Making Connections: Why, Instead Of Looking Tired, Labour Needs To Get Emotional.

Fifth Time Lucky? After trying, and failing, four times to make an emotional connection with the electorate, perhaps Labour should look for a leader who got himself re-elected to Parliament the old-fashioned way - by raising heaps of cash and then persuading "mainstream" New Zealanders to vote for him. Napier MP, Stuart Nash (above) addresses a provincial business audience.

 

THE LATEST ROY MORGAN POLL has cast a deep pall of gloom over all three Opposition parties. Among Labour supporters, however, a growing sense of utter futility is palpable. Support for the party has crashed back to the abysmal figures of Election Night. Barely a quarter of the adult population is willing to identify Labour as their first electoral choice.
 

The corollary to Opposition gloom is, of course, Government elation. And, with the Roy Morgan poll showing National on 54 percent, who can blame its MPs and supporters for breaking out the bubbly? Remember, this latest poll was conducted when Amanda Bailey’s ponytail was dominating the headlines. Did it damage the Prime Minister’s reputation? (As so many of John Key’s enemies were hoping.) Not appreciably. “Teflon John” continues to shine.
 

At around the same time as Roy Morgan’s callers were working the phones, Sir Michael Cullen and the NZ Fabian Society were attempting to rally Labour’s dejected troops with a presentation entitled, rather hopefully, “Destination: Next Progressive Majority.” Arriving at that destination, says Sir Michael, will depend on whether Labour is able to re-present itself as the party of Choice, Aspiration, Responsibility and National Pride.
 

For that re-presentation to work, Sir Michael stresses, Labour must re-connect emotionally with the electorate. “Policies can be a means to this”, says the former Labour Finance Minister, “but rarely the most important means.” In saying this, Sir Michael is echoing the  advice of Lynton Crosby – the man who, earlier this month, won the UK General Election for the Conservative Party. Policy matters, says Crosby, only inasmuch as it expresses the less tangible and more visceral reasons for supporting one political party over another.
 

“This is Key’s huge strength”, Sir Michael observes, “he has enormous emotional connection with voters. The sloppy language we like to make fun of is the language most people speak, not like University lecturers like Helen, Steve and I. The casualness to turn things aside, not important, at the end of the day.”
 

It is National’s huge strength, as well, because there is no other politician in the Government’s ranks who connects with the ordinary Kiwi voter in the manner of John Key.
 

And it is here, on the question of leadership, that Sir Michael’s otherwise sober and sensible analysis falters.
 

In order to sell a Labour Party based on Choice, Aspiration, Responsibility and National Pride; a credible, likeable (and because, historically, Labour is coming off such a low base) a frankly inspirational leader is required. Someone with a personality powerful enough to rekindle the love Labour lost in the 1980s and 90s – and only fleetingly recovered in the early noughties. Someone capable of sparking-up the old flame. And, more than this, someone fresh and fascinating enough to attract and hold the attention of Generations X, Y and Z. Someone to warrant a selfie – and a vote.
 

Does this sound like Andrew Little? Does it sound like anyone in Labour’s post-2014 caucus? If the answer is “No”, then, even with Sir Michael’s sage advice, the party’s in a pretty pickle. It has tried, four times, to pick a winner: twice by the judgement of the Caucus alone; twice according to the judgement of the whole party. Every single one of them failed to fire. And whoever heard of fifth time lucky?
 

Something has to be done, however, or, like Sir Keith Holyoake, the New Zealand political leader he so closely resembles, the Prime Minister will lead his party to its fourth consecutive election victory.
 

To prevent that from happening, Labour is going to have to take a leaf out of the campaign maestro’s, Lynton Crosby’s, playbook. It is going to have to learn to listen to its pollsters and heed their focus groups. Not to discover what the public wants, and then give it back to them as Labour Party policy; but to learn which lines of argument work, and which don’t. Democratic politics is not about giving the people what they want, it’s about persuading the people that they want what you want. “When in doubt”, says Lynton Crosby, “stand for something!” And then, he might have added, convince a majority of voters to stand with you.
 

If Labour can’t find a leader to do that for them, then, for God’s sake, let them hire a campaign manager who can!
 

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, 29 May 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.