History's On Hone's Side

Media Target: Practically every journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery has spent the past week channelling the Maori Party leadership's antagonistic thoughts towards Hone Harawira. Had they stepped back a few paces from the action, and considered the historical precedents for principled dissidence within New Zealand political parties, they would have realised that Hone's chances of emerging from the current crisis with enhanced - rather than diminished - mana are actually pretty good.

THE CRISIS GRIPPING the Maori Party deserves much better media analysis than it’s getting. The final result of the 2011 General Election may well turn on who emerges victorious from the conflict between Hone Harawira’s faction of the Maori Party and the faction led by Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples. What we are witnessing is a struggle of considerable political significance.

In our own struggle to gain perspective on this crisis, what we – the voters – need most is a parliamentary press gallery that places sufficient distance between itself and the main antagonists to give us an independent account of the action.

Sadly, this isn’t happening.

Overwhelmingly, the story that is being relayed to us by the Press Gallery is the story the Maori Party (and, one suspects, the National Party) leadership wants us to hear.

Now, we mustn’t be too hard on our political journalists. Proximity to power is a crucial aspect of parliamentary reporting. Without ready access to cabinet ministers and party leaders the Gallery simply cannot do its job. Proximity isn’t everything, however. To avoid being "captured" by the political movers and shakers, it’s vital that political journalists regularly step outside the parliamentary hothouse to breathe in some un-spun air.

It would also be of great assistance to the Press Gallery’s readers, listeners and viewers if it possessed a slightly firmer grasp on New Zealand’s recent political history. Because, on at least four separate occasions over the course of the past quarter-century we’ve witnessed intra-party crises very similar to the crisis unfolding in the Maori Party .

In 1989 there was Jim Anderton’s defection from the Labour Party. In 1992, Winston Peters defected from the National Party. In 2002, the Alliance – a small group of relatively inexperienced politicians in coalition with the much larger Labour Party – imploded over its leadership’s decision to support the invasion of Afghanistan. And, finally, in 2004, Tariana Turia abandoned Helen Clark’s government over the Foreshore & Seabed Act.

In assessing the many possible outcomes of the current crisis, surely it would be helpful if our political journalists interrogated these historical precedents?

Were they to do so they would quickly discover that the principled defection of a dissident MP is very far from being the slow walk to oblivion that so many Gallery journalists ("assisted", no doubt, by the governing coalition’s spin-doctors) seem to think it is. Because, to the contrary, Jim Anderton, Winston Peters and Tariana Turia were all re-elected by their constituents, and all of them founded a new political party which went on to play a major role in the political life of New Zealand.

The fate of the Alliance is also instructive. Like the Maori Party, the coalition drawn together by Jim Anderton contained elements spanning virtually the entire political spectrum. When a serious conflict erupted these disparate elements simply weren’t prepared to compromise and the party split asunder. Its now separated components were never again able to attract significant electoral support.

What do these historical precedents suggest in relation to the current crisis in the Maori Party?

First, they suggest that if he is forced out of his party Mr Harawira will be triumphantly re-elected by the voters of Te Tai Tokerau.

Second, they suggest that, by forcing Mr Harawira out of the Maori Party, Ms Turia and Mr Sharples would precipitate a fatal split in their nationwide organisation – from which they will find it extremely difficult to recover. (Let’s not forget, the defection of Jim Anderton and his followers effectively kept the Labour Party out of power for three electoral cycles.)

Third, they suggest that if Mr Harawira possesses the courage to test his claim that more than half of Maoridom has tired of the Maori Party’s overly accommodating relationship with National; and if he is prepared to offer Maori voters an alternative political vehicle in November; then Mr Harawira can be reasonably confident of playing a vital role in the formation of New Zealand’s next government.

Listening to the journalists of the Parliamentary Press Gallery regurgitate the private promptings of the Prime Minister’s and the Maori Party’s spin-doctors, we could all be forgiven for assuming that by "dealing decisively" with Mr Harawira, Mr Sharples and Ms Turia have miraculously cauterised their party’s gaping wounds.

Well, it ain’t necessarily so. Self-inflicted damage is always the most difficult to repair.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 February 2011.

Sorry Bomber (Some Thoughts On Martyn "Bomber" Bradbury's Call For A New Left Party)

Revolutions aren't made on television, Bomber, they're made on the street. And have you met the people who live on that street!

ONE’S FELLOW CITIZENS can be a terrible disappointment, Bomber. You will discover this the moment you cross the Rubicon from political observer to political participant. "The People", God bless ‘em, especially when encountered individually, are not always hewn from that heroic material so beloved by 18th and 19th Century revolutionaries.

Standing on their doorsteps, Bomber, it’s easy to become profoundly disillusioned with the human-beings whose votes decide your country’s future. Regardless of their location in the social hierarchy, and irrespective of their role in the processes of production, individuals all-too-frequently behave in ways utterly at odds with their objective self-interest. Parliamentary campaigners for the Left will regale you with stories of anti-feminist women, racist Maori, pro-capitalist proletarians and anti-welfare beneficiaries.

"There better be wisdom in crowds," grumbles the weary candidate following a particularly gruelling canvassing drive, "because there’s bugger-all in the average voter!"

Even worse than the voters with no conception of their own self-interest, are the voters who just don’t care. If you can get past the vicious dog chained-up in their front yard, and make your presence known over the blare of their massive sound system, your party-political spiel elicits nothing more than a bemused shake of the head.

"Not interested, mate", they’ll drawl, shutting the door firmly in your face. If their mailbox wasn’t already stuffed-full of junk mail, you’d leave them a pamphlet – or slip your card under the door. But that low growl, emanating from the Hound of the Baskervilles straining against his chain just a few metres to your right, suggests that it might be wiser to move on to the next house in the street.

As often as not – the neighbours are even worse.

But, of course, if you’re really serious about forming a New Left Party, Bomber, you’ll soon be experiencing all these things first hand. And don’t for a minute think there’s some way of avoiding the bruising experience of face-to-face canvassing – cos there ain’t.

The people you’re planning on drawing into the electoral process: the state-house tenants struggling to raise a family on two minimum wages; the young Maori solo-mum trying to keep it together on the DPB; the sickness beneficiary doped up to the eye-balls on lithium (because this country doesn’t really run to a decent mental health system); none of these folk read Tumeke, Bomber, or Bowalley Road, or The Standard, or Kiwipolitico. They don’t read newspapers either, or watch Citizen A. They just might pick up snatches of talk-back radio, or catch the odd TV-news bulletin – but I wouldn’t count on it.

So, to win them over you’ll have to knock on their front doors, introduce yourself, and attempt to engage them in political discussion. Which won’t happen, because while you’re launching into your spiel, they’ll be asking themselves: "What does this prick want from me? What the fuck is he talking about?"

Standing in front of them, Bomber, you’ll come across as so completely alien: so far removed from their bleak, narrow, hard-scrabble and often violent world; that you might as well have beamed down from another planet.

The barriers to effective political communication: functional illiteracy; cultural impoverishment; sheer exhaustion: each of these factors, on their own, Bomber, is enough to prevent the anomistic underclass from receiving your message. And if – as is likely – the person you’re addressing is of a different ethnicity, then your communication difficulties will be radically compounded.

So, if the underclass is politically inaccessible to the Left (which is, I’m afraid, the brutal message of the Mana by-election) then what about the working-class? Well, I’ve got news for you, Bomber, and, as Jim Anderton is fond of adding: "It’s all bad."

In fact, you should have a chat with Jim about winning and holding the support of working-class voters. Because you know what, Bomber? He was the only member of the NewLabour Party and the Alliance who ever really mastered the art.

Why? Because Jim never, ever, ever, by the slightest word or deed, gave the voters of Sydenham/Wigram reason to suppose that he considered himself, or his political and moral values, to be better than their own. In this, he remains their true representative. Like so many of them, he takes a conservative stance on abortion and illicit drug-use. But, also like them, he is prepared to embrace radical economic solutions to entrenched social problems.

It’s all about respect, Bomber. The giving of it, and the receiving of it. Respect – and respectability – lie at the heart of Anglo-Celtic working-class culture. Jim Anderton gets that. It’s why Labour could never reclaim Sydenham/Wigram from him. No matter how jarring some of their opinions on issues relating to race, gender and sexuality might be, Jim Anderton would never disrespect the people whose votes he was soliciting. He’d never call them "rednecks".

Can you say the same, Bomber? Not really.

Which leaves you politically situated slap-bang in the middle of the only political market which the "post-modern" Left has truly made its own: young(ish), well-educated, middle-income and upper-middle-income, Pakeha voters. And that market, as I’m sure you need no reminding, Bomber, is now the happy hunting-ground of both the Labour and the Green parties.

What I would say to you, Bomber, (in case you do need reminding) is that in order to win the votes of more than the ever-dwindling band of political activists who draw their ideological inspiration from the left-wing philosophers and politicians of the 19th and early-20th centuries, a New Left Party would have to offer the voters of Auckland Central, Wellington Central, Port Hills and Dunedin North more-or-less the same policies as Phil Goff and Russel Norman.

That’s the problem with the voting public, Bomber. They will insist on ignoring the Left's advice! I like the way Bertold Brecht put it in his famous poem "The Solution", written after the East German workers’ revolt of June, 1953.

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

When you work out how to do that, Bomber, please let me know.

Waitangi's Ironic Welcome

Welcoming " The Enemy": John "Junior" Popata lunges at the Prime Minister on 5 February , 2009. As he approached Te Tii Marae on 5 February 2011, did John Key grasp the irony of being greeted by Wikitana Popata as "the enemy"? Convicted alongside his brother for assaulting the Prime Minister two years ago, Wikitana was sentenced to just 100 hours of community service. A "settler government" less concerned with keeping the goodwill of Maori might not have been satisfied with such a lenient sentence.

I WONDER if the Prime Minister grasped all the ironies of his latest "welcome" to Waitangi. It’s hard to know where to begin - there were so many.

Perhaps the most obvious was the identity of the young man with the megaphone who abused Mr Key as he made his way on to Te Tii Marae.

Two years ago – to the day – Wikitana Popata and his brother, John ‘Junior’ Popata, had physically accosted Mr Key on his way to the same meeting ground.

In any other country than New Zealand such an attack would have been treated extremely seriously. It is difficult to imagine that a person found guilty of assaulting the President of the United States would be at liberty to harangue him again, from a dangerously short distance, just two years later.

True, but we Kiwis are a forgiving bunch. The National-led Government’s need to keep its Maori Party coalition partner on-side, and the extraordinary fact that the accused were relatives of the Maori Party MP, Hone Harawira (who, equally extraordinarily, gave John Key’s assailants his moral support) meant that the two young protesters’ ultimate punishment was very light.

Now, there are those who celebrate this sort of easy-going approach to the personal security of our politicians. That the Prime Minister can be manhandled by protesters in front of the television cameras without the Diplomatic Protection Squad emptying their pistols into those responsible is held to be a good thing.

Our national day is a very relaxed affair compared to, say, France’s Bastille Day. Tanks and guided-missile-carriers do not roll beneath a triumphal arch as Mirage jet fighters trail banners of red, white and blue smoke across the nation’s capital – not in this neck of the woods. Here the tradition is for several hundred protesters, shouting separatist slogans and carrying their own flag, to march up to the nation’s birthplace on the Waitangi Treaty Ground.

That this tradition has been allowed to develop should not be viewed as evidence that "Pakeha racism" is on the wane but, rather, of its growing subtlety. It is precisely because we do not take the ritual posturing of the protesters seriously that we allow them their little show of defiance. That the Police and the Navy are not ordered to break up the annual protest-march to the Treaty Ground is not proof of our tolerance – but of just how patronising the whole Waitangi Day celebration has become.

The late Sir Robert Muldoon at least paid the Maori nationalists of his day the compliment of taking them seriously. He understood the very real challenge they posed to the integrity of the New Zealand state – and acted accordingly. John Key is willing to endure the insults, and even the roughings-up, because he’s firmly convinced that it represents nothing of genuine political significance: that it’s all just theatre.

He’s wrong, of course. States that decline to defend their constitutional integrity place themselves – and their political representatives – in mortal danger.

If he had listened carefully to what Pita Sharples said in his State of the Nation address, delivered last Saturday evening, Mr Key would have heard him describe the steady evolution of a political-economic entity known as the Iwi Leaders Group (ILG).

The ILG now negotiates with the New Zealand State in much the same way as the great feudal magnates of medieval England negotiated with their King. And what Mr Sharples speech made very clear is that the ILG will use the forthcoming constitutional review to secure for the leaders of the Maori tribes, the same sort of "Magna Carta" of aristocratic rights and privileges that the barons extracted from King John at Runnymede in 1215.

Like the new legislation regulating the ownership of the foreshore and seabed, the growing power and influence of the ILG is but the latest instance of the re-modelling of New Zealand’s constitutional conventions which has been going on for nearly 30 years. The citizens of this country have never been seriously consulted about these changes. If put to a referendum, I strongly suspect Pita Sharples plans for New Zealand would be decisively defeated. But, as the anonymous leader-writer for The New Zealand Herald blithely expressed the new orthodoxy among this country’s elite:

"Progress in the nation’s central social partnership does not come in sudden breakthroughs or even visible steps. It is a gradual acceptance that a post-colonial state cannot be governed simply by majority rule."

Does John Key subscribe to these sentiments? I’d like to think not. Even so, I doubt if he appreciated the true irony of his "welcome" to Waitangi. That the young firebrand, Wikitana Popata’s, angry declaration: "The enemy is amongst us! He is the one responsible for stealing our lands!" Could now just as easily have come from a conservative Pakeha as a radical Maori.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 8 February 2011.

Talkin' About Waitangi & Hone Harawira

Time to Talk: The hour-long, news-driven format of TVNZ7's News at 8 - in sharp contrast to the One News shock/horror-entertainment and weather-driven bulletin at 6:00pm - allows for considerably more in-depth discussion on the important issues of the day. It's coverage of Waitangi Day 2011 and the growing rift between Hone Harawira and the Maori Party leadership shows what genuine public-service broadcasting could (and should) look like.

A FRANK DISCUSSION on the subjects of Waitangi Day and the future of Hone Harawira took place between myself and Miriama Kamo on yesterday’s (Sunday, 6 February) bulletin of TVNZ 7’s News at 8.

I don’t know how long this will stay up at TVNZ-On-Demand, but at the moment the item can be accessed here http://tvnz.co.nz/tvnz-news-at-8/video (the interview begins two-thirds of the way through "Chapter 1"). [Sadly, the link no longer takes you to the items in question.]

The earlier interview between Miriama and TVNZ’s political reporter, Jessica Mutch, is fascinating. The young journalist clearly cannot conceive of any style of politics that isn’t bound up with the institutional norms of parliamentary representation. Nor is she willing to explore the more likely consequences of her own (or should that be Pita Sharple's?) predictions.

Is Ms Mutch really so lacking in political and historical imagination as to suppose that if Hone Harawira is forced out of the Maori Party he will depart alone? That thousands (especially in Te Tai Tokerau) will not resign from the Maori Party in solidarity with their MP? That the party will not be riven with angry recriminations?

More importantly, can she not see that any splitting of the Maori Party could only have the most serious electoral repercussions for the governing coalition come November?

A Second Coming?

Been There - Done That: The launch of the NewLabour Party in 1989 was derailed by the antics of the Far-Left. Twenty-two years later, and those contemplating the formation of yet another "New Left Party" (like Sue Bradford and Matt McCarten who were there, as I was, at the birth of the NLP) will find themselves with very little, apart from the Far-Left, to work with. The New Zealand electorate is unlikely to respond kindly.

A NEW LEFT PARTY – hardly are those words out when a dispiriting image out of the late-1980s troubles my sight: somewhere (I seem to recall it was the Overseas Terminal in Wellington) a queue of youthful extremists, their gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, are shuffling their sneakers inexorably towards the microphone, while all around them reel indignant social-democrats – recalling, too late, W. B Yeats warning about the worst being full of passionate intensity.

The Inaugural Conference of the NewLabour Party on Queen’s Birthday weekend, 1989, should have been a triumph. Deploying all of the organisational flair for which he was famous, Jim Anderton had gathered together around five hundred eager refugees from the pod-party Labour had become under Rogernomics. An overwhelming majority of those attending the conference were ordinary Kiwis: workers, students, beneficiaries and pensioners – with a smattering of academics and trade unionists.

I wasn’t worried about them. When they spoke I was confident they would put into words the feelings of outrage and betrayal shared by hundreds-of-thousands of their fellow citizens.

No, the people I worried about (and I was not alone) were the fifty-to-sixty Trotskyites, Maoists, "Permanent Revolutionaries", Treaty fanatics, hard-core feminists and uncompromising environmentalists who would climb aboard this new political vehicle like Baader-Meinhof terrorists boarding a jet-liner.

We tried to warn Jim, but he simply couldn’t see the problem. "Don’t worry," he said, "we’ll outnumber them ten-to-one." What Jim didn’t seem to grasp was how much damage fifty-to-sixty fanatics could do to the public’s perception of his nascent political movement.

And, oh, what a lot of damage they did. In the days following Jim’s announcement of the NLP’s birth, on 1 May 1989, opinion polls showed support levels around ten percent. In the weeks following the hi-jacked Inaugural Conference public support plummeted below three percent.

"Ah, but that was more than twenty years ago," I hear you say, "times have changed".

Indeed they have.

In 2011, New Zealand is governed by a right-wing coalition supported by close to 60 percent of the electorate. The dominant partner in that coalition, the John Key-led National Party, has been supported by more than 50 percent of the voters for two straight years.

Does this sound like the right time to launch a New Left Party to you?

Who would join it?

Not the moderate, social-democratic Left: they have all returned to the Labour Party. Not the moderate, environmentalist Left: they have the Green Party.

This is important – and not only because, between them, Labour and the Greens account for practically all of the Centre-Left vote. They also account for 99 percent of those who have the slightest idea about how to run an effective election campaign.

A crucial element in the success of Jim Anderton (ex-Labour) and Winston Peters (ex-National) was the large number of experienced election campaigners who rallied to their side. These people didn’t have to be taught how to fund-raise, organise a canvassing drive, or run an election-day system – they already knew.

"No worries," say the promoters of a New Left Party, "we’ll just game the MMP system by recruiting Hone Harawira. That way we can avoid the necessity of winning 5 percent of the Party Vote. If it’s good enough for Rodney Hide in Epsom – it’s good enough for us."

Hmmmm? Not sure that’s the slogan you’re looking for, Comrades. Besides, if you really think an electorally poisonous bunch of eco-anarchists, Maori nationalists, unreconstructed ‘80s feminists and hard-core Marxist-Leninists are going to attract anything like Act’s vote in 2008 – then you’re away with the fairies.

Just consider the stats: The combined 2008 vote of New Zealand’s Centre-Left parties (Labour Party, Greens, Progressives) was 975,734 or 41.62 percent of the Party Vote. Altogether, the Far-Left parties (Alliance, Workers Party, RAM – Residents Action Movement) attracted just 3,306 votes or 0.14 percent.

It’s nowhere near enough, Comrades. Even if he won every vote in Te Tai Tokerau, Hone would still be on his own.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 February 2011.

Will Key's Courage Provoke Media Bias?

Masterful Performance: If Phil Goff is still wondering how one goes about seizing the political initiative, then he's a very slow learner. The danger now is that the mainstream media will start treating the 2011 election not as a contest - but a coronation.

JOHN KEY’S COURAGE over the past ten days has been extraordinary. Not only did he utter the deplorable word "privatisation", but he also gave us ten months advance notice of the General Election’s precise date. Having surrendered one political advantage the Prime Minister then went on to give away another. By reaffirming his 2008 determination not to enter into a post-election coalition deal with Winston Peters, Key has given New Zealand fair warning that if he cannot win the election on his own terms – he’d rather not win it at all.

If, after this performance, Phil Goff is still wondering how one goes about seizing the political initiative, then he’s a very slow learner. It takes courage. It takes clarity of purpose. And, it takes the ability to speak forthrightly to the electorate. When a reporter asked the Prime Minister what would happen after the Election if Peters ends up holding the balance-of-power, Key replied, simply: "If Winston Peters holds the balance of power it will be a Phil Goff-led Labour government."

It’s this rare ability (in a politician) to give a simple, straightforward answer to a simple, straightforward question that endears Key to friend and foe alike. We are reassured that he’s speaking without mental reservation – hiding nothing. Voters cannot but respond positively to such frankness – so very different from the usual circumlocutory political prattle. The result is paradoxical: by demonstrating his consummate political skills, the Prime Minister convinces us that he isn’t really a "politician" at all. "As some of you have noted", he told journalists, "I’m a different politician to a lot of politicians". Indeed.

It takes a very different sort of politician to hide his intentions in plain sight. Only now, in the light cast by the events of the past ten days, has Key’s strategic plan been revealed to us.

Stage One involved persuading New Zealanders that they were dealing with a very different sort of National Party leader – one they could trust. Everything Key has done since deposing Dr Don Brash in 2006 has been directed towards this end, and he has succeeded brilliantly.

Stage Two requires Key to parlay the trust he has so assiduously cultivated into majority support for a radical manifesto of economic and social change. (This is where we are now.)

Stage Three, to be attempted only after securing an unequivocal democratic mandate, is to implement the promised changes as swiftly and as comprehensively as possible.

Essentially, Key’s strategy is the same as the strategy adopted by the Labour leader, Michael Joseph Savage, from the moment he succeeded the formidable (but rather frightening) Harry Holland in 1932. Most New Zealanders don’t realise that the election which cemented-in Labour’s policies took place not in 1935, but three years later, in 1938. That was the election in which Labour secured the most emphatic electoral mandate in New Zealand’s history – 55 percent of the popular vote. It was a victory built on faith and trust. Key is hoping to repeat Mickey Savage’s triumph.

And, unless I’m very much mistaken, he will be assisted at every turn by a news media which long ago gave away any idea of "monitoring the centres of power" or – God forbid! – holding them to account. Absent also (except among a handful of worthy journalistic veterans) is any conception of the Habermassian "public sphere". The idea that the media’s role is to facilitate a democratic discourse strong enough to interrogate and clarify the political choices on offer finds few, if any, advocates in the upper reaches of the so-called "mainstream media".

Carrying much more weight among news editors and producers is the plebiscitary principle inherent in big media’s reliance on opinion polls. Journalists are increasingly aligning themselves with what their newspaper’s and network’s pollsters tell them is the majority viewpoint. Critical examination of the majority’s claims is strongly discouraged, and media bosses only rarely sanction the presentation of a minority report (unless, of course, such reporting serves the interests of a major advertiser).

With all their polls showing Key well in front of his challengers, the mainstream media’s response will almost certainly be to present the Prime Minister’s political discourse as its own. This was certainly true of Morning Report’s coverage of the Prime Minister’s decision to once again rule out Winston Peters as a potential coalition partner. Radio NZ’s parliamentary reporter, Julian Robbins, was scathing in his dismissal of Peters’ electoral chances. NZ First, he assured us, had just become "irrelevant". Excluded from the Prime Minister’s coalition options, Peters would struggle to gain media attention, opined Robbins.

This was extraordinary stuff – especially since Key himself had already made it clear that if NZ First crossed the 5 percent threshold there was every chance he would be forced from office. The real story is that Peters and NZ First's share of the Party Vote will have a crucial bearing on the outcome of the 2011 election - only becoming "irrelevant" if journalists (especially those working in the Parliamentary Press Gallery) decide to make them so. And if that is their decision, what possible claim can they – or their employers – make to either fairness or balance in their election coverage?

Goff and the Labour Party should protest loudly against this sort of treatment being handed out to any political party – no matter how detested by right-wing politicians and voters. If elements of the news media allow themselves to be used – as they were in 2008 – to do the National Party’s and Act’s dirty-work, then it won’t only be NZ First that finds itself in the cross-hairs of an aggressively partisan media pack, but Labour and the Greens as well.

Vesting Day (In Praise of Nationalisation)

On Behalf of the People: With the privatisation of state assets back in the headlines, it is useful to recall why privately owned industries were nationalised in the first place.

IT’S ONE OF THOSE PHOTOGRAPHS that capture history in the making. Taken by a proud mineworker on 1st January 1947, it records the erection of a large wooden sign outside the gates of a grim and grimy British coal mine. The sign says: "This Colliery is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the People."

Thousands of miners’ lives had been lost to lung disease, gas explosions and cave-ins. The miners’ unions had been forced to engage in some of the most prolonged and bitterly contested industrial conflicts in British history. But at last, after a century-and-a-half of constant struggle, "Vesting Day" – when the proprietary interest in Britain’s coal industry was prised from the fingers of its private owners and vested in public hands – had dawned.

At the little colliery of Berry Hill, near Fenton, in Staffordshire, a group of miners posed for a formal "Vesting Day" photograph. The broad grins beneath the cloth caps bear testimony to the enormous hopes working people all over the world had invested in the nationalisation programmes of their Socialist and Labour parties.

Just a year earlier, and half a world away from Fenton, five thousand trade unionists had marched through the streets of Wellington in support of the New Zealand Labour Party’s long-delayed promise to fully nationalise the Bank of New Zealand. Many of the marchers wanted to go further. They had only to glance at their party membership card to be reminded that Labour’s succinctly formulated political objective was "the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange".

But what did that mean? What was nationalisation/socialisation supposed to achieve?

At the most basic level it was intended to lift the burden of private ownership from the shoulders of the men and women who laboured in its service. Returning a healthy dividend to their shareholders all-too-often obliged private industrialists to extract more effort from their employees for less reward. Health and safety considerations were similarly subordinated to the owners’ over-riding imperative to increase the rate of return on capital. Public ownership was – at the very least – intended to construct a solid floor under the workers’ wages and conditions.

But that was just the beginning. The workers in nationalised industries also hoped to play a central role in their management. To "socialise" production was to break down the artificial hierarchies separating those who made the decisions from those who carried them out.

Socialisation was also intended to broaden radically the definition of who held a legitimate interest in the nation’s mines, factories, warehouses, shops and offices. "Stakeholders" in these enterprises were said to include not only the workers, their families, and the local community, but also those who worked in the civic, cultural and agricultural infrastructure which sustained them.

Nationalisation would thus allow democracy, hitherto reserved for the ballot-box, to flow inexorably into the workplace, where, the socialists insisted, it has always been needed most.

The historical experience of nationalisation fell well short of the millenarian hopes of the 1940s. Only the most basic expectations of the process were fulfilled. Because, although the State generally proved to be a better employer than the private capitalist, it opted to run the nationalised industries in exactly the same fashion. The strict division between "the bosses" and "the workers" endured, and the latter’s vast store of knowledge about the enterprise’s operations remained as under-utilised in the state-owned industries as it did in the private sector.

In New Zealand, the nationalised industries did acquire an unintended – but important – social dimension by being used by successive governments to absorb large numbers of workers who would otherwise have found themselves unemployed. By soaking-up this surplus labour, the State protected New Zealand society from the manifold curses of mass unemployment: domestic violence; child abuse; family break-up; juvenile delinquency, alcohol and drug addiction, and rising crime-rates.

The great post-war wave of nationalisations was finally broken by the countervailing force of the neoliberal revolution. By the late 1980s, in New Zealand, all publicly-owned entities had been forced to abandon their fiscally unsustainable "social" functions and become profit-making "State Owned Enterprises". Operated as if they were privately-owned business, the new SOEs were required by the Treasury to deliver market-determined rates-of-return to their "share-holding ministers". All of the state-owned banks and insurance companies; the nationalised telecommunications sector; the state airline; and the publicly-owned railways were privatised.

The neoliberal justification for privatising state-owned industries has always been that the private sector, on balance, is more productive. That being the case, it makes more sense to cash them up and use the proceeds to retire government debt.

The miners photographed outside Berry Hill Colliery in 1947 would probably agree. Collective exploitation is clearly a contradiction in terms. Fairness seldom turns a profit. And the coal-master’s girth was always inversely proportional to their own.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 February 2011.