National Capitalism: This British Conservative Party poster from 1909 criticises the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, for failing to protect British jobs by imposing tariffs on imported goods.MRS SHIPLEY’S reconfiguration of the National Party’s front bench notwithstanding, the Centre-Right faces some daunting challenges over the next three years.
What sort of party does it wish to be? A mass party, with deep roots in the community and a membership broadly representative of the New Zealand population? Or, a cadre party, tightly organised around an ideologically coherent set of policies and staffed by highly motivated individuals drawn from a narrow segment of society?
If National wishes to reconstruct its mass base it will need to reconsider a great many of its present policy positions. More significantly, it will have to abandon the laissez-faire paradigm in favour of either a genuinely liberal, or a recognisably conservative, political philosophy.
The laissez-faire doctrine is simply too destructive a creed for any political party to pursue for more than a few years. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto identified the all-consuming dynamism of unrestrained capitalism as long ago as 1848 – only a few years after the British Tory Party had been broken in half on the rock of "free trade". In the years that followed, the British Liberal Party also learned to fear the destructive side effects of laissez faire – especially its ability to mobilise the "lower orders".
By the end of the 19th Century both the Conservatives and the Liberals had moved towards a more durable set of political themes. Disraeli’s "One Nation" Conservatism sought to smooth over class antagonisms by enlisting the whole electorate in Britain’s imperial adventure, while Asquith’s "Social Liberalism" attempted to pre-empt the appeal of socialism through a series of radical social reforms.
Margaret Thatcher’s revival of laissez-faire economics in the final quarter of the 20th Century was a retrograde step for the Conservative Party – fatally undermining its mass appeal. Only the extraordinary weaknesses of Baroness Thatcher’s opponents permitted her party to rule for such an extended period. Today, it is a moot question whether the British Tories will ever again secure a parliamentary majority.
In the 21st Century, the chief dilemma confronting a party calling itself "National" will be whether to embrace "global" or "national" capitalism. A majority of the present leadership of the National Party appears to favour the former, a position which aligns it very closely with the ACT Party.
In practical terms this means that both National and ACT are bound to promote policies which facilitate the dominance of transnational – as opposed to local - capitalists. New Zealand under National/ACT leadership would become even more of a "branch office" of the Australian economy than it is now - with a corresponding intensification of the already quite strong push in right-wing circles for New Zealand to "merge" with Australia.
This is hardly the sort of programme a "national" party could hope to adopt with any realistic prospect of electoral success.
By embracing "national capitalism", however, the Centre-Right could once again carve out a political position with genuine mass appeal. A "New Zealand Incorporated" approach, encompassing a judicious measure of state intervention and exhortation – along the lines of Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – has the potential for building a political constituency of election-winning dimensions. At present only Simon Upton and Bill English appear to have grasped this possibility.
The irony, of course, is that "national capitalism" is precisely what Winston Peters has been advocating for the past decade. By banishing Peters, National lost the only charismatic politician it possessed with a compelling vision of the future. Even more astonishingly, by breaking up the National/NZ First Coalition Government, Mrs Shipley not only guaranteed National’s defeat, but also handed Labour and the Alliance the opportunity to make "national capitalism" the Centre-Left’s winning electoral formula well into the next century.
This essay was originally published in The Dominion of Friday, 17 December 1999.
