Labour's Future Has A Single Name.

Heir Apparent: If Andrew Little doesn’t respond to Jacinda Ardern’s emphatic by-election victory in Mt Albert by promoting her to deputy-leader, then he’s a fool. Voters only make prime ministers out of politicians who can see not only what needs to be done, but who also possess the guts to do it.

 

“JACINDA”, was the only name on Labour’s by-election billboards. Andrew Little will have noted that. When the electorate starts identifying politicians by their given name – “Rob”, “Winston”, “Helen” – it signals a significant up-tick in political familiarity. It’s easy to vote for a candidate who requires no second name. “Jacinda” has acquired a winning ring.
 

If Little doesn’t respond to Jacinda Ardern’s emphatic by-election victory in Mt Albert by promoting her to deputy-leader, then he’s a fool. Success merits promotion. Any failure on Little’s part to acknowledge Arden’s pulling-power in Auckland will only fuel suspicions that he lacks the fortitude to shake-up the delicate factional balance of Labour’s caucus.
 

Little simply cannot afford to let such suspicions grow: not inside Labour, and certainly not beyond it. Voters only make prime ministers out of politicians who can see not only what needs to be done, but who also possess the guts to do it. Little should tell Annette King (who first entered Parliament as the MP for Horowhenua in 1984) that she has sat there too long for any good she has been doing. Like Oliver Cromwell, he needs to tell her: “Depart, and let us have done with you. In the name of God – go!”
 

If I may be forgiven for quoting Cromwell a second time: removing King has become a matter of “cruel necessity”. Having embarked upon a radical re-shaping of Labour’s public image: reclaiming its former status as a “broad church” by bringing in the likes of Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson; Little now needs to reassure Auckland’s young urban professionals (who’ve just voted for Jacinda in droves) that there is plenty of space on Labour’s pews for them.
 

Keeping King where she is for fear of reactivating the “Anyone But Cunliffe” brigade would not only flatter that waning faction’s significance, but also signal a serious loss of political momentum. Over recent weeks, Little has shown the country that he is willing to march right over and through his critics if that’s what it takes to get Labour ready for power. The thing is, once you begin that sort of forward march, you absolutely cannot afford to stop. Like the proverbial shark, you must keep swimming strongly – or drown.
 

Annette King has been in Parliament for all but three of the past 33 years. She was there through all the mayhem of the 1980s: a loyal foot-soldier in Roger Douglas’s all-conquering army. Throughout the 1990s and into the third millennium she served with distinction as a disciplined Labour staff officer. It’s a fine record, but King lacks the “optics” necessary for the 2017 campaign. Younger blood is needed at the top. A truly loyal servant of the party would see that – and make way.
 

Sacrifices will be necessary on Ardern’s part as well. First and foremost she must tear up the “Gracinda” (Grant Robertson + Jacinda Ardern) ticket upon which she ran against Little in 2014. The brutal truth she needs to face is that, in the eyes of the voters, at least, she has moved well beyond Robertson. His big moment arrived three years ago when he came agonisingly close to being elected Labour’s leader. He will not have forgotten, and neither should we, that he lost to Little by less than one percentage point.
 

Three years on, however, that losing margin may just as well have been 50 percentage points. Robertson’s star is fading. Indeed, amidst all the intense jockeying between Labour, the Greens and NZ First which is bound to follow a National defeat, he will struggle to retain his finance portfolio.
 

Ardern needs to move beyond the poignant television images of her and Robertson on the edge of tears, but applauding bravely, as Little’s victory is announced. The deputy-leader’s slot is hers for the taking now, and she should take it. Her star has a long way yet to rise.
 

In making Ardern his No. 2, Little would not only be making a statement about Labour’s future, he would also be moving decisively beyond Labour’s past. Sometimes, party leaders are required to anticipate their own, inevitable, demise by providing the public with a clear line of succession. Like a medieval king, they need to proclaim their dynasty’s strength by holding up a political heir for the people’s approbation.
 

Helen Clark did Labour an enormous disservice by failing to prepare the public for the day of her political death. The result has been a Game of Thrones-style bloodbath as rival contenders hacked and hewed their way towards pre-eminence across Labour’s seven kingdoms. Win or lose in September, Little owes Labour a better future than another three years of civil war. He may not look much like Jon Snow, and “Jacinda” may not look at all like Daenerys Targaryen, but after Saturday’s victory, she comes with dragons.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 February 2017.

Rebels And Other Strangers.

Together Alone: Albert Camus summed-up his existentialist masterpiece L’Étranger in a single sentence. “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” Helpfully, he added: “I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

THE FRENCH NOVELIST, Albert Camus, summed-up his existentialist masterpiece L’Étranger in a single sentence. “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” Helpfully, he added: “I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

 

Refusing to “play the game” is a pretty good description of a rebel. Camus’ hero, Meursault, is a rebel without a cause. Or, to be fair, he’s a man whose only cause is to live life on his own terms. Depending on how far you believe society’s claims extend, this makes Meursault either an existential hero, or a sociopath. Certainly, it is his lack of empathy that costs him his life.

 

Of more concern to me than the Meursaults of this world are the rebels with a cause. Far from wishing society would leave them the hell alone, these rebels are passionately committed to changing it. Generally speaking, however, society has as little time for these mavericks as it does for those who attempt to refuse its claims. To be any kind of rebel, therefore, is to find oneself an outsider: feared and resented by those for whom the rules of society are no more burdensome than the rules of respiration.

 

These rebels-with-a-cause respond to their outsider status in different ways.

 

For many, society’s indifference – or outright hostility – towards their attempts to improve the lives of its members breeds a compensatory sense of superiority – bordering on contempt.

 

“What is the matter with these people?”, they complain. “Why can’t they see that we’re just trying to make things better for them?”

 

The self-evident benefits of their proposed reforms convinces them that all those individuals and groups obstructing their efforts are, at best, ignorant, or, at worst, wicked.

 

Either way, they stand disqualified from playing any part in the processes of reform. That such high-handed and anti-democratic elitism might reduce, rather than enhance, the prospects of their proposed reforms winning majority acceptance is dismissed as unimportant. Majority acceptance is not a necessary precondition for effective social reform: not when you have the power of the state at your back.

 

Such is their faith in the efficacy of their reforms that the ingrained opposition of existing generations of citizens is not regarded as important. Once the reforms come into effect, social attitudes and behaviours will begin to change. Future generations will be born into a “new normal”, and the complaints of their parents and grandparents will give rise to much rolling of eyes and shaking of heads.

 

The pain of estrangement experienced by these rebels’ is overcome by re-making society in their own image. In Camus’ terms: by making it illegal to cry at your mother’s funeral.

 

The other kind of rebel-with-a-cause responds very differently to the pain of being an outsider. Far from wanting to impose their reform agenda on the sceptical masses, these rebels are forever searching for the arguments with which to convince their fellow citizens that their reforms are worthy of adoption.

 

Because it’s only when the society they perceive as injured or diseased is ready to embrace the means of its own recovery that these rebels will be able to do what they have been longing to do their whole lives – shrug-off their outsider status and once again breathe in society’s air without choking on it. In Camus’ terms: by persuading people that, at their mother’s funeral, shedding tears is not the only acceptable way of displaying grief.

 

In the end it boils down to the question of how rebels-with-a-cause perceive society.

 

Is it nothing more than a lump of human clay to be kneaded and pummelled and moulded and scraped into an acceptable shape – whether it likes it or not? And if so, what does that tell us about the self-perception of the sculptors – or should we call them the Übermensch?

 

Or, should society be thought of as the place where everyone comes together, and no one gets left behind? What the Swedes call the folkshemmet – the people’s home. Located in this context our rebel/outsider becomes someone temporarily estranged from their family. Society ceases to be a collection of human resources waiting to be engineered, but of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, longing to be reconciled.

 

Revolution means coming home.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 February 2017.

Labour's Not Burning Crosses - It's Gathering Votes.

Double Act: Andrew Little and Willie Jackson have signalled that, as far as the Maori Party is concerned, the political gloves are off. If Jackson’s comments encourage other Maori to speak out in similarly blunt terms about the true agenda of the Maori Party and the Iwi Leadership Group, then the electoral dividend for Labour is likely to be substantial.

 

WHAT I HEARD from Willie Jackson and Sandra Lee this morning (22/2/17) didn’t sound at all like “cross burning”. What I heard on RNZ’s “Morning Report” was a discussion about Maori need and the most effective ways to address it. I also heard some pretty frank criticism of the Maori elite and its principal political mouthpiece.

 

Neither Lee nor Jackson were willing to repudiate Andrew Little’s blunt refusal to accept the Maori Party’s political credentials. What they did repudiate was the selective historical memory of Tariana Turia and her ilk.

 

If Jackson’s recruitment encourages other Maori to speak out in similarly blunt terms about the true agenda of the Maori Party and the Iwi Leadership Group, then the electoral dividend for Labour will be substantial.

 

Because no amount of social-liberal outrage can obscure the fact that the Maori Party long ago abandoned the cause of working-class Maori in favour of a neo-tribal capitalist system which is busy swelling the ranks of a new Maori professional and managerial class.

 

Not that such outrage isn’t extremely helpful. Without it, the crucial role which the Maori Party plays in blurring the edges of the National Party’s continuing assault upon the brown working-class might come into sharper focus.

 

By interposing themselves between National’s neoliberal economic policies and the people they purport to represent, the Maori Party not only protects its political patron from the consequences of its own social aggression; but it also furnishes its voters with “proof” of “their” party’s relevance and effectiveness.

 

The message is as simple as it is cynical: “Just imagine how bad things would be if we weren’t here to keep all those crazy conservative Pakehas from running wild!”

 

The Ratana Church’s Depression-era alliance with Labour was likely born out of a similar rationale. The big difference, of course, was that Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana joined forces with the Pakeha poor to end their common marginalisation at the hands of a ruling class made vicious by social fear and political rage. He knew that the ruling elites of both peoples could only be controlled by “the survivors” of colonialism and capitalism, brown and white, working together.

 

The Maori Party, by contrast, almost immediately shed its mass base in favour of a cross-cultural class alliance between the Maori and Pakeha elites. While the National Party’s accelerated Treaty settlement process helpfully expanded the Maori middle-class, the Maori Party maintained a deafening silence as neoliberal economic and social policies wreaked havoc upon its own people. It was a Devil’s bargain: in return for abandoning the constituency which had given the Maori Party birth, the National Party was growing it a new one.

 

It was this shameless collaborationism that drove Hone Harawira out of the Maori Party and into the cross-cultural alliance of Maori and Pakeha socialists that used to be Mana. Harawira wagered that his tactical association with Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party would provide Mana with a parliamentary beach-head larger than Te Tai Tokerau and sufficient List MPs to make a difference. He lost.

 

The kindest thing that might be said about Harawira’s latest gambit is that it is motivated solely by his determination to get Mana back into Parliament. The less kindly among us, however, might wonder aloud, as Sandra Lee did this morning, about the political efficacy of an agreement which debars Mana from standing in any Maori seat but Te Tai Tokerau, and which prohibits criticism of both the Maori Party’s record and its policies. Hone Harawira owes his followers a clearer explanation.

 

Social-liberal criticism (backing-up that of Turia and Pita Sharples) will, of course, focus on Labour’s handling of the foreshore and seabed issue.

 

In the best of all possible worlds the Court of Appeal’s unexpected decision would have been welcomed with open arms by a Labour Party determined to build upon and strengthen the Maori renaissance. Conveniently forgotten by Labour’s Maori and Pakeha critics, however, is the hostile political reception given to Helen Clark’s attempt to do just that.

 

The National Party had attacked Labour’s “Closing the Gaps” policy relentlessly – not hesitating to wake up the sleeping dogs of Pakeha racism if that was what it took to reclaim the Treasury Benches.

 

Already spooked by the “Winter of Discontent” of 2000 (when New Zealand’s leading capitalists threatened the new Labour-led government with a full-scale investment strike if Clark and her Finance Minister, Michael Cullen, refused to rein-in the radical expectations of their Alliance coalition partner) the Labour prime minister took another step back and hastily abandoned the term, if not the substance of, “Closing the Gaps”. She was in  no mood to let the National Party hang the Court of Appeal’s judgement around her neck and sink Labour’s chances of winning the 2005 election.

 

That Labour’s Foreshore & Seabed Act (2004) was in practical terms indistinguishable from the Marine & Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act (2011) which Tariana Turia accepted without protest from her National Party allies seven years later, speaks volumes about the lengths to which Clark, Cullen and Labour’s Maori caucus were prepared to go to protect Maori interests – even as they were being pilloried as the reincarnation of the nineteenth century’s most hateful colonialists.

 

Those who have spent the last 48 hours condemning Andrew Little for his attack on the Maori Party would undoubtedly benefit from watching the movie All The Way. Covering Lyndon Johnson’s first year as President of the USA (1963-1964) it is a riveting portrayal of just how difficult it is to challenge the racist expectations of an overwhelmingly white electorate – let alone overcome them.

 

To remind passionate seekers-after-change that politics is “the art of the possible” is to repeat a cliché they have heard many times before. Repetition does not, however, make it any the less true. To win power, Andrew Little needs the Maori working-class to remain loyal to Labour. That will not happen if the Maori Party is allowed to paint every expression of Pakeha political criticism as “racist”, and to dismiss every left-wing Maori critic as an “Uncle Tom”.

 

As Lyndon Johnson put it to his tender-hearted liberal running-mate, Hubert Humphrey: “Principles? Principles! Dammit! This isn’t about principles – it’s about votes!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23 February 2017.

Deep State. Big Trouble.

Dark Days: The unmistakeable, if unacknowledged, shifting of pieces on the American political chessboard: strategic leaking of intercepted electronic communications; mass media revelations of politically compromising information; all points to the intervention of the same Deep State that brought down Richard Nixon.

 

THE NUMBER OF REFERENCES to “The Deep State” has shot up since Donald Trump became President of the United States. A term previously confined to academic discussions of Turkish politics is beginning to appear in mainstream news stories all over the world.
 

Driving the “Deep State” reference spike to ever-higher levels has been the obvious collusion of US intelligence agencies and key media outlets in the ouster of Michael Flynn, President Trump’s National Security Adviser.
 

So, what is The Deep State? And do New Zealanders have any reason to worry that their own state may not be as shallow as it appears?
 

Turkey is still the best place to start this discussion.
 

The secular republic created by General Mustapha Kemal out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire in the years immediately following World War I was very much a top-down affair.
 

Kemal and his army had saved the Turkish heartland from dismemberment at the hands of the victorious allies. For that historic achievement Kemal was not only given the name “Ataturk” – father of the nation – but the army which made it possible was accorded a privileged status in the Turkish state – and its politics.
 

Without the army, Kemal’s modernisation and secularisation of Turkish society could not have succeeded. In the 1920s the Turks were an overwhelmingly rural, poorly-educated and deeply religious people. Had Kemal’s social reforms (the emancipation of women, for example) been put to free and fair vote they would, almost certainly, have been defeated. Accordingly, Kemal’s constitution expressly forbade the politicisation of Islam.
 

Below the surface of the Turkish state’s everyday interactions with its people Kemal and his successors created a deeper structure of permanent state interests and actors. Any political threat to the Ataturkian settlement would be answered by its principal defenders: the armed forces, the secret police, and the ordinary police leadership. This was what Turkish political scientists dubbed “Derin Devlet” – The Deep State.
 

Following World War II, the Turkish Republic (which had remained neutral until the final months of the war) acquiesced in the United States’ diplomatic and military policy of “containing” the Soviet Union and joined the Nato alliance.
 

As a key player in the Cold War, the Turkish Deep State was now obliged to extend its grounds for political intervention to include not only politicised Islam, but any too-aggressive pursuit of socialism. It also stepped up its suppression of Turkey’s minority Kurdish population’s quest for self-determination.
 

Clearly, Turkey is not alone in possessing a deep state apparatus. No modern state considers it prudent to leave its people defenceless against either invasion from without or subversion from within. The more important question, however, is whether or not the core institutions of the state: the armed services, the secret services, police, judiciary and senior civil servants believe there to be certain political aims and objectives so contrary to the constitutive ethos of the state that they must be suppressed – at any cost.
 

There is ample evidence from New Zealand’s brief history that this country possesses a deep state of considerable assertiveness. Any perceived threat to the dominant position of New Zealand’s settler population; its capitalist economic system; or to its status as a member-in-good-standing of the Anglo-Saxon “club”; has been met with decisive and often bloody intervention. From the trumped-up excuses for Governor Grey’s assault on the Maori King Movement in 1863, to the political destabilisation campaign which preceded the 1975 General Election, the machinations of New Zealand’s Deep State are hard to miss.
 

The unmistakeable, if unacknowledged, shifting of pieces on the American political chessboard: strategic leaking of intercepted electronic communications; mass media revelations of politically compromising information; all points to the intervention of the same Deep State that brought down Richard Nixon.
 

President Trump should not be surprised. In the eyes of the American Deep State he is guilty of President Nixon’s “crime” of attempting to supplant its own apparatus. President Trump’s key advisor, Steve Bannon, has made no secret of his intention to engage in a Lenin-like “smashing” of the core institutions of the American state – or, at least, to purging their leadership. This cannot and will not be countenanced.
 

Equally, forbidden is what the American Deep State has deemed an unacceptably dangerous attempt to alter the United States’ geopolitical posture vis-à-vis the Russian Federation. In the National Security Agency and the CIA (if not in the FBI) there is clearly a powerful faction which regards the Trump Administration as having been irretrievably compromised by the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
 

This is a very big deal. The present situation in Turkey shows what happens when a populist president believes himself to be in the cross-hairs of the Deep State. The Ataturkian legacy is being smashed to pieces by Turkey’s Islamist President, Tayyip Erdogan.
 

Will America’s democratic legacy be next?
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 21 February 2017.

Little’s “Broad Church” Widens Labour’s Appeal.

Pondering The Counterfactual: How many more percentage points might Labour have advanced in the latest One News Colmar Brunton poll had “discontented party activists” not spent the week prior to its execution demonstrating rank disunity and ideological extremism?

 

ONE SWALLOW does not make a summer, any more than a two-percentage-point lift in the latest One News Colmar-Brunton poll amounts to a massive political vindication. What Labour’s marginal rise in popularity does signal, however, is some very unhelpful news for some very unhelpful people.

 

Why do I say that? Because the furore over Willie Jackson’s return to the Labour Party can now be put in its more immediate context.

 

Before exploring that context, however, a word or two about polling.

 

Both of the major political parties have their own “internal” pollsters (David Farrar and Curia Research in the case of National, Stephen Mills and UMR for Labour) and both know when their researchers are in the field. Indeed, they often time their public policy pronouncements to coincide with such polling.

 

For very similar reasons most senior political operatives and public relations mavens also like to know when media-commissioned agencies like Colmar Brunton are on the job and when their results will be published.

 

In a society as small as New Zealand, acquiring such intelligence is relatively straightforward. Most of the people who believe they need to know, know someone who really does know when a poll is about to get underway.

 

The fieldwork for the Colmar Brunton poll that was broadcast on One News on Sunday, 19 February, was conducted between 11 and 15 February 2017.

 

This is significant, because in the week prior to the survey the Labour leader, Andrew Little, found himself under vicious attack from persons (including Poto Williams, the Labour MP for Christchurch North) opposed to Labour’s strategic recruitment of the broadcaster, community organiser, and former Alliance MP, Willie Jackson.

 

That Williams consulted a Christchurch public relations firm, Inform PR, to shape her criticism of Little, and to assist her in distributing the resulting statement to selected political journalists, prior to posting it on her Facebook page, struck many observers as odd. Now that we know Colmar Brunton was scheduled to be in the field by the end of the week, William’s behaviour appears much less so.

 

The same applies to the letter of protest posted on Facebook by members of Labour’s youth wing – Young Labour. Like William’s media statement, this document attracted considerable media attention throughout the week, especially after two former Labour MPs, Maryan Street and Marian Hobbs, added their signatures to the document.

 

Throughout the week Little was required to endure the less-than-friendly attentions of the parliamentary press gallery, as well as a succession of highly critical opinion pieces questioning his political judgement and challenging his commitment to Labour’s quest for gender parity.

 

By the end of the week, the proprietor of the POLITIK blog, Richard Harman, was reporting that:

 

“The events last week [5-11 February] seem to be connected to what has been what one senior party source described as a ‘parallel universe’ of discontented party activists who have been active on the left-wing blog ‘The Standard’ and who also organised to promote candidates for office within the party.”

 

It is, therefore, very tempting to see, with the benefit of hindsight, the timing of the criticism of Little’s recruitment of Jackson as something more than coincidental. If Harman’s “discontented party activists” had prior knowledge of when the Colmar Brunton survey would be in the field, it is not difficult to fathom why they might be tempted to seize upon the opportunity to put a spanner in the Leader’s works.

 

Clearly, there are many in Labour’s ranks who do not like the idea of the party once again becoming a “broad church”. How better to prove the unwisdom of Little’s policy than to orchestrate a week-long outpouring of protest against the Jackson recruitment, culminating in a falling-off in support for Labour – and Little – as measured in the oh-so-conveniently scheduled Colmar Brunton survey?

 

Except, of course, the campaign failed to achieve its objective. Far from registering a falling-off of support for Labour, the poll revealed a small, but very welcome, rise in support. At last, Labour was back in the 30s – an important morale-boost for both the caucus and the wider party. The recruitment of Jackson and the selection of the former Police Association President, Greg O’Connor, had produced precisely the effect which Little and his team had be working for.

 

The question that cannot be avoided, however, is as straightforward as it is disconcerting: How many more percentage points might Labour have advanced in the Colmar Brunton poll had “discontented party activists” not spent the week prior to its execution demonstrating rank disunity and ideological extremism?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 20 February 2017.

The Wrong Sisterhood: Forgotten Lessons of the 1984 Women’s Forums.

The Progressive Sisterhood: In 1984 Labour's women MPs launched a round of consultative assemblies - Women's Forums - to identify the priorities of their proposed Ministry of Women's Affairs (now the Ministry for Women). Unfortunately, this well-meaning exercise in participatory democracy very nearly ended in disaster. Progressive feminist reforms turned out to be much more easily engineered from above than below.

 

IT WAS ONE of the Fourth Labour Government’s more progressive initiatives, and its most productive outcome, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, endures to this day. It was, however, an initiative that also ended up spinning out of control in ways that its instigators neither anticipated nor appreciated. Indeed, so aggrieved were Labour’s feminists at the outcome of their well-meaning experiment in “participatory democracy” that its most important political lessons remain unacknowledged and, for the most part, forgotten.

 

The election of the David Lange-led Labour Government in July 1984 provided the first opportunity for Second Wave Feminism to show what it could do with the full resources of the state at its back. Labour’s women MPs: Anne Hercus, Margaret Shields, Helen Clark, Fran Wilde, Anne Fraser, Annette King, Margaret Austin and Judy Keall, along with the party’s president, Margaret Wilson, were determined to make rapid progress for women after nearly a decade of government by, of and for Rob Muldoon’s “ordinary blokes”.

 

Pushing them forward was the Labour Women’s Council – a body which had grown rapidly, both in size and influence, since the late 1970s. The consciousness-raising effects of the violent misogyny experienced by women during the 1981 Springbok Tour further strengthened the feminist impulse within Labour’s ranks.

 

Significantly, these new recruits (many of them from women’s groups active on the nation’s campuses) brought with them the non-hierarchical, loosely-structured and “facilitative” political praxis of feminism’s second wave. Born out of the New Left’s embrace of “participatory democracy” in the 1960s, this welcoming political style was founded on the optimistic assumption that, subject only to their consciousness of patriarchal oppression being raised by their feminist sisters, all women were natural allies.

 

That this assumption was far too optimistic had been demonstrated decisively in the United States by the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. What had, at first, looked like a slam-dunk victory for second wave American feminism had been stopped in its tracks, and then turned around, by the aggressive counter-attack of conservative women led by constitutional lawyer and right-wing activist, Phyllis Schlafly.

 

The sheer scale of the conservative backlash against American feminism should have been taken as a warning by Labour’s feminist MPs. It wasn’t. The Women’s Council simply refused to believe that New Zealand was prey to anything like the reactionary forces that plagued the United States.

 

In the context of the burgeoning strength of the feminist, anti-apartheid, Maori Sovereignty and anti-nuclear movements, the notion that New Zealand women might prove susceptible to Schlafly’s conservative arguments seemed preposterous. David Lange’s easy victory over Muldoon likewise appeared to confirm that the country was moving left – not right.

 

Buoyed by these convictions, the new Labour government, guided by its women MPs, was persuaded to set in motion a series of “Women’s Forums”. Open to all citizens, these consultative assemblies were intended to set the priorities for and structure the agenda of the new Ministry of Women’s Affairs foreshadowed in Labour’s 1984 Manifesto.

 

The first forums appeared to bear out the most optimistic assumptions of the Labour Women’s Council. Representatives from women’s NGOs like the YWCA and the National Council of Women, backed by women trade union delegates, eagerly advanced the stalled reform agenda of New Zealand feminism. A radical edge to the ongoing discussion and debate was contributed by the activism of Maori and lesbian women.

 

And then things began to go very seriously wrong.

 

In the words of gay and lesbian rights campaigner, Alison Laurie:

 

“Now, the election of the fourth Labour Government in 1984, which is when Fran Wilde comes to Parliament, brought about the establishment of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. And prior to setting up this new ministry, the government had held women’s forums throughout the country which lesbians attended, and many women were alarmed by the presence of busloads of Christian fundamentalist women who carried Bibles and copies of the National Anthem, and who voted against abortion, lesbian rights and also against ratifying the United Nations Convention on the elimination of the discrimination against women.”

 

On one issue, however, radical feminists and fundamentalist Christians found themselves in perfect sororal agreement: pornography. They both wanted it banned.

 

It wasn’t enough. Participatory democracy, far from demonstrating that all women were sisters under the skin, had proved the opposite. Outside the funky enclaves of progressive inner-city activism; beyond the purview well-educated, Broadsheet-reading career women; there lay a vast hinterland of deeply-entrenched and easily-activated prejudice. Nor were these unsuspected masses of conservative women restricted to the rural and provincial bastions of the National Party. Feminists were just as few-and-far-between in the suburbs. Certainly, there appeared to be many more churches in these localities than consciousness-raising circles.

 

Shocked to the core, and fearful that if the forums were allowed to continue the progressive feminist agenda might end up being rejected by, of all people, conservative women, the Labour government hastily shut them down. Yes, progressive women had found themselves surrounded by a noisy and single-minded sisterhood. Unfortunately, it was the wrong sisterhood.

 

Between 1984 and 1990 the progressive feminist agenda was advanced. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs became a useful and productive reality. LGBTQI New Zealanders were liberated from their legislative shackles. Pay Equity (briefly) became a reality. But never again were the preferences of ordinary New Zealand women so openly and democratically solicited.

 

Sisterhood is, indeed, powerful – but only when your sisters can be relied upon to vote the right way.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 19 February 2017.

Capitalism's Saviours: The Professional-Managerial Class.

"Hi! We're from the Professional-Managerial Class, and we're here to help!" The PMC downgraded the common experiences of economic exploitation which had formerly bound the Left together, supplanting them with exploitation narratives grounded in the experiences of race, gender and sexuality. Capitalism doesn’t oppress humanity, went the PMC’s argument, racism, sexism and homophobia do.

 

BARBARA AND JOHN EHRENREICH spotted the looming disaster on the Left nearly 40 years ago. This was an impressive achievement given the temper of the times. For right-wingers, the 1970s were a decade of dread. They feared that the Left was on the cusp of an irreversible victory. They would have been delighted to learn that their ideological foes faced disaster, but they would have struggled to identify the vector of their demise.
 

But the Ehrenreichs knew what it was. They had even given it a name: “The Professional-Managerial Class.” (PMC)
 

In the rather leaden Marxian prose then in vogue, the Ehrenreichs defined the PMC as “consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labour may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
 

In slightly less daunting language: the role of the PMC was to explain and justify the workings of capitalism to everyone who was not a capitalist, a professional, or a manager.
 

Who were they talking about? Well, in addition to the more obvious groups “hidden within the processes of production” i.e. “middle-level administrators and managers, engineers and other technical workers”, the Ehrenreichs controversially nominated “workers who are directly concerned with social control or with the production and propagation of ideology”. These they identified as “teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts”.
 

Now, if you’re thinking: “Hey, that sounds like a description of the membership of the Labour Party and/or The Greens!” Well then, take a bow, because you have grasped the essence of the Ehrenreichs’ troublesome prophecy.
 

The PMC was already on the rise politically when the Ehrenreichs’ seminal paper was published in 1979. Its impact was clearly visible in the Democratic Party where a new generation of liberal politicians were ruthlessly marginalising the defenders of Roosevelt’s New Deal in preparation for the Carter Administration’s turn towards the “monetarist” ideas of the right-wing economist Milton Friedman.
 

The “turn” in the United Kingdom had come even earlier, in 1976, when the Labour prime minister of the time, Jim Callaghan, told his stony-faced party conference:
 

“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employ­ment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of infla­tion into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.”
 

If Callaghan’s pronouncement prompts the thought: “But that sounds just like the sort of thing David Lange and Roger Douglas used to say!” Then, once again, take a bow.
 

The institutions that Callaghan’s and Carter’s little helpers were most concerned to rein-in were the trade unions. Organised labour represented a dangerously independent repository of economic, political, social, and, most crucially, class power. While they persisted there was always the worrying potential for explanations and justifications unfavourable to the “reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
 

By the 1970s, trade unions in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom had even begun to construct practical alternatives to the capitalist way of doing things. The arguments of class solidarity and collective action were acquiring an unprecedented degree of persuasiveness.
 

The policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan eventually put paid to the union threat. But the iron fist of neoliberalism urgently needed covering with a velvet glove.
 

The PMC was there to take on the task. They downgraded the common experiences of economic exploitation which had formerly bound the Left together, supplanting them with exploitation narratives grounded in the experiences of race, gender and sexuality. Capitalism doesn’t oppress humanity, went the PMC’s argument, racism, sexism and homophobia do. Eliminating these evils requires education, training and a willingness to embrace cultural diversity. A task far beyond the capacity of the working-class Left.
 

The Ehrenreichs knew how this would end. With the politics of identity and the politics of class in conflict – and left-wing unity shattered. The PMC and the working-class could have confronted the capitalists over who should own and control collectively created wealth. Instead, they confronted each other over the barricades of knowledge, skills and culture.
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 February 2017.

Too Little, Too Late: Rachel Stewart On Climate Change.

The Rush To Destruction: Anthropogenic Global Warming signals a civilisation in terminal decline. A world owned and ruled by people who have given up on the future. Humanity finds itself in the hands of a pathologically dissociated global elite. Stupefied by greed and consumed with pride, the ultimate demonstration of the power they refuse to give up will be the irreversible collapse of the fossil-fuelled economic system they have committed so many crimes to preserve.

 

RACHEL STEWART’S COLUMN in yesterday morning’s (15/2/17) NZ Herald bears eloquent testimony to the global progressive community’s sense of helplessness. In it she berates herself for getting into a pointless altercation with a dirty-dairy farmer. Of what value are such small-scale exchanges, she demands, when the much larger and more important struggle against anthropogenic global warming is being lost all along the line?

 

“We need to wise up to the fact that continuing to compartmentalise our endless individual battles – pay equity, dirty dairying, transport, roading, autism funding, education, intersectional feminism, partisan politics – is a waste of precious energy.

 

“Don’t get me wrong. All are beyond important but, ultimately, unless we tackle climate change and right now, there’ll be no human rights or environment to actually fight for.”

 

There was one line in Rachel’s column that particularly resonated:

 

“[I]t’s time to stop getting caught up in the individual fights and realise that climate change is a mission that must be tackled on a World War II scale.”

 

Another way of expressing this is to treat global warming as the “moral equivalent of war”. This would require a level of personal and societal engagement proportionate to the existential threat which global warming poses to human civilisation.

 

The reason Rachel’s words resonated so strongly was that just over seven years ago I expressed remarkably similar thoughts in my own newspaper column ‘From the Left’.

 

On 9 December 2009 I wrote:

 

“If the battle against Climate Change does not become the moral equivalent of war for all the peoples of the Earth, then not only the battle, but the Earth itself, as a planet hospitable to human civilisation, will be lost.

 

“Our government – every government – must be willing to mobilise the population as it was mobilised during World War II. Our generation must plant its own ‘Victory Gardens’ and run its own ‘Salvage Programmes’. We must learn, as our parents and grandparents did, to ration scarce resources, pay special taxes, and buy as many ‘War Bonds’ as we can afford.”

 

I was moved to write these words seven years ago because the leaders of the world were gathering in Copenhagen for an international conference on combatting global warming. Even before that ill-fated conference collapsed in acrimony and confusion, I was doubtful as to whether any good would come of their going.

 

Seven years, and another fruitless international conference on global warming (this time in Paris) later, there is no doubt at all that no good has been done. The rate of global warming is already nudging the thresholds laid down in Paris.

 

As Rachel makes clear in her column, these failures are producing not only extreme consequences in the material world, but they are also generating extreme responses in the human psyche. Seven years ago people were asking “What can we do?” Seven years later, more and more of us are asking “What’s the point of doing anything?”

 

The sheer scale of the organised malice that has undermined every attempt to limit the damage of global warming is at once profoundly shocking and profoundly disempowering.

 

That global capitalism is fully conscious of the planetary harm it is causing, but resolved to go on inflicting that harm regardless, is a realisation so profoundly depressing that hitherto active citizens are robbed of all purpose and resolve.

 

It speaks of a civilisation in terminal decline. A world owned and ruled by people who have given up on the future. Humanity finds itself in the hands of a pathologically dissociated global elite. Stupefied by greed and consumed with pride, the ultimate demonstration of the power they refuse to give up will be the irreversible collapse of the fossil-fuelled economic system they have committed so many crimes to preserve.

 

The election of Trump, and the obvious incapacity of the American political system to defend itself against the madmen and women who have taken up residence in all three branches of the United States government, is merely the outward manifestation of global capitalism’s inner corruption.

 

Neoliberalism has immobilised humanity in the manner of those parasitic wasps whose offspring excrete a chemical which fatally overpowers their host’s self-protective reflexes. Aware that we are being destroyed, we are nevertheless incapable of resisting our destroyers effectively.

 

Rachel gets it: “Just about every bit of bad news is directly linked to climate change. Everything. Oh, and the greed of the few who are trying to extract even more before the inevitable breakdown.”

 

She has also, perhaps unintentionally, chosen the epitaph for the entire Anthropocene epoch.

 

Quoting the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, Rachel ends her column with his observation: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

 

We have changed far too little, and left it far too late.

 

This essay is also posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 16 February 2017.

Is Winston Peters New Zealand's Donald Trump?

The Populist Cocktail: Take, ‘Immigrants willing to work for ridiculously low wages preventing ordinary Kiwis from accessing well-paying jobs’. Add, ‘Big cities – particularly Auckland – sucking up the nation’s scarce resources and leaving New Zealand’s provincial heartland starved of everything from decent roads and railways to policemen able to respond when called’. Shake vigorously and decant into the nearest polling-booth.

 

TRUMP, TRUMP, TRUMP. Has an American president ever dominated the global conversation so effortlessly – or so absolutely? All those foreign policy “experts” who argued that under the lofty administration of Barack Obama American power has waned have been forced to reconsider their position. And no wonder, because practically every hour of every day since his inauguration, President Trump has proved beyond all doubt that the United States remains, indisputably, “the indispensable nation”.

 

So completely does Trump dominate the global news cycle that, even here, at the bottom of the world, political experts have begun speculating as to whether New Zealanders might be in line for an Antipodean version of “The Donald”.

 

Others object that the Americans have, as usual, come late to the party. New Zealanders, they insist, have had their very own populist political leader for nigh-on a quarter-century. His name? Winston Peters.

 

But identifying Peters as the New Zealand Trump merely pushes the question back one space. Instead of asking: Does NZ have its own Donald Trump? The question now becomes: Can Peters replicate Trump’s extraordinary success?

 

The short answer is: No. Trumpism could only be established in New Zealand by a politician drawn from the ranks of one of the major parties. Such a person would then have to take his or her party by storm: over-ruling and over-powering its existing power structures with the assistance of fanatical supporters drawn from both within and without the party.

 

Labour’s rules make such a political eruption much more achievable than National’s, but the absence of a Trump-like figure in its caucus makes one much less likely. National, on the other hand, has Judith Collins who, given the right conditions (and they would have to be very far-right conditions) could place herself at the head of a populist putsch – but only if her caucus colleagues believed themselves to have no other option.

 

Because populism is not summoned into existence by the wiles of an ambitious politician. In fact, the opposite is true. The conditions that make populism viable invariably prepare their own political executors. “Rogernomics” empowered Jim Anderton. “Ruthanasia” called forth Winston Peters. The disintegration of the American working class caused by globalisation and automation; the challenge posed to the hegemony of White America by rapid and irreversible demographic change; these were the principal ingredients of the spell that summoned forth Donald Trump.

 

What, then, are the economic and social forces currently influencing New Zealand society that could enable Peters and NZ First to give the forthcoming general election a populist tinge?

 

Essentially, they are the same forces that drove the United States into the arms of Donald Trump: fear of the “other”, and the hollowing out of the heartland.

 

The ethnic composition of the New Zealand population has changed so dramatically since the mid-1980s that native-born New Zealanders no longer regard their social and economic ascendancy as unassailable. Although Peters has yet to give unapologetic voice to these racial anxieties, their potential to deliver the coup de grace to an already faltering bi-partisan consensus on population policy is undeniable.

 

What populist worthy of the name could have viewed the shocking video footage of an angry young Maori woman abusing a pair of young Muslim women stretching their legs at Huntly and not drawn the all-too-obvious conclusions about the volatility of race-relations in contemporary New Zealand?

 

It is, moreover, very likely that the young Maori woman’s anger was fuelled by more than racial animus. It’s highly probable that envy was also a factor.

 

For those whose lack of education and skills keeps them trapped in declining provincial communities, the presence, however fleeting, of young professionals from metropolitan New Zealand can only remind them of all the things they seek but cannot find: employment, income, accommodation, mobility, freedom … and a future.

 

It is a potent political cocktail just waiting to be mixed.

 

Take, ‘Immigrants willing to work for ridiculously low wages preventing ordinary Kiwis from accessing well-paying jobs’. Add, ‘Big cities – particularly Auckland – sucking up the nation’s scarce resources and leaving New Zealand’s provincial heartland starved of everything from decent roads and railways to policemen able to respond when called’. Shake vigorously and decant into the nearest polling-booth.

 

Peters delivered the latter ingredient straight to the voters of Northland in March 2015. Mixed with the former, and garnished with the bitter fruit of homelessness and poverty, he would have a political cocktail of unprecedented potency.

 

The only question that remains is: will Peters mix it?

 

Is our political culture as irredeemably divided as America’s? Are our core institutions as bereft of competent defenders? Is Winston Peters as blinded by ignorance and narcissistic self-regard as President Trump?

 

Personally, I do not think so. If the drumbeat is Peters, Peters, Peters – it’s unlikely to accompany our collective march to the scaffold.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 14 February 2017.

Just How ‘Broad’ Was Labour’s Church?

On The Right Of The Left: Raised in the public works camps of the Great Depression; organiser for the Workers Union; staunch anti-communist: Ron Bailey held the Heretaunga electorate in the Hutt Valley from 1960 until 1981. Few Labour parliamentarians have exemplified more vividly the ideological elasticity of Labour's "broad church".

 

THE FIRST LABOUR CANDIDATE I ever voted for was Ron Bailey. He’d inherited the Hutt Valley seat of Heretaunga from Labour’s outstanding Minister of Trade & Industry, Phil Holloway, in 1960. Encompassing a good part of the Hutt Valley’s manufacturing industries, the Heretaunga electorate was about as safe as any aspiring Labour MP could wish. Having won it, Heretaunga should have been Bailey’s for life.

 

Not that I knew anything about Ron Bailey as I conscientiously drew a line through the names of all the other candidates on my ballot paper. (I must confess, however, to hesitating over that of the Values Party candidate, J.M. Overton.) As a callow 19 year-old, I cared a great deal less about the personal histories of the candidates than I did about the parties they represented.

 

I cast my first vote for Labour in 1975 to honour Norman Kirk’s legacy. His leadership had impressed me tremendously. From the dispatch of a New Zealand frigate to the French atomic testing site at Mururoa, to the cancellation of the 1973 Springbok Tour, Kirk laid down a template for moral clarity and political courage by which I, and many thousands of other young New Zealanders, could judge his successors.

 

I was also voting for the self-evident decency of Kirk’s political heir, Bill Rowling; the progressive education policies of Phil Amos; and the radical social vision of Labour’s Attorney General, Dr Martyn Finlay. Theirs were the democratic socialist stars by which I allowed myself to be guided. Against such a flaring legacy, the star of Ron Bailey, Minister of Railways, shone only dimly.

 

Had I bothered to investigate the background of the man I was voting for, I would have been, by turns, both impressed and appalled.

 

Born in 1926, Bailey spent his childhood years in the infamous public works camps of the Great Depression. In his 2015 obituary of Bailey Dominion Post journalist Tom Fitzsimons describes the sort of places that five-year-old Ron would have called home: “His family lived in two conjoined gable-style tents with wooden floorboards, a corrugated-iron fireplace, no sink or bath, and kerosene lamps for light.”

 

Bailey’s political career didn’t really get started until he was 29, when he became an organiser for the New Zealand Workers Union. That was in 1956, and he must have impressed his fellow unionists as a go-getter because just four years later he was the Labour MP for Heretaunga.

 

If you’re thinking Bailey was some sort of socialist firebrand, then think again. Like so many of his conservative working-class contemporaries in both the unions and the Labour Party (including Kirk himself) Bailey was a staunch anti-communist. Indeed, in 1975, when I first voted for him, Bailey was, allegedly, an active member of the New Zealand chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) a sinister, far-right outfit with its origins in Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (Taiwan).

Reading between the lines of Bailey’s obituary, it would seem that his far-right views had, by the early 1980s, become so extreme (WACL was exposed as having ties to neo-Nazi death-squads) that even in Rowling’s broad Labour church they could no longer be tolerated. Amid the dramatic upheavals of 1981 – the year of the Springbok Tour – Bailey was somehow prevailed upon to step aside for the affable (and considerably more moderate) lawyer, Bill Jeffries.

 

The curious career of Ron Bailey illustrates just how widely the net of Labour’s candidate recruitment was flung in the 1950s and 60s. The party was very far from being a monolithic organisation for the very simple reason that its core working-class and professional middle-class constituencies were themselves anything but monolithic. Staunch anti-communist trade unionists like Bailey were joined in Labour’s caucus by radical Christian socialists like Hastings MP, Richard Mayson. The social-conservative Kirk sat at the same Cabinet Table as the social-radical Finlay.

 

For those politicians who prefer their parties to cleave to just one line, Labour’s “broad church” must sound like hell-on-earth. As a left-wing Labour Party activist – against whom the Rogernomics-supporting “Backbone Club” (of which Ron Bailey was the Auckland convenor) regularly hurled thunderbolts, I can certainly vouch for it being a very hard slog.

 

What I must also vouch for, however, is that even in a disastrous election year, like 1975, Labour’s “broad church” could still attract 39.6 percent of the popular vote.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday 10 February 2017.

Breaking Point.

Parting Company: Little’s reaching out to Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson – both of them social conservatives – was a test of whether Labour winning in September mattered more than ideological purity: and the social liberals discovered that they could not pass it.

 

WHAT AN EXTRAORDINARY WEEK it’s been! Two years of exemplary discipline within Labour’s ranks have been unceremoniously ditched in favour of rank insubordination and revolt. Poto Williams’ intervention and its aftermath have left Andrew Little’s carefully cultivated image of unity and loyalty in tatters. No amount of “robust and honest conversation” can hide the fact that a depressingly large number of Labour Party members would like nothing more than to punch their supposed “comrades” in the face.

 

Williams’ decision to publicly challenge Little’s recruitment of Willie Jackson represents the breaching of a dam behind which huge amounts of anxiety and anger has been building up since November 2014.

 

The Labour Party’s social liberals may have cringed when their leader, David Cunliffe, said he was sorry for being a man, but they also loved him for it. With his enforced departure, the allegiance of his faction shifted decisively in favour of Grant Robertson. Their champion’s defeat, by the narrowest of margins (50.52 percent/49.48 percent) left them with no other practical option except to swing-in behind Little and breathe through their noses. Three leaders in six years was enough. The party had no chance of winning in 2017 if it failed to rally convincingly behind the fourth.

 

It is now agonisingly clear that while the party membership and caucus may have marched behind their new leader, by no means all of them were enthusiastic followers.

 

Little’s powerbase in the affiliated trade unions made many of them uneasy. Labour’s activist base of highly-educated middle-class professionals were only too aware that the people represented by Labour’s mostly blue-collar union affiliates came from socio-economic backgrounds very different from their own. A party leader who owed his position to the votes of working-class New Zealanders was unlikely to be guided exclusively by the policy priorities of the professional-managerial class.

 

If Little was to deliver to his working-class base, then he would have to expand Labour’s demographic reach well beyond its inner-city nuclei of metropolitan social liberalism. The party’s catastrophic collapse to just 25 percent of the popular vote in 2014 could not be repeated without throwing Labour’s long-term survival into serious doubt.

 

Rousing the Registered Non-Vote and winning back the defectors to National was, therefore, essential to Labour’s success in 2017. But these twin objectives could only be achieved by making Labour much more attractive to all those voters who had turned away from the party in 2008 and not returned.

 

For Labour’s social liberals the logic of Little’s strategy was at once self-evident and threatening. Deep down they understood that the number of New Zealanders who subscribed to their ideology was far too small to win the Treasury Benches unaided. They also understood that the hundreds-of-thousands of ordinary working-class people whose votes made a Labour-led government a feasible proposition were by no means wholehearted in their embrace of the social liberal values to which Labour’s inner-city activists subscribed. After Brexit and Trump, the latter were fearful that the willingness of working-class voters to go on acting as the uncomplaining enablers of social liberalism’s policy agenda might be compromised.

 

This was their dilemma. They grasped that Labour must broaden its electoral appeal if it was to win. But, at the same time, they knew that if Labour once again became a “broad church”, then their position in both the party and the caucus would be seriously – perhaps fatally – weakened.

 

Little’s reaching out to Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson – both of them social conservatives – was the test: and the social liberals discovered that they could not pass it.

 

Though they could not admit it in as many words, their loud and very public rebellion against the recruitment of Willie Jackson made it crystal clear that if the choice was between winning the election, or compromising their social liberal ideology, then they were willing to give up winning the election.

 

They could do this because their position in New Zealand society was sufficiently secure to endure another three years of National Party government without significant material hardship. Moreover, yet another electoral failure would, paradoxically, strengthen, not weaken, their ideological grip on the Labour Party. As a shrewd trade unionist once observed of the cynical political strategy of the Soviet era Socialist Unity Party: “Better to keep control of the losing side than lose control of the winning side.”

 

Unfortunately, the losing side in 2017 will be made up of the least securely positioned members of New Zealand society.  Those impoverished and marginalised citizens whose endurance will be tested to breaking-point, and beyond, by another three years of National Party government.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 11 February 2017.

Freedom Of Expression And Its Discontents.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION has long been regarded as the cornerstone of liberty. Indeed, without the ability to speak our minds freely the whole notion of liberty begins to unravel. Freedom of expression is vital in at least one other respect – it helps us to arrive at and recognise the truth. This is important because, as many philosophers and religious leaders have observed, it is the truth that sets us free.

 

The Left’s relationship with freedom of expression has never been an easy one. Ever since the French Revolution of 1789-99 the desire to maintain the purity of the revolutionary message has weighed heavily against those who dared to raise objections concerning the Revolution’s means – if not its ends.

 

The relaxation of state censorship is the first and most important gift to any revolutionary cause. Historically, the sudden appearance of posters, pamphlets, newspapers and books authored by those whose voices had hitherto been suppressed has always been the surest sign that the old order was crumbling. In today’s repressive regimes it is the unfettered use of social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and blogs; which signals the arrival of the revolutionary moment. Think of the Arab Spring.

 

In its youth the Revolution hails freedom of expression as sacrosanct. The revolutionaries know that without it the power of the elites cannot be challenged. As the Revolution matures, however, and new power structures begin to replace the old, the criticism and analysis which freedom of expression makes possible seems less and less like an unqualified good. To the new occupants of these new structures, it is the protection and consolidation of the Revolution’s gains that should take priority. There is no surer sign that the Revolution is over than when the new power elite begins to punish people for exercising their right to free speech.

 

By this analysis it is clear that the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 70s have well-and-truly passed their expiry date. The great provocations of the Hippy era: think of the Broadway musical “Hair”; the proliferation of revolutionary underground comics; the human “Be-Ins” and “Love-Ins”; Ken Kesey’s “Acid tests”; would today be dismissed as either infantile or inappropriate.

 

Only last week, on the University of California’s Berkeley campus, birthplace of the “free speech movement” which touched off the student revolt of the 1960s, the world was treated to the spectacle of furious students doing everything in their power to prevent the Alt-Right provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, from exercising his right to (yep, you guessed it) free speech.

 

In discussing these sorts of incidents with contemporary leftists, I have been staggered by the consistency of their responses. “What you’ve got to understand, Chris,” they reply, “is that while people have the right to express themselves, they have no right to expect that the things they say will not have consequences.”

 

If free speech is met with "consequences" - is it any longer free?

 

Just what those consequences look like can be seen every hour of every day on social media. Relentless incivility; extraordinary personal abuse; the issuing of threats to attack (and even kill) those whose expression is deemed offensive to, or transgressive of, the great revolutionary “truths” of the once “new” social movements; this, sadly, has become the norm on what passes for the “Left” in 2017.

 

The liberal tradition of responding to the expression of ideas with which you disagree with a reasoned, evidence-based argument in rebuttal no longer seems to fall within either the ideological of intellectual repertoire of today’s left-wingers. The only form of argument they seem capable of deploying is the abusive and circumstantial “Argumentum ad Hominem” – attacking the person rather than his or her ideas.

 

In his celebrated treatise, “On Liberty”, the nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, states: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

 

In the ears of far too many contemporary leftists this oft-quoted passage will sound either incomprehensible or offensive. (Mill does, after all, use the sexist noun “mankind” rather than the more appropriate and gender-neutral term, “Humanity”.) To their way of thinking it is entirely right and proper that those who give voice to offensive or hateful opinions should be silenced. If these people would rather not endure the consequences of exercising their freedom of expression, then they should STFU.

 

“Those who defy the self-evident truths of the new order,” thunder its uncompromising defenders, “must endure the consequences – humiliation and pain!”

 

What tyrant king or totalitarian dictator could possibly disagree?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 8 February 2017.