A World Of Our Own

"Did you call these Pakeha mofos 'mofos', mofo?": Pakeha New Zealanders outrage at Hone Harawira's use of the Black American expletive speaks volumes about their fundamental isolation from the all-too-contemporary manifestations of New Zealand's colonial legacy.

IF THE REACTION to Don Brash’s infamous "Orewa Speech" proved that "biculturalism" had failed to "take" among a large number of Pakeha, Hone Harawira’s brutal e-mail to Buddy Mikaere offers proof that the bicultural ideal is similarly resented by many Maori.

This should worry John Key.

If New Zealand’s official ideology pleases neither Maori nor Pakeha; if the smouldering resentments fanned into flame nearly six years ago at Orewa still glow; then how much confidence can the Prime Minister (or any Pakeha politician) have that Treaty settlements negotiated between the Crown and Maori will "take"?

In 2004 the "political class" closed ranks over race relations. No less than Don Brash, Helen Clark validated the fears and suspicions of the Pakeha nation. Only a fool could read the Foreshore & Seabed Act as anything other than a ruthless and unequivocal assertion of Pakeha power.

The Maori reaction: the massive hikoi of protest that filled Parliament grounds in May 2004; Tariana Turia’s defection from Helen Clark’s government; the formation of the Maori Party; followed with Newtonian precision.

But, nothing was resolved.

National’s narrow loss to Labour in 2005 merely put off the day of reckoning.

For the next three years Pakeha New Zealand, at odds with itself, was consumed by other issues. The vexed question of race-relations was pushed onto the back-burner. When they entered the polling booths in 2008 most voters had more pressing priorities.

But not the Maori Party. For Tariana Turia, Pita Sharples et al, the priorities remained unchanged. Their mission was to roll back the bipartisan obliteration of Maori aspirations symbolised by the Foreshore & Seabed Act, and to make their party the indispensable partner of whichever of the two main Pakeha parties secured a plurality of the popular vote. They were determined that, henceforth, the electors on the Maori Roll, through the Maori Party, would exercise the casting vote of New Zealand politics.

The events of the days following the 2008 election were, therefore, interpreted very differently by Maori and Pakeha.

For Maori, National’s offer of partnership was seen as proof of the pivotal role the Maori Party is destined to play in New Zealand’s political and constitutional affairs. The Prime Minister had to keep the Far-Right at arm’s length or risk re-energising Labour. He needed them more than they needed him.

For Pakeha, however, John Key’s outreach to the Maori Party was seen not as a forced concession, but as a generous gesture of reconciliation and inclusion. The very fact that the Prime Minister, with Act’s support already in his pocket, didn’t need the votes of the Maori Party, merely confirmed the generosity of inviting Ms Turia and Dr Sharples to join his government.

To a dyed-in-the-wool Maori nationalist like Hone Harawira, the Maori Party’s decision to accept the Prime Minister’s invitation must have looked like very high-risk politics. With the overwhelming majority of the Maori Party’s voters being semi-skilled or unskilled workers, there was a real danger of it being perceived as cuddling-up to their White and Brown bosses.

The Maori Party’s equivocation over Nick Smith’s Emissions Trading Scheme, coupled with its support for National’s cutbacks to ACC, strengthened this perception considerably.

Mr Harawira’s intemperate response to Mr Mikaere bears eloquent testimony to the Te Tai Tokerau MP’s frustration with the situation in which he and his party now find themselves.

The decision to work with National (or, one suspects, any Pakeha-led party) requires the Maori Party to demonstrate an ongoing ability to both propose and accept reasonable compromises.

But, to someone holding Mr Harawira’s nationalist beliefs, it was the Maori people’s willingness, over the past 150 years, to make "reasonable compromises" with the Pakeha authorities that led to the alienation of 63 million acres of Maori land. And, it clearly enrages him that "puritanical" Pakeha politicians and journalists were unwilling to characterise the trading-off of an inconsequential meeting in Brussels for a day in Paris – "The City of Light" – as his own "reasonable compromise".

New Zealand’s official "bicultural" ideology enjoins its citizens to walk in two worlds with understanding and respect. But reality tells a very different story. Maori New Zealanders have no choice when it comes to walking in two worlds. Pakeha New Zealanders do - and most of us choose to stay in our own.

It’s enough to make a saint swear.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 13 November 2009.

New Myths For Old

A landscape to swallow souls: Alone in their empty land, New Zealanders have a murderous need to feel at home.

RONALD HUGH MORRIESON saw New Zealand through a whiskey-glass - darkly. The provincial society his novels describe oscillates uneasily between the sunny certainties of rural life, and the pitch-black nightmares of small-town dysfunction.

Obsessions born of boredom and isolation:

"What’s really going on behind the perpetually drawn curtains at Number 13?"

"That body the cops dug up from under the big Macrocarpa hedge surrounding the old Thompson place – did they ever find out who it was?"

What is it about New Zealand society that encourages these gothic outpourings? What transforms sullen misfits like Stan Graham and David Gray into homicidal gunmen? What leads so many "good blokes" to turn their hunting rifles on their wives – and then themselves? What’s our best guess when we hear that: "The Police are not seeking anyone else in relation to the incident."

Is it something in the water – or something in ourselves?

We’re a prickly people, prone to sudden mood-swings – as Helen Clark could testify. One minute she’s riding high in the polls, and the next thing you know she’s the grim commissar of politically-correct Helengrad.

Maori, too, know exactly how volatile Pakeha New Zealanders can be: from "bi-cultural partner", to seething enemy of "Maori privilege" – and all in the blink of Court of Appeal judge’s eye, or the time it takes to deliver a speech to the Orewa Rotary Club.

Pakeha sensitivity on racial issues is, of course, understandable. It’s difficult to feel positive about a country founded on bad faith, violence and the wholesale expropriation of the indigenous inhabitants. Much easier to construct a national mythology which declares the exact opposite to be true.

Up until the mid-1970s, New Zealand’s founding myth went something like this.

In the beginning were the Moriori – a primitive Melanesian people who were easily defeated and exterminated by a proud and warlike Polynesian race called the Maori. The arrival of Europeans profoundly disrupted Maori society, forcing their chiefs to seek the protection of the all-powerful British Empire. Almost alone among Britain’s colonies, New Zealand was founded peacefully and in good faith. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi guaranteed native property rights and gave Maori the legal status of British subjects. Unfortunately, the warlike Maori tribes proved incapable of keeping the peace, and the British Government was required to subjugate them by military force. As the Moriori succumbed to the more powerful Maori, so were the Maori forced to give way before the more civilised Europeans. However, the dignity and valour of their Maori adversaries left a deep and favourable impression on the victorious "Pakeha" settlers. Convinced they were descended from the same Indo-European stock, the two peoples intermarried freely, producing a vigorous hybrid nation famed throughout the world for its racial harmony.

Over the course of the last thirty years, this myth has been relentlessly deconstructed by both Pakeha and Maori historians. For some New Zealanders, learning the truth about their country’s past has been a liberating experience, but for many others it has been profoundly disorienting and unsettling. Particularly galling has been the State’s effective endorsement of the revisionists’ work. For a surprisingly large number of citizens, this official repudiation of the nation’s founding myths is something akin to treason.

In small town, provincial New Zealand – Morrieson country – the State’s bi-cultural "treachery" has led to the growth of an alternative historical narrative. A curious collection of rogue anthropologists, pseudo-historians, New Age mystics, and old-fashioned racial supremacists have combined to produce a bizarre new version of New Zealand’s past.

Since rigorous historical research has made the country’s original founding myth untenable, the new "home-made" myth has been relocated in New Zealand’s pre-history.

The first people to reach these islands were not, it seems, Melanesian Moriori, nor Polynesian Maori, but a highly sophisticated band of proto-Europeans. More than a millennium before the birth of Christ, these daring sea voyagers established a dazzling antipodean civilisation. Long-since buried beneath bush and sand, it is remembered now only by the name the Maori gave to its remnants: "Waitaha".

The Waitaha myth, like the Moriori myth before it, answers a number of urgent needs in its provincial Pakeha creators. It destroys the Maori claim to indigeneity. It reaffirms the historical superiority of European civilisation. And, by extending out the length of time civilised people have dwelt in New Zealand from hundreds to thousands of years, it renders Maori culture irrelevant. Most importantly, however, these new myth-makers reassure historically disoriented Pakeha that their cultural "connection" to these islands is far stronger than that of the brutal primitives who destroyed the wonder and glory that was Waitaha.

In the tiny Northland town of Dargaville the Waitaha Myth briefly crossed the line from unofficial to official history.

While wandering through the town’s museum, Scott Hamilton, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Auckland, spotted a "pou" – or carved gatepost marking the entrance to a Maori settlement.

According to the museum’s curator: "The carving, called Pouto Ki Rongomaraeroa, is the only one of its kind to be restored and put on display in a public place. It is different in type and design to Maori carvings, reinforcing the theory that the Waitaha had different origins and a longer history in New Zealand than Maori. The Waitaha lived in settlements around much of New Zealand’s coast."

When Hamilton took the Museum’s staff to task for passing-off pseudo-history as anthropological fact, he was told that "Maori communities and the archaeologists and historians who work with them have a ‘vested interest’ in suppressing information about a pre-Maori people."

(Visit http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/10/pseudo-history-at-dargy-museum.html for the full story.)

Welcome to the parallel universe of provincial New Zealand. A universe in which the remnants of an ancient, seafaring, pyramid-building civilisation lie buried beneath the sands of your local beach. A universe where non-indigenous Maori and wicked urban intellectuals conspire to keep ordinary Kiwis ignorant of their country’s "true" history.

To the well-educated and well-travelled inhabitants of metropolitan New Zealand, the fevered mental landscapes of their provincial cousins will give rise to genuine alarm. But Ronald Hugh Morrieson: whose Kiwi-gothic novels described every crooked feature of provincial New Zealand’s weird physiognomy; would’ve known exactly what he was looking at.

Adrift in these empty seas, New Zealanders will turn almost anything into an anchor. Alone in their empty land, Kiwis have a murderous need to feel at home.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 12 November 2009.

Putting The Beach Beyond Our Reach

Putting the beach beyond our reach: Both Maori and Pakeha have a mutual interest in taking the foreshore and seabed off the market - permanently.

THE IDEA of vesting the ownership of the foreshore and seabed in the tupuna (ancestors) of the coastal-dwelling Maori hapu (clans) is nothing if not imaginative. Property developers and mining companies are very resourceful, but (as far as I know) they’ve yet to master time travel.

In addition to permanently taking the foreshore and seabed off the market, "Tupuna Title" would also encourage the conservation of New Zealand’s coastal environment. As kaitiaki (guardians) of resources passed down to them by their ancestors, local hapu would have powerful cultural and legal incentives to protect and pass-on the rights of customary usage to their children and grandchildren.

But, how would Pakeha New Zealanders relate to this revolutionary legal concept? The short answer is: with considerable difficulty.

For a start, we’d have to be willing to embrace a radical expansion of the number of things which cannot be bought and sold. The most important of these prohibitions relate to the human person. Since the abolition of slavery in the early part of the 19th Century, it has been illegal to sell or buy human-beings – or any part thereof. Our persons are also legally protected against intentional injury, and the State is prohibited from inflicting cruel or unusual punishment upon our bodies.

The creation of "Tupuna Title" would extend the idea of legal inviolability to the coastal territories and customary rights of New Zealand’s first inhabitants. In a very real sense, these would become an extension of their bodies: things that could never be legally bought, sold, injured or abused.

Once Pakeha New Zealanders got their heads around this extension of legal inviolability, a new compact with the Maori clan-guardians of the foreshore and seabed could be negotiated. In return for reposing the title to this resource in their ancestor’s hands, and placing it beyond the reach of legal confiscation, hapu would grant to Pakeha the inalienable right to access and enjoy New Zealand’s beaches.

But, are we Pakeha ready to embrace a concept as radical as "Tupuna Title"? Or, would we rather the whole of New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed remain vested in the Crown – which we, through our dominant position in Parliament, control? What are the chances of Pakeha giving that up?

No better, I would say, than the chances of the iwi-based Maori corporations having any truck with the notion that their interests should be subordinated to those of the individual hapu and whanau – whose claims to exercise customary usage remain the strongest.

It was the Ngati Apa iwi, and its repeatedly refused applications to establish a commercial aquaculture enterprise in the Marlborough Sounds, that precipitated the legal and political debate which gave birth to the Maori Party.

That debate was both framed and articulated by the growing class of Maori middle-class professionals. They have become the party’s principal advisers, just as the top layer of Maori businessmen have become its principal supporters. Unsurprisingly, it is for the Maori middle-class and the large iwi corporates that the Maori Party now speaks.

What the Maori Party is seeking, on their behalf, is a legal formula for turning the customary rights of hapu into profitable opportunities for iwi entrepreneurs.

The Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei, sees it like this:

"The most likely outcome is repeal [of the Foreshore & Seabed Act] but legislation which results in exactly the same situation: a confiscation; a denial of access to the courts; the benefits going to some, perhaps, of the wealthier Maori organisations, but not to the hapu and the whanau on the ground who came to our select committee and pleaded with us to protect their customary title."

It’s hard to fault Ms Turei’s reasoning. To date, all of the Government’s statements on the issue have been framed in terms of negotiations between iwi and the Crown. The simplest solution – returning to the legal status quo ante and allowing the Courts to determine customary title on a case-by-case basis – is regarded by everyone (except Act) as too risky politically.

With only the Green Party willing to champion hapu rights, it’s pretty clear that the question of who "owns" the foreshore and seabed will be settled by some sort of "deal" between iwi and the Crown (i.e. the Maori Party, National and Labour).

I seriously doubt whether the concept of "Tupuna Title" will make the cut.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 6 November 2009.

Plain English and Plain Wrong

Public Broadcasting? What's that? It’s hard to decide which is worse: TVNZ’s decision to broadcast the "Plain English" promo, or its curious inability to understand why it shouldn’t.

EXPLAINING THE ECONOMY, in Plain English. "Plain English" – geddit?

It’s a pun – don’t you see? A play on words.

TVNZ 7 is putting together a month-long documentary series about the economy in "plain English" – so the viewers won’t feel intimidated by a whole lot of complex, pointy-headed jargon. And then – guess what? Someone in the Marketing Department discovers that the Finance Minister is called Bill English.

Who knew!

Instantly, the whole promotional exercise becomes a no-brainer. TVNZ’s Marketing Department not only persuades English to front a promo for the first programme of the series – it hands him the script.

Brilliant!

　
YOU JUST COULDN’T make this stuff up. In fact, if you sat down and thought for a week, it would be difficult to come up with a more compelling demonstration of everything that’s wrong with our publicly-owned television network.

First, there’s the network’s deeply ingrained anti-intellectualism: its reflexive hostility towards anything resembling a complex idea.

Then there’s the obvious, and very troubling, disconnection between TVNZ’s news and current affairs producers, and the people responsible for marketing their product.

That disconnection is amplified by the quite breath-taking inability of TVNZ’s senior management to recognise that scheduling a promo featuring the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Bill English, delivering an up-beat assessment of the Government’s handling of the economy, screened across four channels in prime time, might – just possibly – be construed as a "party political broadcast".

Lastly, and this is where the "Plain English" imbroglio gets really serious: it demonstrates just how deeply the whole neoliberal ideological agenda has become embedded in TVNZ’s institutional culture.

A media organisation in which "politics" can be neatly separated-off from "economics" is one in which anything resembling critical and conscientious thinking has stopped.

And nowhere was this intellectual and moral vacuity more clearly demonstrated than in the statements of TVNZ’s spokesperson, Andi Brotherston.

Insisting that the promotion had "nothing to do with news and current affairs" – a statement directly contradicted by the all-too-obvious fact that she was responding to a major news story about current affairs – Brotherston compounded her error by suggesting that TVNZ’s obligation to provide fair and balanced coverage of political events only applied in the run-up to a general election: "We are not within an election time frame so there isn’t a requirement on us to give equal time to specific parties."

So, let’s get this straight: the governing party can be given sixty-five 45-second spots, in prime time, to polish its image before the voting public; the Opposition gets nothing; and that’s just fine – because "we are not within an election time frame".

Any notion that by favouring the governing party so blatantly, the state-owned television network might be influencing the outcome of the next election, was clearly much too fanciful an idea to deserve even an atom of Brotherston’s brain-power.

"The other thing is", Brotherston breezily continued, "while other parties might think it’s an ad for Bill English, if we consider it from the viewers’ point of view, they see it as the Finance Minister.

"The series is about demystifying the economy. Viewers might see it differently and they’re the people we have in mind.

"Those people may not care about the other politicians and the time they have on television."

Consider what Brotherston is saying here: that TVNZ has taken on the role of the people’s tribune; that it possesses both the right and the mandate to speak confidently on behalf of the millions of citizen-viewers who comprise its audience; and that, whilst acting in this capacity, it enjoys a status far superior to that of any democratically-elected politician or party.

These are quite extraordinary claims – and they’re just plain wrong.

In the last election the voting public divided itself almost evenly between the Centre- Right and the Centre-Left. Even if one discards the 2008 election-night figures, and uses only the latest opinion poll results, the inescapable fact remains that a huge number of New Zealanders oppose the policies – especially the economic policies – of the National-led Government. These citizens quite rightly expect the public broadcaster to reflect the reality of their opposition in its daily political coverage.

But, Brotherston’s statements blithely ignore this expectation. As far as she’s concerned TVNZ’s "viewers" are of a single mind. Bill English is not a National Party politician, he is the Finance Minister: a figure without politics; dispassionate, disinterested – entirely above the fray.

Equally disturbing is Brotherston’s claim that TVNZ not only can, but has, "demystified" the economy. This suggests that the network sees economics as an essentially simple and straightforward discipline: one whose precepts can be readily simplified and presented in "plain English" to a mass audience.

But only an ideologue could make such a boast. Because only ideologues regard economics – the ground upon which nearly all of modern politics is fought out – as something indisputable and unproblematic.

For those of us not yet enthralled to some ideological system, economics cannot be anything but difficult, complex and "mysterious". If it were otherwise, there would be no need for a series called Focus on the Economy.

My guess is that the economics TVNZ is "demystifying" will turn out to be neoliberal economics. Only neoliberals believe it’s possible to break up the discipline of political-economy into its component parts. A public broadcaster uninfected by neoliberal certitude would be attempting the opposite – trying to put politics and economics back together.

Brotherston’s saddest statement, however, is the one in which she assures the public that the "Plain English" promo went through all of TVNZ’s internal approval channels. These "consider all aspects" of the programmes which go to air.

That such a blatant breach of public broadcasting norms and ethics could have been signed-off without demure is astonishing.

Is there no one left in TVNZ who understands that its role as the "national town hall" forbids it from taking sides? That there’s a crucial moral distinction to be drawn between a public television network which provides a forum for complex, multi-faceted and contentious civic debate, and one which serves up only such "debate" as it believes its viewers ought to be watching?

The broadcast of the "Plain English" promo sets the seal on TVNZ’s existence as an neutral public broadcaster.

In Putin’s Russia, state television delivers its master’s voice. Here in New Zealand, it puts the words in his mouth.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 5 November 2009.

Trading Freedom

A deficit of political will: Free Trade orthodoxy is but one of neoliberalism's many economic and political shibboleths. With the political elites of both the centre-left and the centre-right espousing the same dogma, Western electorates are seldom exposed to alternative explanations for, or solutions to, besetting global problems.

FOR ALL THEIR DIFFERENCES, on the subject of so-called "free trade", National and Labour continue to speak the same language. No matter which of them occupies the Treasury benches, Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) will continue to be signed and celebrated. Regardless of whether New Zealand’s trade minister is Tim Groser, or Maryan Street, the gospel according to Doha will continue to be preached. For the centre-right and the centre-left, "free trade" remains the last great bi-partisan cause.

And why not? New Zealand has always been, and remains, a trading nation. Since the late 18th Century, this country’s flora and fauna, minerals and farm-based products have been exchanged for all those elaborately manufactured articles that make for a civilised society.

In the late 19th Century, we perfected the art of placing high-quality foodstuffs on the tables of the world’s wealthiest consumers. It’s what we do best, and we’d like to go on doing it for as long as possible.

Not surprisingly, therefore, a world of tariffs, quotas and other trade barriers is the sort of world our Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade (MFAT) will do almost anything to prevent. What it seeks – the Holy Grail of New Zealand diplomacy – is an international marketplace into which New Zealand’s exports can flow without let or hindrance.

A world unequivocally committed to free trade is MFAT’s idea of Heaven. And, like Heaven, everybody want’s to go there, but nobody wants to die.

If New Zealand wishes to send its products to all the nations of the Earth, then it must allow all the nations of the Earth to send their products to us. As Shakespeare would say: "Aye, there’s the rub."

Next time you’re in the supermarket, try finding a can of apricots, peaches or pears sourced from New Zealand growers. Try finding a packet of biscuits made with New Zealand flour in a New Zealand factory. Try finding a light-bulb, or a tube of toothpaste, that hasn’t travelled thousands of kilometres to reach your supermarket’s shelves.

Our apricots, peaches and pears, grown for decades on the sunny river-terraces of Central Otago, were the best in the world. Our biscuit, light-bulb and toothpaste factories employed generations of New Zealand workers – as did the factories that produced our clothing and footwear.

No longer.

Now, the advocates of "free trade" will tell you that this is all for the best: that our local manufacturers were uncompetitive; that we paid "too much" for our T-shirts and toothpaste.

If other nations produce these things more cheaply, say the free-traders, then why not simply import them and lower the cost-of-living for all New Zealanders – especially the poor?

What they usually keep out of the conversation is exactly how other nations can produce T-shirts and toothpaste so cheaply. The answer, of course, is by paying their workers far less than even the most exploited Kiwi worker; by preventing them from organising into trade unions to reclaim some of the value of the products they make; and, by refusing to allow the democratic freedoms that would make such civic action possible.

When trade is "free", it’s all-too-often because no one and nothing else is.

The other subject the free-traders try to avoid is the delicate matter of relative economic strength.

Some nations – some economies – are simply much bigger and stronger than others. So big and so strong, in fact, that they can turn the whole "free trade" exercise on its head.

Ask the Australians who got the better deal in their FTA with the United States. (Here’s a hint: it wasn’t Australia.) Ask our own apple-growers if, in spite of CER, they have open access to the Australian market? (Here’s another hint: they don’t.)

The brutal historical fact of the matter is, that New Zealand has never been wealthier than she was when her trade was anything but free. And that, if we want to be as wealthy again, our best course of action would be to find another great empire to snuggle-up in.

Given the way the world is going, that is likely to be the Sino-Japanese Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. The beginnings of which John Key, Tim Groser and Maryan Street witnessed last week in Thailand.

NZ Incorporated: Suppliers of ice-cream to the new masters of the world.

A trade to make us rich – but not free.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 30th October 2009.

Holding the Line

A Bully Pulpit: Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, makes it on to the BBC's "Question Time" programme despite the best efforts of the British Left to ensure the state broadcaster provided "No Platform for Fascists".

THERE’S A SPECIAL FRISSON that runs through even the most conservative citizens when they see a police line buckle and break. The image of authority giving way, quite literally, before public pressure stirs people in ways they struggle to explain. Perhaps it’s the upwelling of deep memories from the historical past – proof that nine-out-of-ten of us are descended from serfs.

A police line outside the headquarters of the BBC in London buckled and broke last week. The flimsy human-chain of constables guarding the "Beeb’s" surprisingly forbidding gates collapsed beneath the weight of hundreds of angry anti-fascist protesters. Around twenty-five of their number actually made it into the building, along the corridors, and up to the very doors of the studio where Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party (BNP) was appearing on the BBC’s "Question Time" programme.

It was "Question Time’s" decision to offer a "platform" for Griffin and his party, that ignited the protesters’ rage. In the eyes of the British Left, allowing Griffin to appear was tantamount to giving Adolf Hitler access to a vast television audience.

Adding to their fury was the decision of the Labour Government’s Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, to appear alongside Griffin. By taking part in the programme, they said, Labour was in breach of the British Left’s informal agreement that there should be "No Platform for Fascists". Sharing the political stage with the BNP, they argued, was the surest way of giving it the legitimacy it craved, and which, as the enemy of tolerance and democracy, it did not deserve.

Watching the programme, it was hard to understand why the protesters bothered. The BBC had assembled a studio audience that appeared to be unanimous in its detestation of Griffin and the BNP. Questioner after questioner delivered stinging criticisms of the party and its leader – criticisms which were picked up and reinforced by the show’s host, David Dimbleby.

Griffin acquitted himself with surprising aplomb in this hostile environment. Responding to criticisms of the BNP’s anti-immigration policies – designed, he said, to protect "indigenous Britons" – Griffin challenged Straw to go to New Zealand and tell a Maori he was not "indigenous". Colour, said the BNP leader, was irrelevant: "We are the aborigines here".

Though the studio audience clearly rejected the BNP’s stance on immigration, and warmly applauded all those who defended the government’s "multicultural" policies, Griffin must have known that in the world beyond the television studio his words were being received very differently.

As the BBC’s own Europe editor Gavin Hewitt discovered during his 2006 foray into the London borough of Dagenham (a BNP stronghold) ordinary, deeply-disillusioned, white working-class voters make up the bulk of the party’s electoral base.

"The mood of the club was one of sullen resentment", recalled Hewitt. "The neighbourhood around them was changing rapidly. Their known world was gone. I remember one of them had got hold of the Labour manifesto from 1997. There was only a brief reference to immigration but the man read out the words ‘every country must have firm control over immigration and Britain is no exception’. They felt betrayed and voiceless. In their view Labour had not been straight and no-one had asked them whether they wanted a sharp rise in immigration."

Like the French Communist Party, whose formerly rock-solid working-class supporters from the inner suburbs of France’s great cities abandoned Marxism for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s xenophobic nationalism in the 1990s, the British Labour Party is paying the inevitable price for its embourgeoisment.

The multicultural dreams of the middle-class idealists who over-ran the mainstream Left in the 1970s and 80s, have turned into the racially and culturally-charged nightmares of the economically-stressed suburbs and towns in which desperate immigrant communities inevitably took root and grew.

Rightly or wrongly, working-class Frenchman and Englishmen regard the loss of their well-paying jobs, the rapid rise in immigration, and the relentless advance of economic globalisation as being all of a piece. That "their" parties – the CPF, Labour – had participated in governments responsible for the imposition of all three "evils" is impossible for many of them to forget – or forgive.

Pakeha New Zealanders’ experience of mass immigration has been very different. Their country’s colonial history precluded any claim to indigeneity, and the careful timing of successive waves of post-war immigration meant that there was little direct economic competition between themselves and the rural Maori and Pasifika immigrants who picked up the low-paid jobs Pakeha workers had left behind them.

With the brief but unpleasant exception of the "dawn-raids" period of the late-1970s, such "immigration politics" as did exist in the New Zealand was fuelled largely by the competition for low-skilled jobs between the urbanised Maori and immigrant Pasifika communities – not Whites and Browns.

That all changed in the 1990s with the very sudden and rapid influx of immigrants from China, Taiwan and the Indian sub-continent. Rather than compete directly with the unskilled and semi-skilled Maori and Pasifika communities, the so-called "Asian Invasion" collided head-on with the Pakeha middle-class.

Possessing substantial capital reserves, and high levels of professional and commercial skill, immigrants from Asia swiftly colonised large tracts of Pakeha suburbia and made significant inroads into the property and services sector of the economy. Thousands of young Asians purchased places in New Zealand’s secondary schools and universities. In Auckland particularly, Asian immigration has wrought an economic, demographic and electoral transformation.

While the New Zealand Labour Party had been highly successful in incorporating the rural Maori migrants of the 1950s and 60s and the Pasifika immigrants of the 1970s and 80s into its predominantly working-class base, it was the National Party which proved to be the more adept at drawing the economically self-reliant Asian immigrants – especially the ethnic Chinese – into its political orbit. With the latter’s numbers threatening to eclipse those of the indigenous Maori by 2025, a whole set of new racial, cultural and ideological calculations must now be made.

New Zealand’s equivalent of the BNP, NZ First, and our own Nick Griffin, Winston Peters, may be temporarily becalmed, electorally, but the chances of both reclaiming their roles as the prime oppositional voices against Asian immigration cannot be discounted. With the nation rapidly devolving into an economically-marginalised Maori/Pasifika underclass; an economically-compressed Pakeha middle class; and an economically-dominant Pakeha-Iwi-Asian upper class – who knows how much longer New Zealand’s multiculturalists will be able to hold the line?

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 29th of October 2009.

The Power of Ignorance

Born of War: The Commonwealth's modern promoters date its birth to July 1949. In reality, of course, the institution is inextricably linked to the British Empire - and the devastating global wars waged in its defence.

In July 2009, the Royal Commonwealth Society launched "The Commonwealth Conversation". This was both a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the "New" Commonwealth in July 1949, and an attempt to "refresh the Commonwealth to keep it relevant and effective for the next 60 years and beyond". The New Zealand end of the "conversation" was officially launched last Wednesday evening (21 October) in the Beehive Theatrette. Alongside Professor David McIntyre and Professor James Belich, I was invited to be one of the event’s three "leading presenters". Afterwards, a number of those present asked me to post my address on Bowalley Road.

WHEN I TOLD my friends about this evening’s "conversation" most of them were rather non-plussed.

"Why bother?", one asked. "Who on earth is interested in the Commonwealth these days – apart from a dwindling band of sentimental royalists, academics specialising in international relations, and a handful of weary diplomats who don’t have any choice?"

"I hope you’re going to come out against it", said another. "It’s nothing but a historical relic from the days of empire. A fusty old heirloom that everyone’s too scared to throw out for fear of upsetting, well, who knows – Betty Windsor perhaps?"

I must confess, there was much in their objections to the Commonwealth that I agreed with.

As the generation who grew up in what their parents and the newspapers still called The British Empire dwindles and fades, and as the Baby Boom generation who thrilled to the emergence of the so-called "Third World" from colonial rule ruefully begins to contemplate the same fate, it is indeed difficult to locate any emotional anchors strong enough to keep their children and grandchildren loyal to – or even interested in – this curious institution.

In fact, the more I thought about the Commonwealth, the more it seemed to resemble bombus terrestris – the common bumble-bee – which, according to urban legend, was once pronounced by some pedantic old engineer to be so aerodynamically deficient that its sustained flight was a mathematical impossibility. Of course the bumble-bee, having no deep knowledge of aerodynamics, flies perfectly well – "under the power of its own ignorance".

Is that what keeps the Commonwealth airborne? The power of ignorance? If people truly understood what it was, and why it was – would the Commonwealth be able to keep on flying in the present tense?

How many people, I wonder, realise that, historically-speaking, there were (some say still are) two Commonwealths: the White, and the Non-white? Or that both were the unwanted offspring of the two great global conflicts of the twentieth century?

Great Britain entered the 20th Century as the world’s pre-eminent economic and military power, with a global reach only the Americans have, so far, been able to equal.

Central to the enabling and exculpatory mythologies of the British Empire was a profound and apparently ineradicable belief in the innate superiority of white men – and not just any sort of white men, either. The fate of the world – whether it realised it or not – had been reposed, by the Almighty (or the British navy) in the hands of Anglo-Saxon white men. Which meant that, as both the crucible of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, and the prime exemplar of its moral, cultural, economic and military pre-eminence, the world rightfully belonged to Great Britain.

Our own Prime Minister during that febrile period leading up to the outbreak of World War I, William Fergusson Massey, took this view of the world to its logical extreme by enlisting in the ranks of the British Israelites. These were the folk who genuinely believed that Britain’s King-Emperor was directly descended from the Lion of Judah, and that the Britons themselves were the direct descendants of a lost tribe of peripatetic Israelites who, for reasons best known to themselves, had abandoned the land of milk and honey for the land of cold and clammy – but I digress.

The First World War, as we all know, transformed Great Britain from the world’s pre-eminent creditor nation, into America’s poor (and deeply indebted) relation. Even worse, it created the conditions for the world’s first socialist republic – a republic implacably hostile to imperialism in all its forms.

So dangerous was the new Bolshevik state in the eyes of the capitalist world that its new leader, the United States, felt obliged to offer the world’s peoples at least the prospect of self-determination.

It wasn’t an idea that went down particularly well at the Foreign and Colonial Office in London, but, with an alarmingly large number of the British working-class cheerily whistling the Internationale on their way t’mill, it was one which the Powers-That-Be were, eventually, required to acknowledge.

Hence the famous Balfour declaration of 1926 (not to be confused with the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917). This made it clear to the Anglo-Saxon portions of the Empire that, henceforth:

"They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations."

Which only seems fair - given the hundreds of thousands of young Irishmen. Canadians, Newfoundlanders, Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders who’d died to make Great Britain master of the Persian Gulf – and its oil.

Thus were the "young lions" of the Dominions inducted into what amounted to a very exclusive and racially privileged, "club" within the greater British Empire. Never mind that their head of state remained a progeny of the House of Windsor (Saxe-Coburg sounded so horribly German don’t you know) or that most of their key industries were British-owned, or that virtually all of their capital hailed from the City of London. After the 1931 Statute of Westminster the Empire’s "young lions" could prowl wherever they pleased.

Few members of the new British Commonwealth of Nations appear to have given much thought to the fact that if they were free of Britain, then she, too, must be free of them. It was only when the imperial Japanese fleet was bearing down on Australia and New Zealand in the early months of 1942 that Britain’s former colonies grasped the full extent of their "autonomy".

But if Britain entered World War I in the spirit of "wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set", she faced down Hitler’s Germany in the considerably less hubristic, but infinitely more likeable spirit of, "there’ll always be an England".

"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties," intoned the British Empire’s last great statesman, "and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’"

"Finest hour" it certainly was, but the thousand-year-empire which Churchill, that arch-imperialist, was still brazen enough to invoke in his most famous speech, would be gone within quarter-of-a-century.

Maybe it was simply the curse of karma (a concept imported from that jewel in the imperial British crown, long-suffering India) that the price which Britain, along with all the other great imperial powers, would be required to pay for drowning the world in blood to expand their empires – would be to lose their empires altogether.

What made the loss so much easier to bear, of course, was the fact that if the British Empire was no longer a sustainable proposition, its successor, the Anglo-Saxon Empire, was approaching its zenith.

In 1945, Capitalism’s cornucopia, protected by its new atomic sword, was the United States of America. It bestrode the world like a gum-chewing colossus. And at its side, ready to help it challenge that other great winner of World War II, the Soviet Union, were its loyal (and very grateful) English-speaking allies – Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The five fingers of the Anglo-Saxon fist.

And in a world where it paid to keep your friends close and your enemy’s potential friends even closer, the US State Department could see that the rapidly disintegrating British Empire had a vital role to play in keeping its former colonies out of the clutches of the dreaded communists.
Enter the "New Commonwealth" – the British Foreign Offices’ highly successful mechanism for preventing its former subject peoples from turning red – by keeping them pink.

But, the new nations of what would become, simply, "The Commonwealth", remained bound to the old family firm by more than the ties of history, language and sentiment. Like the white dominions before them, their economies were built on a foundation of British capital, and their fledgling armies kitted out with the latest in British military hardware.

And as the playwright Anton Chekov so acutely observed: "If you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, you must use by the last."

The new phenomenon of "neo-colonialism" may have relieved Western Imperialism of the "white man’s burden" of permanent military garrisons and pukka-sahib District Officers, but through a judicious mix of foreign direct investment, loans and aid (often amounting to the same thing) not to mention an entertaining cast of military strongmen, the peoples of the vanished empire remained subjects still.

It has hardly been a glorious history. Whether it be the vast crime against humanity that was the partition of India; or the extra-judicial killings of 1950s Kenya; or the cynical Nelsonian eye turned to the anguish and suffering of Biafra; or the disgraceful and deeply racist machinations of British Intelligence in the extended tragedies of Southern Africa and Rhodesia – tragedies in which successive governments of this Commonwealth member played a not inconsiderable and entirely disreputable part – the history of the Commonwealth "family", like the history of most great families in decline, is not a happy one.

And yet, the old bumble-bee continues to fly.

Though history warns me against the testimony of human memory, when it comes to the Commonwealth one memory in particular endures.

It is of the closing ceremony of the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand, when hundreds of athletes and spectators, unburdened by the fears of terrorism which, in today’s climate, would make such a spectacle quite impossible, crowded around the Queen’s and Prince Philip’s open land-rover, laughing and singing and dancing in a joyous celebration of human solidarity – and yes, even love.

It is this special talent of Britannia, and all her brood, to transcend the sins which made them, if not by the power of their own ignorance, then certainly by the power of the great historical romance in which each one of them has played their part, that makes the Commonwealth so curiously effective among all the dilapidated international contraptions of our battered age.

And it is why, for all its faults, I would not see it fall.