A Political King.

Birds Of A Feather: If Edward VIII had been a less enamoured sex-slave to Wallis Simpson and a more convinced fascist, it is entirely possible that he could have completely upended the British constitution. Royal words, and deeds, still matter - as the political impact of the Maori King's, Tuheitia Paki's, intervention earlier this week attests.

 

IT’S AN INTRIGUING COUNTERFACTUAL to contemplate. What if Edward VIII had been a less enamoured sex-slave to Wallis Simpson and a more convinced fascist? It is entirely possible that a highly politicised King, ably assisted by Winston Churchill (who, in real life, fought right up until Edward’s abdication speech to keep him on the throne) David Lloyd-George (Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I) and Sir Oswald Mosley (leader of the British Union of Fascists) could have completely upended the British constitution.

 

Early in 1936 Edward had given hope to millions of unemployed workers, and heart palpitations to the Conservative Government of Stanley Baldwin, by declaring that “something must be done” about the appalling poverty he had just witnessed on a royal visit to South Wales.

 

British monarchs were not supposed to say such things. But, let us suppose that Edward had continued to speak out against poverty and mass unemployment. Let us further suppose that his younger brother, George, the Duke of Kent, had used his contacts with Nazi-sympathising German aristocrats to forge an alliance with like-minded members of the British upper-classes? With the additional assistance of the brilliant outcast politicians mentioned above – all of them desperate to restore their dwindling political fortunes – a more intelligent and dynamic Edward VIII would have had every chance of successfully carrying-off a royal coup d’état.

 

Even today there are elements within the British establishment who dread the ascension of the Prince of Wales. Unlike his remarkable mother, who has maintained the constitutional proprieties impeccably for the whole of her 64-year reign, it is feared that King Charles III may not be content to remain above the political fray. Imagine a King who tweeted? A King who to read his own Speech from the Throne? In the throes of another economic crisis, and unwilling to be ‘rescued’ by a political class they both despise and distrust, what might Charles III’s subjects not do?

 

What has prompted these musings on the residual power of the monarchy? Obviously, it was the extraordinary, and apparently impromptu, political observations of Tuheitia Paki, the Maori King. The latter’s disparaging remarks about the Labour Party, coupled with his de facto endorsement of the Maori and Mana parties, have garnered the Kingitanga movement considerable media coverage. It is a matter of some significance that, to date, media coverage has offered little in the way of criticism of the King’s actions. Maori and Pakeha journalists, alike, have not thought it necessary to condemn Tuheitia for stepping into the fraught arena of electoral politics.

 

The NZ First Leader, Winston Peters, has had no such qualms. “It is disappointing the Maori King has been used in such a sad way,” said Mr Peters. “There is no way his predecessor, the Maori Queen, would ever have done that.”

 

Perhaps not. But was his predecessor’s reticence born of what she perceived to be her purely ceremonial status? Or, was her silence on electoral matters merely a concession to the prevailing political realities of her reign. For the past 153 years, the Kingitanga has maintained a respectful distance from the Settler State. This is hardly surprising: military invasion and land confiscation tends to dampen even the most courageous people’s political ardour.

 

The Kingitanga’s long-standing recognition of the Settler State’s power to do it harm, indicated by its dignified silence, has been misinterpreted by Pakeha politicians as indigenous acceptance of the rules of constitutional monarchy. Like his British counterpart’s, the Maori monarch’s status is regarded as purely symbolic and ceremonial. That he or she might aspire to being an independent political actor, wielding real political power, is not something Pakeha New Zealand has seriously contemplated since 1863.

 

Much has changed since that violent period of our history. The Settler State is no longer the predatory beast that assailed the earthworks at Rangiriri. The need for Kingitanga reticence is not so great now as it was during the reign of Dame Te Atairangikaahu, King Tuheitia’s predecessor. In his keynote speech to mark the tenth anniversary of his ascension, the Maori King spoke of Maori exercising dual sovereignty over Aotearoa-New Zealand by 2025. This is less constitutional monarchy than it is constitutional revolution.

 

Royal words matter. If you doubt it, then just imagine the effect on Jeremy Corbyn’s fortunes if Queen Elizabeth II declared herself a life-long Labour supporter.

 

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, 26 August 2016.

Some Brief Remarks On The Use Of The Word "Austerity".

Over-Ruling Market Forces: Middle Class housewives queue to collect their rationed goods and services. In the first Age of Austerity (1945-1951) the newly elected Labour Government made sure that the inevitable discomforts and shortages of the immediate post-war period were shared equitably across the population. In the second Age of Austerity (2010-Present) precipitated by the Global Financial Crisis, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, off-loaded the cost of bailing-out capitalism on to the shoulders of the young and the poor.

 

SOME WORDS ENJOY a second lease on political life. Although, it’s almost never the case that a political term retains its original meaning the second time around. The word “austerity” is a good example.

 

Originally, the word was used to characterise the period in British history immediately after World War II. The Age of Austerity is remembered as a time of economic stringency when food was rationed, luxuries unheard of outside all but the most exclusive circles, and housing was in desperately short supply.

 

There was, of course, a very good reason for all this. Great Britain had just emerged from a six year war in which, for a few crucial months, the very existence of the British nation hung in the balance. Britain had come through, but not before hundreds-of-thousands of her citizens had been killed or injured, and tens-of-thousands of her houses, factories, ports and other key pieces of infrastructure had been destroyed. To win, the British had been forced to engage in a prolonged period of unprecedented military and economic effort. In attempting to pay for the war, Britain had liquidated nearly all of her financial assets and borrowed heavily from the Americans. By 1945 the cupboard was very bare indeed.

 

What this meant was that Britain had to manage what meagre resources it still possessed (or could borrow) extremely frugally. Consumer demand was tightly constrained – both by rationing and by continuing the tight wartime economic controls. It was not a joyous time. Life was hard. Indeed, in the fat years that followed, many British people looked back on the Age of Austerity and shuddered.

 

If you think all these measures sound a lot like the so-called “austerity” policies implemented by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, between 2010 and 2015, then you really need to think again. Because, historically-speaking, the two periods could not be more different.

 

In 1945 the British Labour Party was elected in a landslide to implement what they openly described as a “socialist” manifesto. The immediate effect of Labour’s election was that, from the very outset, the “peace” – at least in its early years – was to be a time of social equality. Inherited wealth was targeted quite ruthlessly and the near confiscatory taxes on high incomes that had been levied during the war persisted. The distribution of goods and services was organised not by “market forces” but according to need. For the upper and middle classes this over-ruling of the market was utterly unacceptable. For centuries, the ownership of wealth had conferred all manner of advantages: social, economic and political. But for the first 5 years after the war the upper classes ability to avail themselves of their customary advantages was severely constrained.

 

There may, therefore, be an element of cruel historical irony in the Conservative Party’s political appropriation of the word “austerity”. Because Osborne’s response to the Global Financial Crisis and the huge debts it had forced the British Government to incur was very different from that of Clement Attlee’s socialists. Rather than sharing the burden of recovery equally, Osborne piled virtually all of it onto the shoulders of the poor and the young. This was achieved by imposing swingeing cuts on public expenditure – especially spending on the unemployed, beneficiaries, students and even, unconscionably, the disabled.

 

The original Age of Austerity was a time of enforced social equality, Osborne’s austerity was an exercise in looking after the interests of the well-to-do at the expense of the poor. Unlike Labour’s post-war Britain, market forces were in no way restrained and all the advantages of wealth were taken by those fortunate enough to possess them.

 

The other significant difference between the late 1940s and the post-GFC years is that, in 1945, the world’s great creditor nation, the USA, had to exercise a measure of common sense in recovering the money it had lent during the war. The Red Army loomed over Europe just waiting for poverty and starvation to drive the peoples of the West into the arms of soviet-style socialism. The Americans were careful ensure that the anticipated social and economic collapse did not eventuate.

 

How different it was after the crises of 2008-09. Governments had been forced to borrow the money needed to keep capitalism afloat and the financial institutions who had purchased the instruments of their own rescue demanded the full repayment of every Pound and/or Euro that they were owed. And this time there was no Soviet threat to moderate the financiers’ greed, or to convince them that unregulated market forces are, politically, their own worst enemy.

 

Austerity, then, possesses a very different meaning, depending on whether it is being used to describe the enforced social equality of the post-war years, or the punitive imposition of the costs of rescuing capitalism upon those sectors of British and European society least able to bear them.

 

Greece, according to Radio New Zealand has been issued with an “austere” set of economic demands. Seldom has the true meaning of a word been so carelessly traduced. What is being asked of Greece bears little resemblance to anything “plain and unadorned” unless it is plain and unadorned cruelty.

 

Between 1945 and 1951 the British learned to live “without unnecessary things”, but they were not forced to starve on their knees so that their creditors could stay on their feet.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 1 July 2015.

What Game Of Thrones Can Teach Us About Magna Carta

Under Duress: In the end, John Plantagenet had nothing but bad options to choose from. Cornered by his barons at Runnymede, about 20 miles west of London, and chivvied by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, King John affixed his seal to the charter which, its high-flown promises about freedom, justice and the rule of law notwithstanding, was drawn up to ensure that government of the barons, by the barons, for the barons, would endure.

 

“FOR THE WATCH!” With that grim cry, the conspirators of Castle Black struck down their Lord Commander. How fitting that the assassination of the fictional Jon Snow should coincide with the 800th anniversary of a legal document sealed at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. Why fitting? Because the breath-taking brutality and treachery of Game of Thrones offers us a much truer guide to the political realities underpinning Magna Carta (as that legal document is now known) than the pious platitudes offered up by its latter-day celebrants.

 

The power of Game of Thrones, and the likely explanation for its worldwide popularity, is its clear-eyed refusal to pretend that good character and effective policy are somehow inextricable. The very real John Plantagenet, like the fictional Jon Snow, was a man confronted with a multitude of poor options – none of which were likely to significantly improve his position.

 

George R.R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, presents Jon Snow to his readers as a man of honour and courage who, in spite (or is it because) of these qualities, is required to make his choices from a set of dwindling military and political options – each one carrying a higher risk of death, either in battle or by assassination. With every decision Jon Snow makes, his personal circumstances grow more perilous, until, eventually, nothing remains to him but fatal choices.

 

Very few historians (if any) would attempt to present John Plantagenet as an honourable man. The historical cliché of “Bad King John” (so unlike his “good” brother, the chivalrous King Richard the Lionheart) does possess a reasonably solid foundation in historical fact. With brutality to match the very worst scenes in Game of Thrones, John ordered the deaths of the young Welsh noblemen sent to his court as hostages to their fathers’ good behaviour. And, to prevent her spreading rumours (which were, almost certainly, true) that he had personally murdered his own nephew, Arthur, John ordered Maud de Braose, along with her eldest son, to be shut up in the dungeon of Corfe Castle and starved to death.

 

John Plantagenet was, clearly, no Jon Snow when it came to matters of good character. He did, however, have much in common with the fictional hero when it came to poor political options. The vast Angevin Empire, which John inherited from his father, King Henry II, and his formidable mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Cersei eat your heart out!) was under constant pressure from barons loyal to the French king. To hold onto his family’s territories across the English Channel, men and money were urgently required – and they did not come cheap.

 

If John had refused to defend his inheritance, he would have been in all kinds of trouble. (His enemies already called him John “Lackland”, or, even worse, “Softsword”!) But, in raising the resources required to defend the empire, he was bound to displease his feudal support-base, the barons. Indeed, it was John’s success as an administrator – and tax collector – that incited his barons (especially those who owed him lots of money) to rebel.

 

And these barons were very far from being the lordly defenders of the rights of freeborn Englishmen that the celebrants of Magna Carta like to paint them. On their own lands they wielded the same sort of brutal authority as the murderous Bolton family displays in Game of Thrones. One could even argue that it was the royal encroachments on baronial power represented by John’s administrative innovations (he invented to post of Coroner, the “Crown’s Man”) that made his rebellious barons so determined to roll back their King’s expanding authority.

 

Good man or bad man, John Plantagenet, like Jon Snow, was ultimately left with nothing but bad options to choose from. Cornered by his barons and their “bannermen” at Runnymede, about 20 miles west of London, and chivvied by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, King John affixed his seal to the charter which, its high-flown promises about freedom, justice and the rule of law notwithstanding, was drawn up to ensure that government of the barons, by the barons, for the barons, would endure.

 

Jon Snow over-ruled his enemies in the Night’s Watch – and paid the price. John Plantagenet bowed to his barons’ assembled swords – and survived. Three months later, at John’s insistence, their long-winded charter was annulled by the Pope.

 

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, 19 Junes 2015.

Parcels Of Rogues

All The King's Men: Redcoats await the onslaught of Bonnie Prince Charlie's clansmen, 1745. The future of Scotland has never been a casual matter for England - just as the future of the Ukraine has never been a casual matter for Russia.

 

IT’S OVER 300 YEARS since a “parcel of rogues” signed away Scotland’s status as an independent nation. The Act of Union of 1707 created the “united” kingdom of “Great Britain”. Two crowns are one crown too many, said the English, and the Scots were “persuaded” to agree.
 

According to the distinguished British historian, Simon Schama: “What began as a hostile merger, would end in a full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world ... it was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history.”
 

 “[H]ostile merger”? Why were the English so determined to put an end to Scottish independence?
 

To understand England’s motives we need look no further than the situation currently unfolding in the Crimea and Ukraine. When you share a border with a nation unnervingly sympathetic to powers than wish you no good, “independence” can very quickly become a dirty word.
 

In 1707 the Catholic monarchy of France was still offering sanctuary to the descendants of James Stuart, the deposed king of England and Scotland. While Scottish independence persisted there was always a risk that England would wake up one morning and find King James VIII of Scotland, backed by French bayonets, camped along its northern border.
 

England was willing to spend a lot of money to dispel that strategic nightmare.
 

As Robbie Burns so succinctly put it:
 

We were bought and sold

For English gold

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation

 

And, when English gold was no longer enough, England was more than willing to spill Scottish blood. In 1715, and again, most famously, in 1745, when James Stuart’s grandson, “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, raised the clans against its German-speaking Hanoverian king, George II, England’s answer was swift and brutal. Scotland had been bought fair and square – and, By God! She was going to stay bought!
 

It’s highly likely the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, experienced very similar feelings as he watched the government of bought-and-paid-for Viktor Yanukovych cut a disgraceful deal with, and then run from, the far-right nationalist protesters occupying Kiev’s Independence Square. If Ukrainian “independence” meant waking up one morning to find the European Union, backed by NATO bayonets, camped along his southern border, then, from President Putin’s perspective, the word “independence” needed some … redefinition.
 

The rag-tag regime installed by the Kiev protesters may not like President Putin’s idea of Ukrainian independence, but they can hardly have been surprised by it. Russia was born in the Ukraine. The ancient cities of Novgorod and Kiev providing the economic and administrative hubs around which the Russia state took form. Ukrainian independence – at least in its post-Soviet guise – is an accident of history.
 

The more thoughtful sort of American (which unfortunately excludes nearly all of its political leaders) understands the essential fragility of Ukrainian “independence” very well. Here’s how the leading US strategic forecasting agency, Stratfor, sums up the situation:
 

“Ukraine is as important to Russian national security as Scotland is to England or Texas is to the United States. In the hands of an enemy, these places would pose an existential threat to all three countries … And given that, the future of Ukraine is never a casual matter for them.”

"Russia has only two friends in the world - its army and its navy."

 

Just as the future of Scotland can never be a casual matter for England.
 

Or the future of the entire Western Hemisphere can ever be a casual matter for the United States.
 

It was President James Monroe who, in 1823, gave voice to the strategic doctrine that would forever after bear his name. Addressing Europe’s imperial powers on behalf of the American people, Monroe declared:
 

“[W]e should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
 

In May 1962, it was the Monroe Doctrine which underpinned the Kennedy Administration’s demand that the Russians remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba. In the 1980s, with much less justification, President Ronald Reagan invoked it against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
 

The United States friends and allies maintained a respectful silence as it went about securing its “near abroad”. The Russian Federation, by all appearances, has not been so fortunate.
 

“Russia has only two friends in the world,” said Tsar Alexander III, “its army and its navy.”
 

If history is any guide – two is all she needs.
 

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, 7 March 2014.

Facing Fearful Odds: A Reply To John Pagani

"You Turn If You Want To": But Margaret Thatcher, Britain's "Iron Lady", was not for turning. And that is the lesson John Pagani has failed to draw from her career. Powerful ideas, coherently organised and ruthlessly implemented, are extraordinarily difficult to resist. Only when the Left evinces the confidence in its principles that Mrs Thatcher had in hers, will the Right be decisively defeated.

JOHN PAGANI’s intriguing riff on Thatcherism and the importance of being on the right side of history has got me worried. It’s not that I think he’s wrong – there is much to be learned from Margaret Thatcher’s career. What worries me is that he’s learned the wrong lessons.

Mr Pagani characterises Thatcher as a politician of principle who was able to achieve great things for her country because, having set her course, she could rely upon the surge of History’s tide to carry her forward. Of course he’s only able to say such things because he knows how the story ends, which, from an historian’s point of view, is cheating. In 1979, when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister, the ‘surge of History’s tide’, far from favouring the Right, was assumed to flowing, with ever-growing force, to the Left.

For many Conservatives the image which best summed up the mission Margaret Thatcher had assigned herself was that of Horatius on the bridge. She was willing to be the “Last Tory”, just as Horatius was willing to be the “Last Roman”, denying passage to the implacable enemies of a great, if faltering, empire and averring, by her readiness to stand and fight, the power of Lord Macaulay’s oft-quoted lines:

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his gods

When Mrs Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition in 1975 the British nation was in crisis. It’s working-class was pushing hard against the crumbling structures of tradition and privilege in hopes of building a more rational and humane society. Twelve million strong, the trade unions had already seen off the Conservative Government of Edward Heath and had imposed upon a startled Labour Party a manifesto openly calling for the nationalisation of the “commanding heights” of the British economy and the introduction of “industrial democracy”. More than a few on the right of British politics feared that just one more king hit from the Left would see British Capitalism go down for the count.

But if Britain’s manufacturers were resigned to the state relieving them of their responsibilities, and her middle-classes already half-way convinced that the manifold absurdities of their existence (so brilliantly satirised in the BBC’s 1976-79 series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin) had rendered them unfit to rule, there was still one, rock-solid bastion of British capitalism that was not willing to go gentle into that good night of socialism – the City of London.

The financiers of the City of London constituted the Imperial Guard of British Capitalism. It was extractive and parasitic, and cared not one whit for the vast workforces employed in Britain’s industrial heartlands. The City of London had not just grown alongside the British Empire, it had, in a very real sense created it. And the tribute of that empire, in the form of dividends and interest, continued to pile up in its vaults.

And the men of the City did not lack for resources. Above all else, the City was a vast and complex network – and its reach was long. It extended into Fleet Street and Oxbridge and the Civil Service. The younger brothers of City men could be found in the upper echelons of the armed forces, and, more disturbingly, in the ranks of MI5 and MI6. Descendants of Duke William’s knights, and of Henry VIII’s “new men”, the ones who ended up with Catholicism’s English acres; the families who ran the City of London had always known what to take – and how to keep it.

As Richard Crockett shows in his book Thinking The Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983, it was men of the City who bank-rolled the so-called “New Right” and underwrote its ideological factories. And it was from these that the “new” ideas flowed: to the news media; to the universities; and to the Conservative Party faction, led by the cadaverous Sir Keith Joseph and his ambitious young protégée, Margaret Thatcher, which was determined to prevent the Left from delivering British Capitalism's coup de grace.

But, of course, they were not new ideas at all. Mr Pagani, having pumped himself full of Thatcherism's anabolic steroids, waxes eloquent about the “paleolithic”political tactics advocated by “left reactionaries” – all the time forgetting that the ideas Mrs Thatcher championed and the social order she constructed had already been tested to destruction in the hundred years between 1830 and 1930. Like the US officer in Vietnam,who was willing to “destroy the village in order to save it”, Mrs Thatcher was prepared to let Britain’s productive industrial base go under rather than see the City of London subjected to effective regulation.

And that refusal continues to exact its toll on British society. The consequences of the City’s unregulated greed are today as clear to Britons as Wall Street’s recklessness is to Americans. Mrs Thatcher’s historic achievement was not to show how far one can travel when History is pushing you forward, but how long History’s progress can be impeded by someone relentlessly pushing back. In the 33 years since Mrs Thatcher was elected, British society has not become more rational or more humane – quite the reverse. The breakthrough that so nearly occurred in the 1970s remains to be made, and only the Left can make it.

And that’s the lesson Mr Pagani failed to draw from his cinematic sojourn with Meryl-as-Maggie. The extraordinary power of ideas, and how far a politician and her party can go when those ideas are marshalled into a coherent set of economic, social and political objectives.

Far from advising New Zealand's Labour leader, David Shearer, to shun the looming battle on the Auckland Waterfront, Mr Pagani should be urging him to strap on his armour and unsheath his sword. Mrs Thatcher never ran away from a fight, which is why she was able to win over and over and over again. Nor did she have the slightest patience for those who advocated poll-driven ideological U-turns.

“You turn if you want to,” she famously told the Conservative Party’s doubters and worriers, “the Lady’s not for turning.”

Oh that David Shearer should prove as willing to go into battle for the long-delayed advance of socialism, as Britain’s “Iron Lady” did for the sterile ashes of her capitalist fathers and the high-rise temples of their greedy London gods.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Tony Blair No Guide For Shearer's Labour

First and Second of the Third Way: Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson felt obliged to destroy the British Labour Party in order to save it. This is precisely NOT what David Shearer and his team should do.

TONY BLAIR transformed the British Labour Party by means of root-and-branch reform. His priorities were as clear as they were ruthless. Disable the party. Re-write its rule-book. And, most importantly, make sure Labour’s MPs were accountable to nobody but themselves.

Blair’s reforms were driven by the strategic thinking of his chief henchman, Peter Mandelson. In essence, Mandelson’s strategy boiled down to just three, fundamental, political insights:

One. Since the British working-class has no serious political alternative to Labour, the party can safely ignore its interests.

Two. Since no party can be elected without the support of the British middle-classes, and since these have multiple electoral options, Labour must not, under any circumstances, advance policies that might upset middle-class voters.

Three. To retain the support of middle-class voters, Labour must never allow its political rivals to out-bid it on matters relating to “sound” economic and social policy.

Blair’s and Mandelson’s strategy made a brutal kind of sense in the light of the British Labour Party’s recent history, and within the wider context of British electoral politics.

The party had endured years of bitter factional strife, with those who regarded Labour as the last bastion of working-class resistance to Thatcherism fighting a desperate rear-guard action against the bleak electoral logic of the “modernisers” analysis.

That logic was, of course, underpinned by the First-Past-the-Post electoral system, which allowed the Conservative Party to win large parliamentary majorities in spite of attracting considerably less than half of the popular vote.

Labour’s “modernisers” also had to factor-in the impact of globalisation on the size of Britain’s industrial working-class (the core of both the traditional Labour vote and the more militant trade unions) and the more recent ideological triumph of capitalism over its Soviet rival.

IN 2011, the strategic choices confronting the New Zealand Labour Party’s new leader, David Shearer, are very different to those which taxed Tony Blair in the mid-1990s.

Rather than a fractious, activist and openly antagonistic party organisation, Mr Shearer inherits a party in which rank-and-file members have sunk to the level of what one wit describes as “MP fan clubs”. At its upper levels, the party is caught in the grip of a sclerotic, self-selecting oligarchy based in Labour’s insular and largely unaccountable sector-groups. In effect, Mr Shearer’s Labour Party is rapidly disabling itself. His first and most urgent priority is to kick it back into life.

To do this he must, like Blair, re-write Labour’s rule-book. Not to marginalise the party and insulate the caucus from its influence, but to do exactly the opposite. Mr Shearer needs to grow his party. At 6,000 members, Labour is only slightly bigger than the Greens. If it is to re-claim the Treasury Benches it must once again become a mass party, with a membership measured in the tens-of-thousands. And that cannot happen unless those members are equipped with real powers. These include the power to determine (and not merely “contribute” to the making of) party policy. The power to choose and rank the people on Labour’s Party List – as the Green Party members do. And, lastly, the power to choose their party’s leader. (Either directly, by a postal ballot of the whole membership, or, as the British do, through an electoral college composed of the rank-and-file, affiliated organisations, and the Parliamentary Caucus.)

Unless Mr Shearer moves swiftly to force rule-changes along these lines, all of his rhetoric about wanting to “listen” to New Zealanders will ring hollow. The most effective way to “hear” what ordinary Kiwis have to say about their country’s future, is to encourage them to join your political party by promising to translate their ideas into policy. Mr Shearer needs to convince the tens-of-thousands of Labour members who have walked away from the party that he’s committed to a future in which rank-and-file votes not only shape what Labour stands for, but who stands for Labour.

The fate of Damien O’Connor points the way. Rejecting the influence of Labour’s oligarchs over the content and ranking of the Party List, Mr O’Connor staked his future on an all-or-nothing bid for the West Coast-Tasman seat. The Coasters were only too happy to reward his courage. On 26 November, alone of all Labour’s candidates, it was Mr O’Connor who took a seat off the National Party – and by a handsome majority.

Mr Shearer has another great advantage over Tony Blair. He’s assumed Labour’s leadership in a world embittered and angry at neoliberalism’s botched ideological recipes. In 1998 Peter Mandelson infamously remarked that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. In 2011, far too many people are drowning in the rich’s filth for any sensible Labour leader to utter such dangerous apostasy.

To win in 2014, David Shearer need only steer Labour in precisely the opposite direction to that of Tony Blair.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 December 2011.

Terrorist or Fall-Guy?

Seize him!: King James's men arrest Guy Fawkes in the "undercroft" directly beneath the House of Lords on 5 November 1605. Hidden beneath a screen of firewood were 36 barrels of gunpowder. Should the foiling of the most audacious "terrorist" plot in British history be attributed purely to good fortune, or was the dramatic "discovery" of "gunpowder, treason and plot" engineered by the authorities to further their own political purposes? (The Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Painting by Henry Perronet Briggs, 1823.)

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

HAD IT COME OFF, the "Gunpowder Plot" of 1605 would have ranked alongside 9/11 as one of the most audacious and world-altering terrorist attacks in human history.

To mark the 400th anniversary of the Plot, a British television network constructed a replica of the 17th Century Houses of Parliament, installed the 36 barrels of gunpowder Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators are said to have hidden in the basement, and ignited them. The resulting massive explosion completely destroyed the replica structure. Explosive experts told the programme’s producers that anyone within 100 metres of the detonation point would have been killed instantly.

So, the target of the Catholic Gunpowder Plotters – the Protestant King of Scotland and England, James Stuart – would certainly have been killed if the barrels of crude explosive had been allowed to do their job. The British Isles would have been plunged into civil war, and the plotters’ ultimate aim – the restoration of Catholic ascendancy – may even have been achieved.

What fascinates me about the Gunpowder Plot, however, is that almost from the moment the plotters were apprehended, tortured, tried and executed, their contemporaries started questioning the truth of the Government’s version of events.

From the very beginning, these "5/11 Truthers" – as they’d be called today – cast doubt upon the Government’s key assertion: that it was entirely ignorant of the plot.

According to the King’s chief minister, the first Earl of Salisbury, Robert Cecil, if one of the plotters hadn’t sent a letter to a Catholic Lord, warning him to stay away from the Houses of Parliament on 5th November, not only the King, but the whole House of Lords and the entire House of Commons would have been blown to Kingdom Come.

The 17th Century "Truthers" – like their 21st Century counterparts – weren’t buying it.

Everybody in London knew that Cecil (the son of Elizabeth I’s long-serving chief minister, Sir William Cecil) had been schooled in the arts of statecraft and intelligence-gathering not only by his father, but by Elizabeth’s spymaster, and the man regarded by many as the Father of England’s "Secret State" – Sir Francis Walsingham.

Walsingham had masterminded the operation which resulted in the execution of Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. The so-called "Babington Plot" had been run almost from beginning to end by Walsingham himself, in order to snare Mary in an act of treason. The 5/11 "Truthers" argued that the Gunpowder Plot was no different.

In a capital city swarming with Cecil’s spies, they said, it simply beggared belief that the ever-increasing number of Catholic plotters (most of whom would have been under surveillance) and the constantly postponed plot (outbreaks of disease in London had led to the date of the Royal Opening of Parliament being changed several times) went entirely undetected by James’ spymasters.

Like the 9/11 Truthers, the 5/11 doubters argued that a terrible act of terrorism (or, in the case of the Gunpowder Plot, attempted terrorism) was just what the Government of the Day "needed" to further its foreign and domestic policy goals.

The case both would make is that the destruction of the Twin Towers (or the only-just-averted elimination of England’s Protestant rulers) were deliberately engineered by the "secret statesmen" of 21st Century America (or 17th Century England) to persuade their populations that "drastic measures" were necessary to protect the State from its terrorist foes.

Misdirection’s an old and dirty game – as old as politics itself. Robert Cecil learned it from his father and Walsingham, who’d simply followed the example set by Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who had learned it in the palace corridors of Renaissance Italy, where the heirs of the Roman Empire practised the dark arts of treachery and deception with a skill only centuries of hands-on experience can impart.

And, of course, it was Walsingham’s and Cecil’s heirs who taught the Americans how to play. The Office of Strategic Services – which President Roosevelt established during the Second World War (and which later morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency) was tutored by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.

Something to think about as you set a match to the blue touch-paper this November night.

Was Guido Fawkes a terrorist – or was he simply the spymasters’ fall-guy?

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 5 November 2010.