with the LA Times, spoke about the opportunities available to him in the early 1970s UK after he finished his secondary education:

What was worse was that when it got time for us to start leaving school, they took us out on trips to give us an idea of what jobs were available. But they didn't try to introduce us to anything exciting or meaningful. They took us to the power station and the Navy yards. It was like saying, 'This is all you guys could ever do.' Some of the kids fell for it. When we got taken down to the Navy yards, we went on a ship and got cooked up dinner and it was all chips and beans. It was really great. So some of the kids joined up – because the food was better than they ate at home.

— Paul Simonon,

Strummer, like Simonon, spent time on the dole, but Strummer did not come from a lower-class family. In the same interview with the LA Times Strummer said,