One For The Road: David Cunliffe Reminds Labour’s Rank-And-File Why They Voted For Him.

 

WAS IT PURE COINCIDENCE? Just 48 hours before the opening of Labour’s annual conference in Palmerston North, David Cunliffe contributes a blinder of a speech to Parliament’s General Debate. Watching and listening to the speech it’s hard to avoid the impression that the man lumbered with all the responsibility for Labour’s catastrophic 2014 election defeat was using his speaking slot to send a message to the gathering rank-and-file.

 

“If you’ve been wondering why you voted for me back in 2013,” Cunliffe seemed to be saying, “it’s because, when I want to, I can unleash a speech like this.” He had no need to add: “Can anyone on Labour’s front bench say the same?” Because Labour’s members were already asking themselves that question.

 

It’s increasingly difficult to form a clear impression of Cunliffe the politician. Blackening Cunliffe’s name, and trashing his performance as party leader, have played a crucial role in enhancing the shaky legitimacy of the man who replaced him. It has also allowed the party to avoid examining too closely the contribution of other Labour MPs to the 2014 debacle. The stories of Cunliffe’s indecision; his inability to formulate a strategy and stick to it; his obsessive and exhausting micromanagement; these are all that’s needed, now, to explain away Labour’s worst electoral performance since 1922.

 

And Andrew Little (the man whose winning margin was less than 1 percent) has been able to emerge from this carefully constructed narrative as Labour’s unlikely saviour. After a long run of incredibly bad luck, Little is portrayed as Labour’s lucky break. A strong and stable contrast to the unaccountably hopeless Cunliffe.

 

Because that is the contradiction that so many of Cunliffe’s supporters still cannot reconcile: the before-Cunliffe and the after-Cunliffe. The coolly ruthless assassin of David Shearer’s hopes; the man who repeatedly reassured his supporters that he would be leader of the NZLP, and then proved as good as his word. Could he also be the hapless, accident-prone, foot-in-mouth Cunliffe who, as Leader of the Opposition, took Labour from 37 percent in the polls to 25 percent at the ballot-box?

 

Listen to Cunliffe’s speech carefully, and an answer, of sorts, emerges. National’s strategy, which turns out to be exactly the same strategy as that of the Crosby-Textor-advised Conservative parties in the UK and Canada, is to use the Right’s allies in the news media (and the blogs) to destroy the reputation of new Opposition leaders before the public has time to form a firm opinion of their own. Foot-tripped from the very beginning, and unable to establish any kind of secure footing, Cunliffe struggled constantly to tear off the labels being fastened to him from every quarter (including, tragically, by members of his own caucus).

 

Cunliffe does not dispute the facts of his less-than-stellar performance as Labour Leader. There are things he knows he should not have done – or, at least, done differently. All he was trying to say in his Wednesday-afternoon speech was, in essence, two things. First: “You weren’t wrong to make me your leader, because, when I’m good – I’m bloody good!” And second: “I know I stuffed a lot of things up, but, never forget, I had plenty of help!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 7 November 2015.

Standing For Something

Mephistopheles In A Savile Row Suit: Lynton Crosby (of the infamous Crosby/Textor firm of right-wing political consultants) conducts a master-class on behalf of the Patchwork Foundation. Crosby's catch-phrase "When in doubt - stand for something" is one the Left would do well to ponder.

 

“WHEN IN DOUBT, stand for something.” So says Lynton Crosby, the man who, according to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, “really won the election for the Tories”. On the face of it, Mr Crosby’s catchphrase appears to be a statement of the bleeding, bloody obvious. But, the fact that he has had to reiterate it again and again over the course of his long and highly successful career as a political campaign adviser, strongly suggests that to a great many people in politics the need to “stand for something” isn’t obvious at all.

 

An old friend of mine, a Labour Party activist in Glasgow – God help him – was railing at me about the shallowness of the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) candidates and their paucity of policy. He’d just witnessed good Labour MPs, who had stood by their constituents through the bitter years of Thatcherism, wiped out by callow youths barely old enough to shave. It wasn’t right. It simply shouldn’t have happened.

 

But what did Labour stand for? That was the question which so many of Scottish Labour’s former supporters could no longer answer. It’s why so many of them voted for the SNP. Because the Nationalists unquestionably stood for something. Not just for independence – although that was hugely important – but for the sort of society that more and more Scots have come to believe only independence can bring.

 

Crucially, for my embittered friend in Glasgow, that’s the society which Labour’s founding heroes – like the Scotsman, Keir Hardie – promised to build. The society that Tony Blair effectively cancelled when he persuaded the Labour Party to remove the in/famous  “Clause IV” from its constitution.

 

Clause IV had promised:

 

To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

 

That’s what Labour used to stand for. That’s what hundreds of thousands of Scots believe a party of the working-class should still stand for. That Labour no longer stands for anything remotely resembling Clause IV is why the SNP’s derisive nickname “Red Tories” was able to wreak such historic havoc upon the electoral map of Scotland.

 

After defining what they stand for, the next thing Lynton Crosby advises his conservative clients to do is attempt to define what their opponents stand for. The effectiveness of this strategy may be seen in the way Labour’s democratic socialist objectives have been made to stand for (at best) union tyranny and gross inefficiency, or (at worst) secret policemen and concentration camps.

 

“The socialist objectives of Clause IV confuse ends with means,” the Blairites helpfully parroted throughout the early 1990s, “the triumph of Labour’s values cannot be secured by the methods of the now defunct Eastern Bloc.” As if the UK’s welfare state, its National Health Service (NHS) and nationalised industries were in any way comparable to the totalitarian Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. As if the privatisation of the UK’s water supply and railway network has been a roaring success. As if the hollowing-out of the NHS (under both Conservative and Labour governments) has made Britons healthier or happier.

 

What, then, do the Tories stand for? Supplying a politically persuasive answer to this, the most important of questions, is how Lynton Crosby really earns his money. The most truthful answer: the Conservative Party stands for the untrammelled right of those already in possession of wealth and power to make and acquire more; would not play well with “the man down there on the corner waiting for the bus”. Even so, Mr Crosby’s and his ilk’s description of Conservative aims and objectives is only slightly altered.

 

What contemporary conservatism stands for is the right of persons possessing the requisite energy and talent to acquire wealth and power without unwarranted obstruction or restriction. In a funny sort of way, this formulation is not so very far from “Old Labour’s” promise to “secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry.” The difference, of course, is that the Tories expect the workers to secure these on their own.

 

Labour used to be feared by the people the Conservative Party represents because it stood ready to expose this “you can make it on your own” mantra for the cruel con it has always been. That Labour was so easily defeated in England and Scotland last Friday is almost entirely due to the fact that it no longer offers workers any answer except “make it on your own”.

 

That is Mr Crosby’s greatest triumph: not only helping the Tories to remember what they stand for; but making Labour forget.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 12 May 2015.

National's Sinful Blunder

Christine Rankin: Utterly unfit for the job.

"THE naïve, the almost childish brutality, with which the chiefs of the National Party fell upon power may seem quite surprising, until one remembers how famished for power they were, and with what an innocency of experience they faced the world about them."

That was how the New Zealand historian, Dr J.C. Beaglehole, writing twelve years after the event, in 1961, described the transition from Labour to National in 1949.

Nine impotent years in opposition – the longest stretch since the 1940s – coupled with last year’s emphatic election win, has inspired in today’s National Party a similar desire to make a bonfire of their predecessors’ most detested policies.

This time, however, the Tories’ auto da fé of Labourism is taking a little longer to get going.

The Right has been in no position to indulge in the wholesale destruction of Labour’s policies for the very simple reason that National only secured its electoral success by guaranteeing in advance a large chunk of the Clark-Cullen legacy.

Certainly, there have been examples of Tory pettiness – Anne Tully’s cancellation of Labour’s healthy schools programme springs to mind, as does Tony Ryall’s unjustified dismissal of Otago DHB Chair, Richard Thompson.

In general terms, however, the first few months of John Key’s reign have seen the sage (if cynical) advice of the Party’s Australian advisors, Crosby/Textor, continue to hold sway. Mr Key won the trust of New Zealanders by presenting National as the non-threatening alternative to a tired and discredited government. Forfeit that trust, and his government’s lease on power will be short.

Mr Key, at least, required little in the way of prompting. His sensitivity to the electorate’s longing for national unity, and to their need for reassurance in the face of globalised economic calamity, has been impressive. Especially well received has been his successful outreach to the Maori Party, and the inclusive spirit of the Jobs Summit. The Government’s unprecedented popularity is due almost entirely to the political adroitness of these prime-ministerial touches.

But, National’s stratospheric poll-ratings may yet turn out to be Mr Key’s undoing. They have imbued his cabinet colleagues with a partisan triumphalism bordering on insolence, and encouraged the very dangerous belief that the Key-led Government is politically unassailable. Jonathan Coleman’s lofty indifference to the plight of public broadcasting is but one example this heedlessness. Murray McCully’s roughing-up of MFAT, and his wilful demoralisation of NZAid, another.

National’s right-wing coalition partner, Act, is similarly interpreting the Government’s 50 percent-plus poll-rating as an endorsement of its own far-right policy initiatives. As Minister of Local Government, the Act leader, Rodney Hide, appears determined to drive through his own version of the Auckland "super-city" – spurning genuine consultation with the people of the region, and heedless of the proposal’s growing unpopularity.

With each passing day, Crosby/Textor’s advice: to safeguard the people’s trust in Key’s leadership; and to maintain the Government’s non-threatening stance vis-à-vis the average punter for as long as possible; grows fainter and fainter.

To be fair to National, the sheer weight and volume of the decisions that must be made in a faltering economy, and the necessity of preserving the good opinion of the international credit-rating agencies, cannot help but over-ride the purely electoral considerations of even the most astute of the Government’s political advisers. It is the fate of every administration that, sooner or later, good governance and good politics will come to a parting of the ways.

What Mr Key needs to keep in mind is that most thinking voters understand this, and are generally reluctant to punish a government for doing the right thing – even when it is manifestly to the electorate’s short-term disadvantage. What the intelligent voter will not forgive, however, are political decisions that owe nothing to the irresistible force of economic necessity, nor the dictates of good governance, but which are simply and crassly partisan.

The appointment of Christine Rankin to the Families Commission falls squarely into this category. Ms Rankin, by aligning herself with some of New Zealand’s most reactionary individuals and organisations, and by adding her voice to those insisting that children be denied the same legal protection against physical assault as adults, has rendered herself utterly unfit for the job.

By offering this sop to the Far Right, Mr Key has diminished both himself and his government.

Worse than a sin – it’s a blunder.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 15 May 2009.