WILL ANYBODY IN the Labour Party learn anything from this
latest debacle? It seems doubtful, especially coming so soon after the last
debacle! (The 2018 Summer School Scandal.) Nigel Haworth, who didn’t so much
fall on his sword this morning (11/9/19) as get thrust very roughly into it,
has gone, but the malady lingers on.
What Labour is suffering from is a disease that is easy to
diagnose but hard to explain. The Ancient Greeks called it hubris –
roughly defined as: “excessive pride and/or over-confidence”. That’s fine, as
far as it goes, but a better sense of the word’s meaning is gleaned by listing
its synonyms: arrogance, conceitedness, haughtiness, pride, vanity,
self-importance, pomposity, superciliousness, hauteur. Those afflicted by
the fatal flaw of hubris harbour unfaltering feelings of superiority
over all those lesser breeds with whom they are forced to have dealings. It is
usually fatal.
The time-line of this latest scandal, helpfully pulled
together by the journalists at The Spinoff, reveals just how seriously
infected Labour has become by the hubris disease. Throughout the crooked
course of this tawdry saga every one of the synonyms listed above has been in
evidence; and each character failing appears to have occasioned a corresponding
failure in performance. That’s the awful thing about hubris: its way of
leading the sufferer into terrible misjudgements and mistakes. Wonderful for
driving forward the action in Ancient Greek theatre. Not so helpful in
politics.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Labour had a lot to feel
excessively prideful and over-confident about. But they don’t. The party’s
record since 2008 has been one of ever-worsening failure – calibrated by the
steady decline in Labour’s Party Vote up until 2017. And who was the person who
rescued the party’s fortunes that fateful year? It most certainly wasn’t Nigel
Haworth; or the Labour Caucus; or the clowns in the Leader’s Office. No, it was
Jacinda Ardern wot won it. Except, of course, not even that is true. The person
wot won it for Labour in 2017 was Winston Peters.
And yet the hauteur of Labour MPs and their
party-dwelling apparatchiks remains undiminished. They still evince
utter disdain for all those “lesser breeds without the law”.
Rudyard Kipling’s line is especially apt in this context,
because it is the Labour Party’s movers-and-shakers understanding of what
constitutes “the law” that lies at the very heart of their hubris.
Jacinda, herself, must have come into contact with it during
her brief stint as one of Tony Blair’s bright young things in the early-2000s.
The key question for any Blairite was whether or not so-and-so “gets it”. Gets
what? Simple: the whole “New Labour”, “Third Way”, “New Times” – call it what
you will – “project”. You were either smart enough (and ambitious enough) to
get that the days of old-fashioned social-democracy (don’t even mention the
word ‘socialism’!) were over, and that capitalism had won the battle of ideas
hands-down, or you weren’t. If you didn’t “get” this – if you still don’t “get
it” – then you are no bloody use to anybody who takes politics seriously.
Putting all this back into a New Zealand context, the
“getting-it” test goes all the way back to Rogernomics. It’s not so much a
matter of having to sign-up to everything Roger Douglas and his fellow
free-marketeers did. It was more a case of, to make your way upward in
the post-1984 Labour Party, you had to make it absolutely clear to all the
people who mattered that you had no intention of un-doing it.
That this commitment to the neoliberal status quo must
instantly set the movers-and-shakers at odds with a pretty big chunk of their
party’s membership; an even larger chunk of its trade union affiliates; and
what is still, almost certainly, a majority of Labour’s most loyal voters, only
serves to strengthen the perception they have of themselves as a special elite.
Among the lesser breeds, they’ll talk up a social-democratic storm – promising
them everything from 100,000 affordable houses to the end of child poverty. But,
among themselves – among the ones who get it – the objectives, and the rules of
the game, are very different.
And yet, these are the rules the young complainants in this
latest scandal have had to negotiate their way through: a task made all the
more difficult and distressing by the fact that nobody told them what they
were. They did not understand that the invitation to come forward with their
personal experiences of sexual misconduct was never meant to be taken
seriously. They did not grasp that the prime objective of the Labour Party is
not to build a better, fairer world, but to win the next election. Or, that the
people to be protected within the party are not its youngest and most
idealistic members, but its most skilled electoral technicians; the paid
staffers who know their way around the ever-more-complex circuitry of political
power.
These complainants, however, have proved to be fast learners
of the elite’s unwritten rules. (Telling their stories to Paula Bennett and The
Spinoff proved a masterstroke!) What was supposed to have been “managed”
out-of-sight and off-camera, has been hurled bodily into the media’s
unforgiving glare. Suddenly, the vast abyss that separates the idealistic from
the hubristic Labour Party (the Labour Party that “gets it”) has been revealed
in all its Nietzschean darkness and danger.
So, talk fast Jacinda. You’re talking for your political
life.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 11 September 2019.
