Christmas 2019: Still Salivating At Jingle-Bells.

The Season of Good Sales: “What does it matter?”, sneer the atheists and secularists. “The whole silly story never happened.” It matters because the still-cherished principles of secular humanism may be traced all the way back to the Roman Empire of 2,000 years ago, when ordinary human-beings gathered to hear and repeat the words of a carpenter’s son.  It matters, also, because, to paraphrase Robert Harris, writing in his latest, terrifying, novel The Second Sleep: when morality loses its power, power loses its morality.

WHAT HAVE WE just celebrated? Christmas? A holy festival? Or a bacchanalian celebration of conspicuous consumption designed, built and delivered to a palace or a hovel near you by Global Capitalism PLC? I think we all know the answer to that. What hurts the most is that we fall for it every single year. Proof, if proof is required, that Pavlov’s dogs weren’t the only animals conditioned to salivate whenever the jingle-bell rings.

Consider the fact that Christmas is celebrated in just about every mall on the face of the planet. They’re doing it in Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore and Bangkok. The only part of the world where you might struggle (and, quite possibly, incur some risk) to find Christmas displays and commercial enticements is in the Muslim world.

Now, why is that? The answer is simple. Because Muslims still believe. Islam remains a living and, for the most part, uncorrupted faith. It is still illegal in Muslim countries to practice “usury” – lending out money at interest.

The same was once true of Christendom. Indeed, one could argue that the forward march of capitalism was only finally secured in the British Isles in 1854 with the passage of “An Act To Repeal The Laws Relating To Usury”. The commercial imperative has long since laid low the ancient claims of religion in the Christian West. In the Muslim world, however, the good fight against Mammon goes on.

It would be an interesting exercise to quiz a thousand young people chosen at random from the countries where neoliberal capitalism reigns joyful and triumphant, and ask them to locate the events of Christ’s birth in the broader New Testament narrative.

Would a majority still be able to accurately re-tell the story? Mary’s pregnancy; the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem; the birth of the infant Jesus in a stable; the shepherds in the fields; the Angelic Host’s proclamation of peace and goodwill toward men; the journey and arrival of the Magi; King Herod’s massacre of the innocents; Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus’ flight into Egypt. How many would attempt to place Santa Claus somewhere in the Christmas Story? It’s probably best not to know!

Astonishingly, not even our senior Christian clerics seem to be able to tell the Christmas story correctly. In the NZ Herald of Saturday 21 December 2019, one of them wrote (on behalf of all the major denominations) that: “Jesus, God’s son, was born amongst the animals. He grew up in a family that experienced poverty. He spent the first years of his life as a refugee, eventually fleeing for his life from a wicked dictatorship.”

Ummm. No. He didn’t. Joseph was a carpenter and, like blacksmiths, carpenters in the ancient world were not to be counted among the poor. Jesus had a comfortable upbringing. Nor did the Christ spend the first years of his life as a refugee. Yes, the New Testament has him fleeing to Egypt, but his return to Galilee was not long delayed on account of King Herod’s sudden and mysterious demise. So, quite where this “eventually fleeing for his life from a wicked dictatorship” comes from is anybody’s guess. The Gospel According to Golriz Ghahraman perhaps?

“What does it matter?”, sneer the atheists and secularists. “The whole silly story never happened. The gospels were thrown together several decades after the alleged birth, life and death of Jesus of Nazareth – if such a person can truthfully be said to have existed at all!”

It matters because the still-cherished principles of secular humanism, which continue to inspire the multitude of moral arbiters who police social media, come with provenance papers tracing them all the way back to a peculiar collection of Jews and Gentiles living and writing in the Roman Empire of 2,000 years ago. Ordinary human-beings who gathered to hear and repeat the words of a carpenter’s son: the Galilean rabbi, Yeshua Ben-Joseph. Words that still constitute the core of the what remains the world’s largest religious faith –  Christianity.

It matters, also, because, to paraphrase Robert Harris, writing in his latest, terrifying, novel The Second Sleep: when morality loses its power, power loses its morality.

Meaning that, with every passing Christmas, the stuff we’re conditioned to buy will amount to less: and the Carpenter’s story we no longer remember will count for so much more.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 December 2019.

If You Want To Know Why Clinton And Corbyn Lost - Watch This.

This short documentary explains brilliantly why the candidates and parties of the Left keep on losing to the Right. Highly recommended viewing.

Video courtesy of YouTube

This posting exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Reconnecting Jacinda With her Inner Swashbuckler.

Let's Do This - Again? If all Labour has to take to the electorate in September 2020 is an automobile-driven infrastructure programme borrowed wholesale from the last National Government, then Simon Bridges is going to make sure that being the prime minister of a one-term Labour government is the only thing Jacinda will ever have in common with Norman Kirk.

HOW DID 2019 END on such a jarring note of neoliberal bi-partisanship? With the Coalition and the Opposition united in their backing for a lavish spend-up on roads, roads, and more roads? It’s possible the two parliamentary groupings may diverge on the question of how all this bitumen should be paid for: directly by the state, or through Private-Public Partnerships (PPPs); but that’s about it in terms of potential disagreement. The year is ending on an apparently unanimous parliamentary assumption that trucks and cars will continue to provide New Zealanders with their prime means of transportation. With this slavish commitment to the automobile, the country’s political class has demonstrated its near-total moral incapacity. New Zealand’s claim to be taking Climate Change seriously stands exposed as utter bullshit.

Also exposed is Labour’s intellectual exhaustion. By returning to National’s pro-automobile vomit so shamelessly, Jacinda Ardern and her senior colleagues are essentially admitting that they lack the necessary competence to translate their promises of “transformation” into reality. It’s a fatal admission. By acknowledging that the big stuff is simply too much for them they have opened a royal road (if you’ll excuse the expression) along which Simon Bridges and his team can now motor to electoral victory.

Bridges’ script is pathetically easy to write: “National and Labour are in full agreement about what needs to be done in New Zealand. But, let’s be brutally honest, only one party possesses the competency required to do it. From KiwiBuild to the Provincial Growth Fund, the Labour-led Government has proved woefully inept. By the time the election rolls around, New Zealanders will be looking back at three wasted years. About the only things our Prime Minister and her Cabinet are good at is making promises, finding excuses and providing hugs. By contrast, National possesses both the will and the talent to get this country moving again – and that’s exactly what it’s going to do.”

Which is not to suggest that Bridges and his team won’t employ Topham Guerin Ltd to mastermind a complementary social media campaign. If the high road of “competency” fails to inspire, then the low road of crude emotional arousal will be primed and ready for all the traffic it can bear. Indeed, Ben Guerin and Sean Topham may advise Bridges to use both roads – at the same time. They’ve already proved they can do it – just ask Boris!

Labour, the Greens and NZ First could beat this style of campaigning easily – if they only had the will and the talent to get even a little bit creative on the propaganda front. But, that, alas, is where the party falls so woefully short. Unless he or she is being kept extremely well hidden, there just isn’t anyone in Labour’s ranks who even remotely fits the description of “a little bit creative”. How could there be? The culture of the Labour Party in 2020 is hardly what you’d call welcoming to the swashbuckler and the maverick. Its ideologically rigid and puritanical apparatchiks simply wouldn’t know what to do with a political gunslinger like Ben Guerin.

Even if Jacinda intervened on behalf of the 2020 equivalent of Bob Harvey – the young swashbuckler who somehow persuaded Norman Kirk to take a punt on him in 1969 and who then proceeded to transform the public’s perceptions of both Labour and Kirk by deploying state-of-the-art advertising techniques – it’s doubtful he or she would last the distance. Ideological Orthodoxy and Art have never been the best of friends.

Which only leaves Jacinda, herself, to take on the role of the swashbuckler and maverick. Looking back, that’s exactly what she did in 2017. There just wasn’t the time – or the script – for anything other than Jacinda’s inspired, seat-of-the-pants, political acrobatics. The party had to let her carry more-or-less the whole campaign because it had nothing else to offer. When it did step back in – remember the sudden about face on the Capital Gains Tax, and the equally sudden reversal of the about-face? – it succeeded only in slowing Jacinda’s momentum and carving 3-4 percentage points off Labour’s final tally of Party Votes.

The best we can hope for is that Jacinda will be put in touch with someone with the same insouciant brilliance as Ben Guerin. Someone who simply doesn’t care if what he’s pushing out there is politically correct or incorrect – only that it works. Only if it causes the person scrolling-down his or her device to stop and read Labour’s latest post. That means engaging them at the level of the heart – not the head. To win “The Battle of the Thumbs”, as Guerin calls this struggle to hold the modern voter’s attention, you don’t have time to make them think – so you have to make them feel.

In the last, crucial days of the UK general Election, Topham Guerin Ltd’s brilliant parody of “Love Actually” was watched by more than 7 million British voters. It held them spellbound for the few minutes it took the equally brilliant Boris Johnson to give them his simple, but winning, messages. “The other guy could win.”, and “Get Brexit done”. Jacinda has the skills to do something similar – just ask Stephen Colbert! The $64,000 question, however, is: “Does she have anyone smart enough, and creative enough, to come up with an idea that good?”

Because, if all Jacinda has to take to the electorate in September 2020 is an automobile-driven infrastructure programme borrowed wholesale from the last National Government, then Simon Bridges is going to make sure that being the prime minister of a one-term Labour government is the only thing she has in common with Norman Kirk.

When Jacinda stood in the Auckland Town Hall in 2017 and proclaimed Climate Change “the nuclear-free moment of my generation” – how we all cheered.

The thing is, we were expecting her commitment to amount to something more than the well-meaning but toothless Zero Carbon Act. Something like announcing a completely new, wider-gauge, electrified, national rail network. An infrastructure programme that would allow New Zealand to replicate the ultra-fast trains that move people around Europe, China and Japan. Something to put the greenhouse-gas pumping road transport industry out to pasture. Something more than a plan to build roads, roads and more roads.

Something to make young and old alike exclaim, at least one more time: “Let’s do this!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 20 December 2019.

Scotland's Secret Weapon.

Defensive Position: What will be Nicola Sturgeon’s equivalent of Robert the Bruce’s shiltrons when proud King Boris sends his army north against a people determined to “be a nation again”? For this is the twenty-first, not the fourteenth century. Courage and a 12-foot spear might be enough to turn aside an English warhorse, but what does Scotland’s SNP Government have to turn aside an English tank?

I WAS WATCHING Neil Oliver’s “Rise of the Clans” last night on the History Channel. It’s a quirky production. Lots of re-enactments and even more burly Scots hurling themselves at one another, axes and broadswords flashing in the thin Highland sunshine. The directorial decision that I found most interesting, however, was to make Oliver himself a witness to the drama – as if he had just stepped out of a time-machine. This is Scottish history as seen, quite literally, through Oliver’s eyes.

The story begins with Bannockburn, the battle that Scottish football crowds recall whenever they sing “Flower of Scotland” and boast of their forefathers’ success against “Proud Edward’s army” and how King Robert the Bruce and his peasant soldiers “sent him homeward – tae think again”.

As a trained historian, Oliver was at some pains to explain how it was that Bruce’s much smaller force was able to defeat the heavily armoured English knights.

The answer was William “Braveheart” Wallace’s military innovation – the Shiltron. Wallace had equipped his peasant soldiers with 12-foot spears and taught them how to deploy them against English cavalry. Contrary to what you may have seen in Sir Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”, horses are not given to suicidal gestures. Set a barrier of sharp spearpoints in front of them and they will rear-up and shy away.

Even so, not a little courage is required to make the Shiltron formation work. A charging “destrier”, sixteen hands high and galloping ‘full-tilt’ at 30mph, is not something most people – even holding a 12-foot spear – are able to confront without cutting-and-running. But such was the Scots’ faith in “The Bruce”, that on the road to Stirling Castle they stood firm and turned aside the English charge.

But Bruce did more than repeat the tactics of Braveheart, he taught his men how to manoeuvre on the battlefield. The Shiltron, to use the modern military jargon, evolved from being a “static” formation, into a “kinetic” weapon. The Scots ability to manoeuvre en masse destroyed “Proud Edward’s” invasion force. Their retreat blocked by the steep-sided river – the Bannock “burn” – and hemmed-in by the advancing Shiltrons’ bristling spears, the superior numbers of the English army availed them nothing. Bruce’s own Shiltron’s decisive charge put the English to panic-stricken flight. Thousands were either cut down or drowned.

Stirring stuff! But what, I wondered, will be Nicola Sturgeon’s equivalent of Robert the Bruce’s shiltrons when proud King Boris sends his army north against a people determined to “be a nation again”? For this is the twenty-first, not the fourteenth century. Courage and a 12-foot spear might be enough to turn aside an English warhorse, but what does Scotland’s SNP Government have to turn aside an English tank?

Well, Sturgeon and her government have their own, very special, kind of shiltron – millions strong – and with more than enough courage to face down an England ill-disposed to countenance the break-up of the “United” Kingdom. A Scotland which has voted, democratically and peacefully, for its independence has us – the Scottish diaspora. We are her shiltron.

King Boris should understand that there are millions more people of Scottish descent living outside Scotland’s borders, than there are living north of the River Tweed. If he doubts the power of the Celtic diaspora he should, perhaps, have a word or two with Tony Blair.

Without the backing of Bill Clinton, and the millions of Irish-Americans at his back, the Good Friday Agreement would never have held firm. President Trump, similarly, owes too much to the support of those hard-bitten descendants of the Scottish borderers who settled the South and West to stand idly by and let English triumphalism crush the pride of four million defenceless Scots.

Fanciful nonsense? It won’t come to anything remotely resembling the doomsday scenario painted above? I imagine there were many Catalonians who were similarly dismissive of the idea that the Spanish State would violently suppress their independence movement and imprison its leaders. And yet, that is exactly what the Spanish Government did.

Catalonia, moreover, could not point to the arrogant over-ruling of its own people’s clear, democratic, and twice-expressed preference to remain a part of the EU.

Proud Boris should keep England’s army south of the Tweed – lest, from Nova Scotia to Dunedin, the indignant clans of the Scottish diaspora, give him cause “tae think again”.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 December 2019.

The Trick Of Winning Power Under Capitalism.

“Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” - Varys to Tyrion in Game of Thrones.

CORBYN’S DEFEAT, and the defeat of the Labour Party his leadership made possible, is a defeat for the Left everywhere. All over the western world social-democrats are pointing to the British Labour Party’s electoral catastrophe and saying: “See? This is what happens when you try to sell “Democratic-Socialism” to those not already convinced that it’s a good idea.” What happened to Labour’s “Red Wall” will be used to undermine AOC; batter Bernie Sanders; and demoralise Elizabeth Warren. Closer to home, it will be used as a prophylactic against the merest hint of Corbyn-style thinking inside the New Zealand Labour Party.

The question is: What lessons should democratic-socialists, themselves, draw from the Corbyn Labour Party’s historic defeat? Because the UK General Election has more lessons to teach us than Dominic Cummings has wickedly clever ideas. Not the least of which is that you receive fewer scratches when you pat a cat from its head to its tail, rather than from its tail to its head.

It is one of the great paradoxes of radical left-wing politics: that the people who rail most uncompromisingly against the evils of capitalism are genuinely shocked and horrified when capitalism unleashes a fair old swag of those evils against them.

Jeremy Corbyn was unfairly pilloried in the media, they complain. Every major media outlet was against him. The guy couldn’t get a break – not even from The Guardian and the BBC!

Well, duh! What the hell did they expect? That the leader of a party promising to restore the trade unions’ right to engage in “secondary picketing” was going to be given a fair shake by newspapers owned by billionaires? That Rupert Murdoch, the man who broke the power of the print unions in the 1980s, was going to say: “Come on in, Jezza! Sit down and tell me how I can help you devise the sort of inheritance tax that will break the power of families like my own forever.”

If you accept the proposition that we are all living in a capitalist society, then, surely, you must also accept that anyone posing a genuine threat to that society will be subjected to unrelenting political attack? And, doesn’t that oblige you, as the democratic-socialist leader of a serious electoral party, to offer the capitalist press the smallest possible target? In fact, wouldn’t the smart move be to convince the mainstream media bosses that you weren’t any kind of democratic-socialist at all?

Come to think of it, wouldn’t it mean doing exactly what Tony Blair did? Making the pilgrimage to Rupert Murdoch’s corporate lair and convincing him that from you and your “sensible” Labour Party he had absolutely nothing to fear? That way, when the election campaign got rolling, The Sun could come out and endorse you, and urge its readers to vote Labour.

Obviously, I’m not saying that Tony Blair was any kind of democratic-socialist. What I am suggesting, however, is that if you are a Labour leader who genuinely subscribes to the principles of democratic-socialism, then it would probably help a lot to keep your true ideological colours under wraps. Tactically, at least, it would make more sense for the powers-that-be to see you as a reasonable moderate – not a scary radical. Impress the electorate with your economic wisdom; demonstrate your deep understanding of, and sympathy for, the hopes and aspirations of your core working-class supporters. Speak with pride and passion about the contribution their party has made to the nation’s history. Whatever you do, don’t refuse to sing God Save The Queen. It would also probably help if you refrained from meeting with representatives of terrorist organisations – especially those hostile to the State of Israel!

A democratic-socialist leader possessed of a sophisticated strategic sense would understand that election manifestos are best restricted to promoting policies that the electorate actually wants – not policies his (or her) comrades believe the electorate should want. Let the drift of events – economically and socially – propel the party in directions which the capitalists may not like, but which they no longer feel able to redirect. Most importantly, identify the one reform most likely to undermine the institutions upon which their opponents’ rely most heavily for protection. Implement it early, fast, and without compromise.

Think of Jim Bolger, Bill Birch and the Employment Contracts Act. Radically reducing the reach and power of the trade unions – the working class’s most effective defence against exploitation and declining living standards – was the one reform most likely to enhance and entrench the power of capital. The moment it became law, everything else National and its backers wanted to do was made ten times easier.

It is worth recalling that the unprecedented scope and radicalism of the Employment Contracts Act had not been signalled to the electorate prior to National racking-up a massive majority in the 1990 General Election. Bill Birch had reassured New Zealand workers that their hard-won industrial rights – guaranteed hours and penal rates – would not be affected by the changes National was proposing. By the time the draconian provisions of the bill became clear, the leaders of the trade unions had lost all confidence in their ability to prevent its passage. This loss of confidence was crucial to the National Government’s success. A successful democratic-socialist government should be similarly positioned to demoralise their capitalist opponents.

Perhaps, then, that is the exercise democratic-socialists around the world should now be undertaking. Quietly identifying the single reform that would effectively disarm the capitalists and fundamentally diminish their ability to effectively resist the introduction of further progressive economic, social and environmental reforms.

As Varys in Game of Thrones so wisely tells Tyrion: “Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

It’s high time the Left learned the trick of winning power under capitalism: positioning a very big man in such a way that he casts a very small and non-threatening shadow – until he doesn’t.

Jezza, old son, they saw you coming!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 December 2019.

Oh No! It's a .....

What other song could we play as the UK's political rule book gets torn up and thrown away?

Video courtesy of YouTube

This post is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Some Thoughts On Socialism As Jeremy Corbyn Loses The UK General Election.

Forlorn Hope: When the call came down to make Corbyn unelectable, the Establishment's journalists and columnists rose to the challenge. Antisemitism was only the most imaginative of the charges levelled against the old democratic-socialist. There were many more and, sadly, they appear to have worked. Boris Johnson may not be much liked or trusted, but he’s more liked and trusted than Jeremy Corbyn.

WHAT BETTER DAY to assess the latest contribution from The Daily Blog’s resident Marxist than Election Day in the UK? I’m pretty sure Dave Brownz will be as gobsmacked as I most certainly will be if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party ends the day with the makings of a majority in the House of Commons. Should the impossible happen, however, the issues raised in Dave’s post will take on a new urgency. The question of whether socialism and democracy can operate successfully together will instantly, in the UK at least, cease to be a matter of academic debate.

The essence of Dave’s argument is that any attempt to introduce socialist policies, while all the core institutions of the bourgeois capitalist order are still standing, is doomed to fail. According to this argument, every socialist reform attempted by a Corbyn-led government of the UK would end up being thwarted. Either, Labour’s changes would be welcomed as a much needed intervention on behalf of Britain’s beleaguered capitalists. Or, if Corbyn’s reforms did, indeed, strike at the heart of UK capitalism, his government would be deposed. Peacefully, if possible. Violently, if necessary.

Dave’s (and Marx’s) way out of this no-win situation is to call for “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. In place of the social forces which currently run, justify and benefit financially from capitalism, set up an entirely new system operated by its victims. Only then, say the Marxists, can socialism have the slightest chance of surviving and flourishing.

There is a grim logic to this position. Certainly, a socialist government surrounded by capitalist institutions will very swiftly find its room for political manoeuvre shrinking. The courts will intervene on behalf of those affected by its most radical policies. Senior public servants will leak its transformative plans to the capitalist press. Right-wing middle-class students take to the streets in protest. Foreign corporations will threaten to seize the nation’s overseas assets in the event of inadequately compensated nationalisations. Hostile capitalist powers will impose sanctions in order to “make the economy scream”. Dave’s argument: that if all these forces are not first swept away by the revolutionary masses, then they will conspire to strangle an infant socialist government in its cradle; is pretty compelling.

To date, Corbyn’s fate lends credence to Dave’s case. In the four years he has led the British Labour Party he has been the target of an unrelenting campaign of personal vilification and political destabilisation. With hindsight, it is clear that the Labour Party has, for decades, been kept “fit for office” through a combination of destruction and creation. The careers of potentially successful Labour left-wingers have been destroyed, while the reputations of those considered a “safe pair of hands” have been enhanced – mostly by Capitalist Britain’s well-positioned defenders in the security services and the news media. Corbyn’s success was a slip-up – a big one. Exactly how big is indicated by the sheer viciousness of the campaign set in motion to destroy him.

It has, however, been an extremely costly exercise for “The Establishment”. To “get” Corbyn, the supposedly left-wing Guardian newspaper was forced to reveal its unshakeable allegiance to the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. When the call came down to make Corbyn unelectable, the Guardian’s journalists and columnists rose to the challenge. Antisemitism was only the most imaginative of the charges levelled against the old democratic-socialist. There were many more and, sadly, they appear to have worked. Boris Johnson may not be much liked or trusted, but he’s more liked and trusted than Jeremy Corbyn.

The temptation to subscribe to Dave’s critique of democratic-socialism’s contention that liberal capitalism can be dismantled and reassembled without sacrificing its “progressive” features – such as Freedom of Expression, the Rule of Law and Personal Liberty – is very strong. Especially once it becomes clear that, as I used to tell my fellow trade unionists back in the 1980s, “all the rights we possess as citizens of a democracy are given to us on just one condition – that we never use them”. But, to move from this bleak realisation to the Marxists’ wholesale embrace of proletarian dictatorship strikes me as a step too far. It requires us to pretend that the terrible events of the twentieth century never happened. That the exigencies of dictatorship – regardless of whose particular class interests it is established to serve – do not lead inevitably to censorship, concentration camps and mass executions.

The trick, it seems to me, is to so conduct yourself as a democratic-socialist government that the capitalists are insufficiently motivated to overthrow you. There is, as alluded to above, a high price to be paid for exposing the iron fist of fascism inside liberal capitalism’s velvet glove. Nevertheless, convincing the Powers-That-Be that your left-wing government has more to offer them alive than dead isn’t easy. It requires a mixture of political wisdom and cunning not often found among the men and women of the Left. Harold Wilson almost had enough to achieve his goal of fusing the interests of British capitalists and British workers in “the white heat of technology” – creating thereby a “producers’ alliance” that would overpower the City of London and “Put Britain First”. Had he been Prime Minister at any other time but the Cold War, who knows, he might have succeeded.

Could Corbyn have made a similar case for a “producers’ alliance” to restore Britain’s waning economic fortunes? If he had somehow contrived to link Wilson’s project to the economic and cultural frustrations fueling Brexit – maybe. A democratic-socialist European Union: offered to Labour voters as an alternative to the present, bureaucratic, neoliberal monstrosity; now that might have been worth voting “Leave” to achieve. Barring some sort of miracle, however, it’s too late to make that case now.

No doubt Dave Brownz will shake his head at such naivety. But, even as Labour goes down to yet another defeat in the UK, I refuse to abandon the hope that one day we’ll find the right person at the right time. Because, in the end, if your socialism isn’t democratic, then it’s not worth having. No one ever said achieving social justice and freedom would be easy, but then, as my dear old dad used to say: “Nothing worthwhile ever is.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 December 2019.

Cartoonist David Low's Radical Sympathy.

"Rendezvous" by David Low, September 1939.

DUNEDIN IS THE BIRTHPLACE of, for my money, the world’s greatest cartoonist, David Low.

At the height of his powers, in 1930s London, Low’s cartoons represented the visual conscience of the civilised world. His most famous cartoon, “Rendezvous”, penned a few weeks into the Second World War, depicts Adolf Hitler greeting Josef Stalin over the prostrate body of Poland. “The scum of the earth, I believe.”, says Hitler, bowing and lifting his cap. “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?”, Stalin responds, mirroring his enemy’s gesture.

The cartoon’s brilliance lies in its multiple layers of meaning. The dictators’ outlandish greeting echoes the famous query of the American newspaperman, Henry Stanley, upon encountering the celebrated Victorian explorer and missionary, David Livingstone. “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”, the American is said to have enquired. Low has taken the greeting, originally uttered in the heart of darkest Africa, and set it in the heart of what is now an even darker Europe.

The cartoon also captures the mind-numbing cynicism of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Hitler and Stalin, for so long sworn ideological foes and living symbols of their mutually exclusive systems, are shown politely setting aside their differences. Low is defying his audience to imagine a more ruthless assertion of realpolitik.

The cartoon’s masterstroke, however, is its dark humour. Politically, Low’s joke is a clever one, guaranteed to raise a grim chuckle. In wringing this response from his audience, however, Low is not attempting to gloss over the horrors of the war now raging. These he suggests in just a few deft strokes, but the sense of unending destruction and death is palpable. “And yet,” he seems to be saying, “we can still laugh. All is not lost.”

At the heart of all effective satire is radical sympathy. It draws from us not scorn but pity; not a sneer or a guffaw, but the sort of righteous anger that one finds in the mouths of Old Testament prophets. True satire: written, visual or dramatic; makes us laugh in the way Low makes us laugh in “Rendezvous”. The humour is drawn not only from the absurdity of the situation the cartoonist has contrived, but also from the shock of recognition. We get the joke, but we also get the message. Low has made us complicit in his protest. Forced us to stand with him in solidarity. He has made us do something. He has evoked radical sympathy.

Low’s radical sympathy is what sets him apart from so many other New Zealand cartoonists and satirists. For some reason, Kiwis are made uncomfortable by the sort of satire that – in the superb formulation of the American humourist, Finley Peter Dunne – “Comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.” With a handful of notable exceptions, Kiwi satirists have preferred to be the enabler of the bully and the boss; offering their audiences the vicarious thrill of watching the weak get hammered.

I well recall the allegedly satirical television series McPhail & Gadsby. While David McPhail’s depiction of Rob Muldoon was superb, it was also adulatory. Invariably, Muldoon’s political antagonist, Bill Rowling, was presented as a weak and contemptible figure who deserved every whack “Muldoon” gave him. McPhail & Gadsby thus provided an invaluable service to the National Government of the day and its redoubtable Prime Minister – Rob Muldoon.

It is easy and, one suspects, extremely tempting to cross over the line from satire to propaganda. To become, as the Americans say, a “suck up, kick down, kinda guy”. Easy, too, to court the applause of the majority by refusing to challenge their idées fixes about all manner of controversial subjects.

Just imagine if Low had been one of those guys. Instead of standing resolute (alongside the politically marginalised Winston Churchill) against the horrors and dangers of Nazism, Low would have taken the much easier – and popular – road of appeasement. He could have made a hero out of Neville Chamberlain, even rendered the German Chancellor sympathetically, and made fun of the friendless Czechs. Who would have complained? Certainly not the Nazis.

But that was not the road Low elected to travel. He kicked up against the threat of Nazism so forcefully that Hitler had him marked down for immediate execution should Great Britain fall. Low later described his inclusion on that list as the greatest honour of his professional life.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 December 2019.

Grant Robertson Spends Up Large - On The Establishment!

Grant Keeps On Trucking: Out of the $12 billion Robertson has announced for infrastructure investment, $8 billion will be allocated to specific projects, with the balance of $4 billion held in reserve. What does it say about this Government's "transformational" ambitions that 85 percent of that $8 billion is to be spent on “transport projects” – by which, of course, Robertson and his colleagues mean “roads”?

I’VE BEEN WATCHING The Crown on Netflix. The fifth episode in the latest series, “Coup” exposes the 1968 plot hatched by furious members of the British Establishment to overthrow the Labour Government of Harold Wilson. The plotters included not only the pugnacious media-mogul, Cecil King, but also the Queen’s second cousin (and recently laid-off head of the UK armed forces) Lord Louis Mountbatten. Obviously, the planned coup never eventuated. I mention it only because the drama provides a forceful reminder of how the Establishment responds to genuinely democratic-socialist Labour governments.

I think it’s safe to say that after Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s announcement of the Government’s proposed infrastructure spend-up, the New Zealand Establishment will be plotting nothing more dangerous that inviting the Minister to celebratory end-of-year drinks. Out of the $12 billion Robertson has set aside for infrastructure investment, $8 billion will be allocated to specific projects, with the balance of $4 billion held in reserve. That the Establishment feels able to relax is attributable to the fact that 85 percent of that $8 billion is to be spent on “transport projects” – by which, of course, Robertson and his colleagues mean “roads”.

Oh, sure, Robertson’s media release refers to roads and rail, but unless something profoundly “transformative” has occurred within the present Cabinet, the amount spent on New Zealand’s publicly owned railway network is unlikely to represent even a sixth of that $6.8 billion. Which means that this Government, supposedly committed to purposeful action against Climate Change, is proposing to spend billions and billions of dollars on making our roads safe for the road haulage industry’s heavy trucks and the middle-class’s gas-guzzling SUVs. The Establishment doesn’t organise coups against Labour ministers who do it favours like that – it nominates them for knighthoods!

Robertson’s announcement comes after months of just about every major banker and businessperson, every mainstream economic and political commentator, earnestly begging the Finance Minister to take advantage of the unprecedentedly low cost of borrowing to fiscally stimulate New Zealand’s sclerotic economy. I suppose we’re obliged to congratulate Robertson for his discipline. A less cautious politician would have taken the  policy initiative – along with the consequent kudos. But not Robertson. Determined that only good headlines would greet his final determinations, he waited until the pressure for some sort of major fiscal intervention became irresistible. Unsurprisingly, media criticism has been … muted.

But, if Robertson’s caution is bad, then the Greens’ response to his announcement is just plain sad. To be clear, their transport champion, Julie Anne Genter, has been humiliated. The road transport lobby has effortlessly outmanoeuvred whatever policy wonks she’s had pitching the case for rail. The tires on the wheels of the big rigs chewing up our roads are all humming “Hallelujah!”

But, are the Greens’ outraged? Are they cutting-up rough? Not soze you’d notice. How’s this for a media release?

“The Greens in Government have today won a significant investment to help move the public sector estate onto clean, renewable energy, Green Party Co-leader, James Shaw, said today.”

Seriously? Yes, seriously. And, it gets worse:

“As part of the Government’s capital investment package announced today, the Government will support the public sector to reduce its carbon footprint through an infrastructure spend of $200 million.”

Oh, wow! Really, James! A whole $200 million! So the Public Service can buy a few more Prius cars? How can we ever express our gratitude? A Labour-led government, with $12 billion to spend, allocates a breath-taking $200 million to making the Zero Carbon Act mean something. Are we supposed to be grateful? What would Greta say?

And Metiria – what would she say? Twelve additional billions of dollars to spend and from what’s been released today it would appear that not one cent of it is to be spent on beneficiaries. Never mind the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group. Never mind that the Job Seekers Allowance is simply too meagre to live on without falling deeper and deeper into debt. Never mind that pouring money into the pockets of our poorest citizens is the fastest and most effective way of delivering our economy a much-needed shot of adrenaline. No, never mind all that. Finance Minister Robertson and Social Welfare Minister Carmel Sepuloni have no intention of upsetting the Establishment by giving beneficiaries anything remotely resembling a Christmas present.

So much for our “transformational” government: our Prime Minister’s “politics of kindness”. The saddest part of this very sad story isn’t just its courage and compassion deficit; or even its complete failure to register the scale of the opportunity that’s been lost. No, the saddest aspect of this disgraceful announcement is that young people will receive it as the best the Left can do. It’s not, kids. Truly. Genuine Labour governments, genuine Labour Prime Ministers, have done way better than this. If you don’t believe me, then take a few minutes to watch this. 

Before concluding, however, I’d like to leave you with this quote. Appropriately, given the way this post began, it’s about Harold Wilson. What he stood for and why, eventually, the Establishment was successful in driving him out of office. (The quote itself is from Smear! Wilson & the Secret State by Stephen Dorril & Robin Ramsay. Published in Great Britain in 1991 by Fourth Estate Limited.)

“Wilson embodied the radical end of the wartime social contract, which not only saw that a dynamic mixed economy demanded a producers’ alliance, but also saw that such an alliance could not succeed with an ascendant City of London. The extraordinary hatred that Wilson provoked on the British right was not irrational: Wilson was a serious threat; he knew who the 'enemy within' actually was. And they knew he knew; ‘they’ – the banker in the City with the elder brother in MI6 and a cousin in the Army – ‘they’ knew that Wilson, virtually alone among Labour leaders of his generation, had pulled aside the whisps of mystification which hid the British Establishment and seen the power of finance capital at its heart.”

If Grant Robertson and his colleagues ever followed the financial sector’s twisting labyrinth to the Capitalist Minotaur’s hidden lair, it wouldn’t be to slay him, but only to slap him on the back, shake him by his bloody hand, and invite him to the Treasury’s next cocktail party.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 12 December 2019.

Delusional And Irrational: The Rise Of Paranoid Politics In New Zealand.

Sheer Loopiness: Many of those expressing bemusement at the antics of these #turnardern effacers, were convinced that they were yet another expression of the National Party’s increasingly spiteful anti-government propaganda campaign. They marvelled at the oddness of the perpetrators’ mindset and questioned the common-sense of allowing the rest of New Zealand to glimpse the sheer loopiness of the Prime Minister’s detractors.

WHAT IF EVERYTHING we currently think about politics in New Zealand is wrong?

We assume that our political parties correspond more or less accurately to the shape of our society. National stands for businessmen, farmers, wealthy professionals and all those temperamentally conservative New Zealanders opposed to radical change. Labour represents wage workers, public servants, people engaged in what might be called the “caring” professions, along with the young and/or idealistic people who hunger for “progressive” reform. The so-called “minor” parties: the Greens and Act; cater to smaller, more ideologically driven, groups of voters. Finally, NZ First represents those mostly older Kiwis nostalgic for the less confusing, economically cut-throat and culturally diverse New Zealand of yesteryear.

So far, so straightforward. But what if these familiar descriptions of our political parties no longer correspond to what they truly represent? What would that mean? What would it tell us about the people and organisations charged with making sense of our politics? Could it be that we are being deliberately misled about what is actually going on in the precincts of power and influence? Or, are the journalists and pundits, the PR mavens and academics, no more aware of what is actually happening than the rest of us?

Over the weekend, Twitter began to fill up with video-clips of individuals, in supermarkets and dairies, turning around women’s magazines with covers featuring photographs of the Prime Minister. Persons also recorded themselves turning over copies of Jacinda Ardern’s biography in bookshops. These bizarre actions were presented as acts of political resistance. Those responsible clearly believe themselves to be living under a dangerous and oppressive government – whose leader merits literal effacement.

Many of those expressing bemusement at the antics of these #turnardern effacers, were convinced that they were yet another expression of the National Party’s increasingly spiteful anti-government propaganda campaign. They marvelled at the oddness of the perpetrators’ mindset and questioned the common-sense of allowing the rest of New Zealand to glimpse the sheer loopiness of the Prime Minister’s detractors. How could such behaviour possibly boost National’s chances of re-election?

At the heart of that last question lies an assumption that the National Party, its leaders and campaign strategists, continue to be guided by a rational assessment of New Zealand’s present condition, and that the policies formulated and articulated by the party represent a rational response to that condition. We assume this because the alternative explanation: that National is in the grip of seriously deluded individuals, driven by profoundly irrational impulses, is simply too frightening to contemplate.

But, contemplate it we must, because the people we used to describe as the “Right” have, indeed, succumbed to delusions, and no longer appear to be engaged in rational political behaviour.

If there is a single word to describe the current mood of the people in charge of the National Party – and their followers – it is “paranoia”. The Merriam Webster Dictionary describes Paranoia as “a mental illness characterized by systematized delusions of persecution”. For the purposes of this post, however, Merriam Webster’s second definition is the more useful. It describes “a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others”.

The New Zealand farming community is very much the poster-child for political paranoia. The fear and anxiety, suspicion and distrust, triggered in the typical dairy farmer by the formation of a Labour-led government is disturbing. It’s as if, at some point in the past, angry columns of working-class militiamen had invaded the countryside, hellbent on subduing farmers’ freedoms, robbing them of the fruits of their labour, and driving them into penury. That New Zealand history records exactly the opposite happening – Massey’s Cossacks anyone? – is conveniently forgotten.

Very much at the front of rural and provincial minds, however, is the urge to punish and humiliate the urban poor – especially the brown urban poor. Install a listening device in any venue where farmers and their families are confident they will not be overheard and you will hear the most appalling sentiments expressed. Not just hostility, but visceral hatred. The sort of dehumanising language that generally precedes physical assault – or worse. So speak the paranoid guardians of rural and provincial virtue. To fathom the fury of  National’s policies towards beneficiaries, state house tenants and the homeless – just visit the country.

It would be wrong, however, to locate the paranoia currently afflicting New Zealand politics exclusively on the Right. On the Left, too, suspicion and mistrust run riot.

Fuelling the Left’s paranoia is its awareness of the Labour Party’s sociological contradictions. Founded by, and for many decades dominated by, the trade unions, Labour’s culture was uncomplicatedly working-class. In simple terms: its members and voters tended towards economic radicalism and social conservatism. Yes, they were fervent believers in state intervention, but they were also, consciously or unconsciously, racists, sexists and homophobes.

The new social movements of the 1960s and 70s complicated this picture considerably. Tensions between the old social conservatives and the young social liberals grew steadily – most particularly in response to the party’s conservative stance on abortion. So long as all elements within the party cleaved to the state interventionist “democratic-socialist” thrust of Labour’s economic policies, however, those tensions remained manageable. It was only when the social liberals abandoned democratic-socialism for the “free market” that the party tore itself asunder.

When the smoke and fire of the 1980s had cleared, a very peculiar picture emerged. The party organisation had taken on an unmistakably middle-class, social-liberal countenance. It’s electoral base, however, remained stubbornly working-class. A wide gulf had opened up between the values of the party and the values of its voters. This was especially true of its conservative Christian supporters from the Pacific Islands.

Somehow Labour’s leaders had to finesse these profound sociological and moral divergences. Not only was Labour now required to conceal from its staunchest “have not” supporters a radically different set of values and beliefs, but it also had to obscure the fact that the people who actually controlled the Labour Party should now be counted among the “haves”. In other words, Labour found itself committed to living a political lie. Understandably, it grew increasingly fearful of its contradictions being exposed. Its suspicion and distrust of its own electoral base grew. Labour, too, was becoming paranoid.

Plant a listening device in any Grey Lynn Labour household and the inhabitants’ recorded conversations are likely to prove as hair-raising as that of any farming family. The working-class Pakeha male, when he’s not a cross-burning white supremacist, is an eager participant in rape culture. It is, therefore, vital that the freedom of expression of such dangerous people be curtailed as the processes of full-scale decolonisation are set in place, immigration increases, and gender roles are radically reconstructed.

The most important conclusion to be drawn from the paranoia into which New Zealand politics has fallen is that its ugly manifestations are driving more and more voters out of their old political pigeon-holes. Those who still see a point in voting are casting their ballots more out of habit than conviction. There may already be an electoral majority in support of a political style that is neither delusional nor irrational.

All it needs is a party.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 11 December 2019.

Adrian Orr – The Reserve Bank’s Revolutionary Governor?

New Zealand's Underarm Banker: It bears recalling that the “independence” of the Reserve Bank Governor was for decades held up by neoliberal capitalists as the most compelling justification for passing the Reserve Bank Act. Interesting, is it not, how the ruling class’s support for the Bank’s independence lasted no longer than its Governor’s first attempt to regulate (albeit modesty) the behaviour of Australasian capital?

I’M BEGINNING to suspect that Reserve Bank Governor, Adrian Orr, is, at heart, a revolutionary. The decision of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to nearly double the “Big Four” Australian banks capital requirements – from 10.5 to 18 percent – has deeply shocked financial communities on both sides of the Tasman. What Orr has triggered in the minds of the Australian bankers is a truly fateful question: “At what point does our involvement in the New Zealand finance sector become unprofitable?” It’s a question fraught with potentially revolutionary implications for New Zealand’s economic sovereignty.

The reaction from the Right confirms the boldness of Orr’s move. The consensus among those opposed to the Reserve Banks’s decision is that it will make it harder for the Australians to perform to their shareholders’ expectations. In other words, Orr stands accused of reducing the Australian banks’ profitability. New Zealanders are being warned that they will have to endure higher interest rates on their borrowing, and lower rates for their savings, as a consequence of Orr’s actions. National’s Finance Spokesperson, Paul Goldsmith, is predicting a substantial hit to the country’s growth prospects:

“The two primary effects of today’s decision will be higher borrowing costs than would otherwise have been the case and businesses and farmers will find it harder to access the funds they need to grow.”

The NZ Initiative (the successor organisation to the dark knights of Business Roundtable) echoes Goldsmith’s fear:

“The RBNZ’s decision to increase the capital banks are required to hold will have adverse effects for borrowers and the wider economy. The effects are likely to be felt most acutely by high loan-to-value borrowers, the rural sector and small-to-medium-sized enterprises.”

Exposed in these statements, however, is a reality which both authors would undoubtedly prefer to keep hidden from New Zealanders. Namely, the degree to which we have become slaves to the financial power of Australia. Not only that, but how little – if anything – our ruling class is prepared to do to defend (let alone rebuild) New Zealand’s economic sovereignty.

A party calling itself “National” might have been expected to applaud the Reserve Bank Governor’s decision to protect New Zealand depositors from the worst effects of a catastrophic financial collapse. Instead, we have its finance spokesperson chiding the Bank for daring to twist the Kangaroo’s tail. Meanwhile, the front organisation for the country’s biggest capitalists mutters darkly about the need to curb the Reserve Bank’s powers.

It bears recalling that the “independence” of the Reserve Bank Governor was for decades held up by these same neoliberal capitalists as the most compelling justification for passing the Reserve Bank Act. Interesting, is it not, how the ruling class’s support for the Bank’s independence lasted no longer than its Governor’s first attempt to regulate (albeit modesty) the behaviour of Australasian capital?

For those few adherents of “democratic socialism” (still the official ideology of the NZ Labour Party BTW) who continue to soldier-on, the reaction of big capital is extremely instructive. It points the way to how the Australian banks might one day be “persuaded” to relinquish their dominant position in New Zealand.

Way back in the early-1990s, when Jim Anderton’s Alliance was considerably more popular than the Labour Party, I remember being contacted by one of the Alliance’s policy activists with an intriguing question. He wanted to know, in practical terms, how one might go about re-nationalising privatised public enterprises without the legally required compensation payments bankrupting the nation.

Whew! That was a poser! Where to begin? Why not with a country that had already confronted and solved the problem? How did the largest surviving communist state – the People’s Republic of China – deal with/to the private sector? The answer proved to be both remarkably shrewd and surprisingly simple.

What the new communist government of China did, in the early 1950s, was to pass a law requiring all existing capitalist businesses above a certain size to make the Chinese state a 25 percent shareholder in the enterprise. Naturally, such a large shareholding would also entitle the state to be represented on the enterprise’s board of directors. As the years passed and the new regime consolidated itself, the legislation was amended constantly. Year by year, the state’s shareholding in the enterprise was increased – along with the number of its directors.

Unsurprisingly, the value of these enterprises’ shares plummeted. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, all those Chinese capitalists with a lick of sense offered-up their business’s remaining shares to the state. The latter generously agreed to take these off their hands – albeit for a handful of cents on the dollar. In this way, China’s largest capitalist enterprises were legally, peacefully – and cheaply – acquired by the state. As an added bonus, most of the by-now-former capitalists took what was left of their money and ran – to Taiwan, Singapore and the United States.

So, that was how you did it. By deploying the state’s legislative and administrative powers against the entrenched economic power of private enterprise. Far from sending in the revolutionary guards to seize, in the name of the people - and without compensation – the banks, insurance companies, department stores and factories, a democratic-socialist government would send in … its lawyer.

Like the ruthless, clear-eyed hero of the television series McMafia, the state’s representative will patiently explain to the people who used to be in charge, the new rules of the game:

“From now on” he’ll quietly inform the Chairman and his CEO, “your bank will be obliged to meet a capital requirement of 18 percent. In two years’ time that will rise to 25 percent. Three years after that the Reserve Bank’s CR will be 33 percent.”

“But that will ruin us!”, the Chairman and the CEO of the Aussie bank will wail. “We will have nothing to offer our shareholders.”

“With respect to that”, the young, clear-eyed lawyer will respond, with just the flicker of a smile, “the Minister of Finance has authorised me to make you the following offer …”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 6 December 2019.

Driving Us Up The Poll.

Rubbish In, Rubbish Out: Put all this together, and it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that anyone who responds positively to a pollster’s request to “answer a few questions” is just ever-so-slightly weird. Desperately lonely? Some sort of psephological train-spotter? Political party member primed to skew the poll for or against her opponents? All of the above?

THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH about opinion polls is that the people who participate in them are not really typical Kiwis. Agreeing to participate in anything remotely public-spirited is something fewer and fewer New Zealanders are willing to do. Charities struggle to attract volunteers. Sports teams can’t get enough players. Political parties have long since ceased to be mass organisations. Just finding enough people to satisfy the statistical requirements for an accurate public opinion survey gets harder and harder with every passing year.

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the era when nearly every New Zealand household had an old-fashioned land-line telephone; and the easiest way to locate somebody was to simply ‘look them up’ in the phonebook; polling was a breeze.

It was a time when community action and political debate was engaged in by an extremely broad cross-section of the population. Indeed, New Zealanders were gently chided by Austin Mitchell, the best-selling author of The Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre, Pavlova Paradise, for being inveterate committee formers. “Pressure groups” were studied forensically by political scientists. Overseas visitors marvelled at a nation of joiners.

The late Professor Keith Jackson, in his book New Zealand: Politics of Change, confirms the strongly participatory character of our democracy by citing the research of R.S. Milne:

“Membership of the New Zealand Labour Party which had peaked in the year 1939-40 at 235,605 remained high after the war at 201,765. By 1960, however, this figure was down to 180,000 distributed through more than 600 branches.”

National’s engagement with New Zealanders was no less impressive: “Much the same pattern appears to have developed within the National Party. Speaking in 1956 the President of the National Party claimed that membership varied from 143,000 in a non-election year to 250,000 in an election year.”

In a nation this politicised, the opinion polling companies of the 1960s and 70s easily assembled the requisite number of participants.

The contrast between those times and our own could hardly be sharper. Who uses the land-line-generated phone book anymore? Asked to do so, most younger Kiwis would probably look at you blankly. The ubiquitous cell-phone presents the pollsters with endless difficulties. There’s no “phone book” for a start, and caller ID allows us all to screen our incoming calls. Many people simply don’t answer unidentified callers – justifiably fearing tele-marketers and scammers.

These latter miscreants have become the bane of land-line subscribers’ lives. For many citizens – especially the elderly – it is considered foolhardy to converse with anyone whose voice isn’t instantly recognisable. Someone can say they’re calling from Colmar Brunton or Reid Research – but how do you know? Better to politely decline and hang-up the receiver.

Put all this together, and it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that anyone who responds positively to a pollster’s request to “answer a few questions” is just ever-so-slightly weird. Desperately lonely? Some sort of psephological train-spotter? Political party member primed to skew the poll for or against her opponents? All of the above?

These distorting possibilities are only increased when the fact that landlines tend to be attached to owner-occupied dwellings is factored into the polling equation. Just ask any Gen-Xer or Millennial what sort of person is likely to pick up the phone in their own home and they will hiss “Baby Boomer!” Quite correctly. Which way, do you suppose, a voter sitting on a million dollars-plus of tax-free capital gain is more likely to vote – Left or Right? No wonder, really, that about 45 percent of the Party Vote appears to be welded-on to the National Party!

So, what do the pollsters do? Basically, they innovate. They try to assemble a representative number of cell-phone-using voters to offset the encrusted biases of land-liners. Or, like the new kid on the New Zealand polling block – YouGov – they step away from phones altogether in favour of a “panel” of potential online participants many thousands strong.

Trouble is, these innovations require the pollsters to run the raw data through all manner of algorithms to make sure their samples remain representative. They then have to make some, frankly, subjective assumptions about voter behaviour. That’s when things can turn very seriously pear-shaped.

The highly-experienced pollster advising the campaigners for “Remain” in 2016 assumed those who didn’t vote in the 2015 UK General Election would also sit out the Brexit referendum.

That worked out well.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times of Friday, 6 December 2019.

The Birth Of Israel: Wrong At The Right Time.

Before The Birth: Israel’s most fervent supporters set their clocks ticking in Biblical times. They cite the kingdoms of David and Solomon as proof that, in the words of the Exodus movie’s theme-song: “This land is mine.” The majority of Israel’s backers, however, start their clocks in 1933 – the year Adolf Hitler and his Nazis took over Germany – setting in motion the dreadful sequence of events that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.

IN ANY DISCUSSION about the morality of Israel’s conduct, the most important question is: “When did you start your clock?” Meaning? In assessing the ethics of the Israeli state, exactly when, historically-speaking, do you begin?

Many critics of Israel start their clocks in 1948, the year of Israel’s birth. Others prefer 1917 – the year in which Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, declared his government in favour of establishing a “national home” for the Jewish people in what was then the Ottoman province of Palestine. A few even start their clocks in 1897, when Theodore Herzl’s international Zionist movement held its first conference in Basle, Switzerland.

Israel’s most fervent supporters, by contrast, generally prefer to start much further back. Setting their clocks ticking in Biblical times, they cite the kingdoms of David and Solomon as proof that, in the words of the Exodus movie’s theme-song: “This land is mine.” The majority of Israel’s backers, however, start their clocks in 1933 – the year Adolf Hitler and his Nazis took over Germany – setting in motion the dreadful sequence of events that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.

Setting the clock ticking in 1933 makes perfect sense. What happened in Germany, and then throughout Europe, between 1933 and 1945, provided incontrovertible proof of the Zionists’ contention that Jews could never be safe in other peoples’ countries. Those who had argued that the national laws emancipating and conferring citizenship upon European Jewry offered sufficient protection against the continent’s endemic antisemitism had been proved tragically mistaken. In a world shocked and stunned by the Nazi death-camps, the argument that only under the protection of their own nation-state could the Jews of the world be safe resonated strongly.

For Israel’s critics, however, the year 1948 offers the most telling evidence of the moral deficiency built into the Israeli state. 1948 was a year of Jewish outrages and massacres: of terrible crimes committed against the Arab population of Palestine by armed Jewish terrorists. The purpose of these attacks was to facilitate what would later be called “ethnic cleansing”. A viable “State of Israel” required the expulsion and dispossession of as many Palestinian Arabs as possible. 1948, the year of the Palestinian “Nakba” (Catastrophe), is thus presented as the source from which flows all the other wrongs committed by Israel over the subsequent 70 years.

The Nakba (Catastrophe) - Palestinian Arabs driven from Israel, 1948.

What Israel’s critics fail to acknowledge about the years immediately following the end of World War II, however, is that, throughout Europe, the displacement of millions of human-beings – most of them ethnic Germans – had been sanctioned and facilitated by the victorious allies.

Ethnic cleansing did not begin in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it began in the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe in the 1940s. The victorious powers had witnessed the malign consequences of leaving large ethnic minorities in the midst of other people’s countries. They remembered the trouble caused by the Sudeten Germans. How Hitler’s Germany had exploited their nationalist grievances to break up Czechoslovakia in the late-1930s. Accordingly, it became the official policy of the Allies to eliminate ethnic German enclaves completely from Eastern Europe. Whole communities: families who had lived in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Russia for centuries; were ruthlessly uprooted and “repatriated” to Germany.

Few objected to this brutal exercise. In the minds of most people living in the war’s aftermath, Germany and the Germans had it coming. To secure a peaceful future “inconvenient” communities simply had to be moved on. What strikes us, at the remove of 75 years, as a deeply immoral policy, struck the people of the immediate post-war world as a tough but fair solution. After all, they had just spent 6 years proving the proposition that when reason and persuasion fail, and all-out war becomes the only option, then the over-riding priority is to do whatever is necessary to end it – as quickly as possible.

This was the moral environment in which the State of Israel took shape and was declared. Starting your clock in 1948, as if everything that happened in the preceding 15 years had no bearing on the behaviour of those determined to establish a secure national home for the Jewish people, is not a strategy with high prospects of success. The grim shadow of 1933, and all that followed, will always obscure the foundational sins – if sins they be – of the Israeli state.

For as long as the vast and unprecedented immorality of the Holocaust weighs upon the conscience of the World, the unethical conduct of the Israeli state will continue to be, if not forgiven, then unresisted.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 5 December 2019.

“Not The Labour Party We Once Knew.”

All Smiles Now: Claire Szabo is taking up her presidential role after serving as the CEO of Habitat For Humanity. Which is absolutely perfect! After KiwiBuild was so comprehensively mismanaged by Phil Twyford, the party has not only elected a new president from a thoroughly respectable not-for-profit, but one who has also actually managed to get real “affordable houses” built!

THIRTY YEARS AFTER he quit the party in disgust, a man calledMark has re-joined Labour. That’s remarkable. It’s also a tribute to the power of Jacinda Ardern, and to the strength of the hopes she has kindled. People who once wanted nothing more to do with Labour are returning to the fold. The Coalition Government’s failure to deliver on child poverty, affordable housing and a more equitable tax system has not disillusioned them. They are standing firm: willing Jacinda to succeed. Willing to cut her enough slack to secure a second term.

What remains to be seen is whether the Labour Party – thirty years on from 1989 – can fulfil the expectations of Jacinda’s hopeful recruits. After reading “Politik” editor Richard Harman’s report of the party’s annual conference, I’m doubtful. This is how he began:

“For over 30 years the Labour Party could have only dreamed of the conference it has just held. Labour has finally found its happy space; devoid of factional rivalries; bitter personality feuds or fundamental challenges from the party activists to the Parliamentary wing. Delegates who were there for the fights of the 80s or even more recently the Cunliffe challenge in 2012, were left reminiscing about the bad old days. Otherwise, the 400 or so who attended spent the weekend basking in the Whanganui sun and cheering and applauding their leadership with considerable enthusiasm. This was not the Labour Party we once knew.”

Harman has a gift for understatement! The entity he describes isn’t merely a far cry from “the Labour Party we once knew”, it barely qualifies as a political party at all! It certainly has nothing at all in common with the inveterately quarrelsome and rambunctious political movement that, for more than a century, accommodated the overwhelming majority of the New Zealand Left. A progressive party without factional rivalries, personality feuds, or party activists hankering to challenge the Parliamentary wing has lost every defining characteristic of a living left-wing movement.

Nowhere was this lack of living political sentiment more evident than in the election of Claire Szabo. The 300-400 delegates assembled at Whanganui (a number well down on previous conferences) opted to elect not a party president but a curriculum vitae. Indeed, it would be difficult to come up with a more perfect example of the modern political professional. Szabo’s first interview with the news media struck Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill as “a string of platitudes”. She was being kind.

The presidential election result did, however, serve to clarify what the Labour Party no longer sees itself as representing. Szabo’s principal challenger for the party presidency was Tane Phillips, a working-class Maori battler and trade union leader from Kawerau. It was people like Phillips who reclaimed every last one of the Maori seats for Labour in 2017. Their highly effective campaign (which drove the Maori Party from Parliament) spoke not to the Maori middle-class, but to the strong working-class communities in which most urban Maori still live. That sort of success would have been enough to get the Secretary of the Pulp & Paper Workers Union elected president in the old Labour Party – but not Jacinda’s new one.

Jacinda’s Labour Party would have had a pink fit if a woman of Szabo’s outstanding professional credentials failed to head-off a burly trade unionist. Certainly, all the bright young things currently polishing their own CVs would struggle to understand what sort of outfit they’d signed up to if degrees from Trinity College, Dublin and Harvard Business School could be outclassed by qualifications from the School of Hard Knocks!

Not that such an upset was ever on the cards. Well, not on the 56 E-Tu Union card votes carried around by the Labour affiliates’ superannuated bag-man, Paul Tollich, anyway. For more than three decades the combined votes of the Affiliates and the Women’s Council has dictated the outcome of annual conference ballots. Maybe, if the blue-collar Pulp & Paper Workers had affiliated themselves to the party, then things could have turned out differently? But, probably not. Mark, returning to Labour after 30 years – and finding “Tolly” still “doing the numbers” – would have known in an instant which horse to put his money on.

Anyway, it’s impossible to argue with the optics. Standing side-by-side, Szabo and Ardern speak eloquently of a party well-and-truly equipped for the third decade of the twenty-first century. The idea that politics might be a struggle between rulers and ruled; bosses and workers; rich and poor: well, that’s just so twentieth century! A modern – nay, a post-modern – political party is there to recruit and indoctrinate the personnel necessary to ensure an “orderly circulation of elites”. It’s slogans aren’t drawn off the placards of union picketers and Climate Strikers; they’re carefully crafted by copy-writers, and then focus-group tested by public relations professionals and advertising executives.

What’s more, Claire Szabo is taking up her presidential role after serving as the CEO of Habitat For Humanity. Which is absolutely perfect! After KiwiBuild was so comprehensively mismanaged by Phil Twyford, the party has not only elected a new president from a thoroughly respectable not-for-profit, but one who has also actually managed to get real “affordable houses” built!

When Mark walked out of the Labour Party in 1989 he was not alone. It was in May of that year that Jim Anderton led between a third and a half of the NZ Labour Party into “NewLabour” – soon to become the Alliance. Except, of course, Anderton’s NewLabour Party wasn’t really “new” at all. The imaginations of those who followed Anderton overflowed with visions of a rebirth of the sort of working-class power that enabled Michael Joseph Savage to transform a Depression-ravaged New Zealand into something the whole world could admire. But, it was not to be. No matter what Labour did to its working-class base, they never deserted the party. Like the loyal draught-horse, Boxer, in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, they soldiered-on. That’s why Anderton’s Alliance is long gone and Labour’s still here.

There’s a lot of dying in an old and trusted brand. While Labour’s leaders can still raise people’s hopes, they’ll always be in with a chance.

This essay was posted simultaneously on Bowalley Road and The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 3 December 2019.