Missing From The Electoral Action: The radical Left's last forlorn hope, the "Missing Million", is generally despised by mainstream New Zealand and mistrusted by the respectable members of their own communities. They have moved well beyond the reach of conventional electoral politics.
TO SAY the Left’s reaction to Grant Robertson’s “Recovery
Budget” has been mixed would be a considerable understatement. Everyone from
Mike Treen and John Minto to Susan St John and Gordon Campbell have criticised
the Coalition Government for failing to piggy-back a socialist programme on its
economic response to the Covid-19 recession. To which I feel obliged to call:
Bullshit!
Had Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson followed the advice
of those who are now so loud in their condemnation of the Budget, their 26
percentage-point poll advantage would have evaporated practically overnight.
Why? Because the additional 10-15 percent of popular support Labour appears to
have attracted over the past two months can only have come from former National
supporters. How long, I wonder, do Labour’s critics on the Left suppose these
people would have stuck around had Jacinda decided to go all Jeremy Corbyn and
Bernie Sanders on them? That is not a trick question. The answer is – not long
at all.
The bad news wouldn’t have stopped there, however, it would
just be getting started. Can Jacinda’s and Grant’s critics not imagine how
right-wing commentators like Mike Hosking and Matthew Hooton would have seized
upon the Government’s sudden lurch to the left as proof of its fundamental
dishonesty. Oh yes, they may have pretended to be responsible managers of the
New Zealand economy, but when the crisis/opportunity came – in the form of a
critical public health emergency, for God’s sake! – they fell upon it cynically
to implement a radical agenda – the content of which they had concealed from
the electorate.
And what about that NZ First, eh? What about Winston Peters!
The sly old fox had been a radical socialist all along. Forget about the Manchurian
Candidate – this guy was the original Moscow Sleeper! And the rest of his
caucus – what consummate actors! Ron Mark a socialist – who knew? I mean, the
Greens never made the slightest effort to hide their radical credentials – and
didn’t NZ First give them stick for it. That decision, back in 2005, to keep
the Greens out of government: what a masterstroke! Put everyone off their
guard. Talk about your long-term, far-left agenda.
Yes, I’m being facetious, but only to remind this
government’s left-wing critics that it is a coalition; and that one of the
constituent parties of that coalition was formed by a former National Party
cabinet minister. Which is just another way of saying that even if Jacinda and
Grant had been foolish enough to try and drive through the measures demanded by
the radical Left, Winston would have vetoed them. Would that have broken up the
coalition? Yes. Would Winston and NZ first have suffered for pulling the
emergency hand-brake? No. Would Labour and the Greens have been punished
electorally? Yes. Would Simon Bridges have become New Zealand’s next prime
minister? Of course.
Now, I’ve been around long enough to know exactly how the
radical and revolutionary Left would answer these arguments. They would say
that driving all those cross-over Nats back into Simon’s waiting arms wouldn’t
matter, because the political consequences of a radical left-wing response to
the Covid-19 induced recession would, on balance, be favourable to the
Government. All those beneficiaries whose lives would have been improved
immeasurably by its decision to implement the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s
recommendations, for example, would have turned out in their droves to re-elect
Jacinda and her colleagues.
This is yet another iteration of the “Missing Million”
argument: a political proposition that the Left has been kicking around for at
least the last three general elections. Give the poor and marginalised
something to vote for and they will reward their political benefactors at the
ballot-box.
Except they won’t.
Increasingly, electoral politics is an activity restricted
to those whose lives are still buoyant enough to warrant engagement with
“mainstream” New Zealand institutions. Unionised workers; church members in
good standing; newly-minted professionals who have scraped and clawed their way
out of the immigrant communities into which they were born. By-and-large, these
are not people with a revolutionary mindset. On the contrary, many of them have
little or no respect for those who, as they see it, have given up the struggle
to make a better life for themselves and their children. That’s why the Missing
Million is generally despised by mainstream New Zealand and mistrusted by the
respectable members of their own communities. They have moved well beyond the reach
of conventional electoral politics.
Whenever the Missing Million argument is used by
left-wingers seeking to reconcile electoral politics with revolutionary
aspirations, I think of Len Richards in Mangere. Len, a staunch and thoroughly
engaging socialist, stood for the NewLabour Party against David Lange in 1990.
He ran a very good campaign, winning 11.79 percent of the votes cast – more
than twice the NLP’s 5.16 percent of the popular vote nationally. And yet, even
after everything the Labour Party had done to the working people of the Mangere
electorate; even after six years of Rogernomics; even with unemployment
skyrocketing; David Lange romped home with 51.1 percent of the votes cast.
The most fundamental problem confronting the radical Left
has never really been about the people who don’t vote. It’s always been about
the political parties supported by the people who do. New Zealanders will vote
for parties positioned to Labour’s left – sometimes in impressive numbers – but
only when those parties are offering policies demanded by a significant
percentage of the electorate, and which Labour, for reasons best known to
itself, refuses to endorse.
Clearly, this is not the situation in 2020. In this year’s
election there will be only one viable party to Labour’s left, the Greens, and
the policy differences between the two are now marginal – at best. On its
current standing in the Newshub-Reid Research poll (56 percent) Labour will be
looking to retain office with the support of former right-wing voters – not
radical leftists. It’s not a situation which any democratic-socialist activist
enjoys, but one that cannot be avoided without giving up the game of electoral
politics altogether.
Grant Robertson’s Budget is offering what most New
Zealanders are hoping for – economic recovery. More importantly, it’s offering
what the New Zealanders who actually vote are demanding. Is that the same as
offering what so many poor and marginalised New Zealanders desperately need?
No, it’s not. But if people’s economic and social needs are not translated into
serious political demands, then they are unlikely to be fulfilled in any
serious way. In the immortal words of the Black abolitionist and former slave, Frederick
Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand – it never has and it never
will.”
When the wretched of the earth – and that includes the
people of Mangere and Porirua – organise themselves to the point of convincing
mainstream politicians that there is more to be gained by acceding to their
demands than ignoring them, then their lives will improve immeasurably. Put
enough community organisers in New Zealand’s most deprived suburbs and all the
exclusions of the 2020 Budget, which have so upset the radical Left, will very
rapidly become inclusions.
Until then, Labour – riding so very high in the polls – will
go on listening to and meeting the demands of those who know how to make
themselves heard where it counts – in the ballot-box.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 19 May 2020.
