Intransigent Minorities.

No Compromise! The price of not keeping faith with the voters can be high. The Coalition Government would be wise to learn from the Left’s more recent mistakes. The most obvious of which is its truly bizarre belief that intransigent minorities will not be electorally punished for spitting in the face of the majority.

WHEN THE UNITED KINGDOM next goes to the polls, the Scottish National Party (SNP) will struggle to retain office. Currently, the Labour Party has a better-than-even chance of reclaiming its crown as Scotland’s electoral darling. After 17 years as the dominant force in Scottish politics, the SNP is running neck-and-neck with Labour. The reason: it allowed itself to get seriously out of step with Scotland’s voters.

The Scots are a well-educated and progressive people, but they drew the line at backing a premier, and a party, that saw nothing wrong with incarcerating a convicted rapist in Cornton Vale women’s prison on the grounds that she had subsequently self-identified as a woman.

Though the Premier, Nicola Sturgeon, responding to public outrage, removed the rapist, Isla Bryson, from Cornton Vale, the damage was done. According to The Guardian, Sturgeon’s predecessor (and political mentor) Alex Salmond accused her of “throwing away” the hope of Scottish independence (the SNP’s raison d’être) for the sake of controversial gender recognition reforms.

Things went from bad to worse for the SNP when, following Sturgeon’s resignation, she and her husband became the focus of a police investigation, and the SNP membership opted to reject the socially conservative candidate for Premier, Kate Forbes, in favour of the woke Humza Yousaf.

One instance of challenging the voters’ values might be forgiven – but two? It may, or may not, be relevant that the SNP’s fall from grace occurred while it was in coalition with the Scottish Greens.

Why allow a party currently polling at around 2-3 percent push you into backing reforms that most voters do not support? Why risk incurring the wrath of the electorate by allowing the perception to grow that the tail is wagging the dog? These questions are not restricted to the Scottish situation. There are people here in New Zealand asking very similar questions in relation to Act’s Treaty Principles Bill.

Not the least of these inquirers is Dame Anne Salmond who, in an uncharacteristically tetchy post for the Newsroom website, observes: “The process surrounding the Treaty Principles bill is a farce. With 8.6 percent of the vote at the last election, Act has no democratic mandate to advance a referendum on Te Tiriti.”

A perplexing observation which, on its face, suggests that even to “advance” the idea of a referendum (to resolve an otherwise irresolvable public issue) a political party must first secure 50 percent +1 of the Party Vote.

As National Party gadfly, Liam Hehir, observed on X (formerly Twitter) :

“Does Dame Anne Salmond have self-awareness enough to realise she is arguing against MMP and in favour of FPP? Is there an acknowledgement that you can’t construct a system where the Greens and TPM are allowed to ‘distort’ things but NZF and ACT are not?”

We shall come back to Hehir’s question presently. But, before we do, the pithy response of lawyer, and all round go-to guy on electoral matters, Graeme Edgeler, to Dame Anne’s commentary is worth citing:

“It seems like Anne Salmond is proposing a 15% threshold for MMP?”

Why 15 percent? Because, ever since the introduction of MMP 28 years ago, no minor party has ever secured more than 13.35 percent of the Party Vote (NZ First in 1996.) Hence Hehir’s quip about Dame Anne calling for the reintroduction of the First-Past-The-Post electoral system.

But, a return to the old system would not resolve the problem that lies at the heart of Dame Anne’s rather intemperate post. This, stripped of all its distracting rhetoric, boils down to one, key, question: how does one prevent the wrong sort of people, by which, presumably, Dame Anne means “right-wing” sort of people, from gaining access to the most important platform in the land – the House of Representatives?

The answer, as Hehir points out in his tweet, is that you can’t – not without abandoning democracy altogether. If left-wing voters, and Dames, are willing to accept the right of a party receiving 11.6 percent of the Party Vote, let alone one attracting just 3.08 percent, to materially shape the policy agenda of a Labour-led coalition government, then they must also accept the reality of Act and NZ First shaping the policy agenda of Christopher Luxon’s National Party-led coalition.

The problem is: “abandoning democracy” is exactly what a growing proportion of what passes for the Left in 2024 wants to do. Only by getting rid of democracy’s open-ended promises can the “correct” ideas be assured of winning through. Hence, the woke majority of the SNP’s membership’s refusal to acknowledge that the gender recognition reforms that they and the Scottish Greens were advancing would only end up sending a majority of Scottish voters in the direction of less radical electoral alternatives.

We see the same ideological intransigence at work within the American Left. The radical wing of the Democratic Party simply refuses to accept that a clear majority of Americans have grown alarmed and dismayed at the number of migrants making their way into the United States. No matter how damaging their opposition to closing the US-Mexican border might be to the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes: no matter how many voters the Left’s uncompromising zealotry is driving into the wide-open arms of Donald Trump; their ideologically-driven position is correct – and must prevail.

That same unshakable conviction that they are right, and must prevail, is especially evident in the New Zealand Left’s insistence that the Treaty principles identified by Te Iwi Māori, the Waitangi Tribunal, the Judiciary, the Public Service and Academia are the only ones that count. That a majority of the population might feel uncomfortable with the current, “official”, interpretation of Te Tiriti simply does not signify. Under no circumstances can the ill-informed views of poorly-educated (deplorable?) New Zealanders be permitted to decide the issue.

Hence, the demands from left-wing (and even some right-wing) political commentators for Luxon and the National Party to put their feet down and insist that the Treaty Principles Bill not proceed. Presumably, they are of the view that Act’s David Seymour, and NZ First’s Winston Peters, lack the grit to challenge Luxon. Such people are guilty of, to paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien, weighing all things to a nicety in the scales of their own malice. They forget that the Right, no less than the “Left”, can, at need, be impressively intransigent.

The opponents of the Treaty Principles Bill are also guilty of forgetting just how adroit a parliamentarian Seymour has already proved himself to be. His End of Life Choice legislation – the ultimate success of which few predicted at the time of the bill’s introduction – is now the law of the land.

Nor should it be assumed that it is only Act’s 8.6 percent of the electorate that are committed to seeing his bill proceed all the way to a referendum. In Saturday’s (27/1/24) edition of the NZ Herald a group calling itself “Democracy Action” inserted a full-page advertisement headed “We Stand With You”, which urged Luxon, Peters and Seymour to be steadfast in the defence of both their electoral mandate and the democratic process. Formed by Aucklanders Lee and Susan Short, Democracy Action has long had the official interpretation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in its sights. The wealthy couple insist they are not alone.

Nicola Sturgeon and the SDP discovered, to their cost, just how high the price of not keeping faith with one’s voters can be. The Coalition Government would be wise to learn from the Left’s mistakes. The most obvious of which is its truly bizarre belief that intransigent minorities will not be electorally punished for spitting in the face of the majority.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 29 January 2024.

Scotland's Secret Weapon.

Defensive Position: What will be Nicola Sturgeon’s equivalent of Robert the Bruce’s shiltrons when proud King Boris sends his army north against a people determined to “be a nation again”? For this is the twenty-first, not the fourteenth century. Courage and a 12-foot spear might be enough to turn aside an English warhorse, but what does Scotland’s SNP Government have to turn aside an English tank?

I WAS WATCHING Neil Oliver’s “Rise of the Clans” last night on the History Channel. It’s a quirky production. Lots of re-enactments and even more burly Scots hurling themselves at one another, axes and broadswords flashing in the thin Highland sunshine. The directorial decision that I found most interesting, however, was to make Oliver himself a witness to the drama – as if he had just stepped out of a time-machine. This is Scottish history as seen, quite literally, through Oliver’s eyes.

The story begins with Bannockburn, the battle that Scottish football crowds recall whenever they sing “Flower of Scotland” and boast of their forefathers’ success against “Proud Edward’s army” and how King Robert the Bruce and his peasant soldiers “sent him homeward – tae think again”.

As a trained historian, Oliver was at some pains to explain how it was that Bruce’s much smaller force was able to defeat the heavily armoured English knights.

The answer was William “Braveheart” Wallace’s military innovation – the Shiltron. Wallace had equipped his peasant soldiers with 12-foot spears and taught them how to deploy them against English cavalry. Contrary to what you may have seen in Sir Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”, horses are not given to suicidal gestures. Set a barrier of sharp spearpoints in front of them and they will rear-up and shy away.

Even so, not a little courage is required to make the Shiltron formation work. A charging “destrier”, sixteen hands high and galloping ‘full-tilt’ at 30mph, is not something most people – even holding a 12-foot spear – are able to confront without cutting-and-running. But such was the Scots’ faith in “The Bruce”, that on the road to Stirling Castle they stood firm and turned aside the English charge.

But Bruce did more than repeat the tactics of Braveheart, he taught his men how to manoeuvre on the battlefield. The Shiltron, to use the modern military jargon, evolved from being a “static” formation, into a “kinetic” weapon. The Scots ability to manoeuvre en masse destroyed “Proud Edward’s” invasion force. Their retreat blocked by the steep-sided river – the Bannock “burn” – and hemmed-in by the advancing Shiltrons’ bristling spears, the superior numbers of the English army availed them nothing. Bruce’s own Shiltron’s decisive charge put the English to panic-stricken flight. Thousands were either cut down or drowned.

Stirring stuff! But what, I wondered, will be Nicola Sturgeon’s equivalent of Robert the Bruce’s shiltrons when proud King Boris sends his army north against a people determined to “be a nation again”? For this is the twenty-first, not the fourteenth century. Courage and a 12-foot spear might be enough to turn aside an English warhorse, but what does Scotland’s SNP Government have to turn aside an English tank?

Well, Sturgeon and her government have their own, very special, kind of shiltron – millions strong – and with more than enough courage to face down an England ill-disposed to countenance the break-up of the “United” Kingdom. A Scotland which has voted, democratically and peacefully, for its independence has us – the Scottish diaspora. We are her shiltron.

King Boris should understand that there are millions more people of Scottish descent living outside Scotland’s borders, than there are living north of the River Tweed. If he doubts the power of the Celtic diaspora he should, perhaps, have a word or two with Tony Blair.

Without the backing of Bill Clinton, and the millions of Irish-Americans at his back, the Good Friday Agreement would never have held firm. President Trump, similarly, owes too much to the support of those hard-bitten descendants of the Scottish borderers who settled the South and West to stand idly by and let English triumphalism crush the pride of four million defenceless Scots.

Fanciful nonsense? It won’t come to anything remotely resembling the doomsday scenario painted above? I imagine there were many Catalonians who were similarly dismissive of the idea that the Spanish State would violently suppress their independence movement and imprison its leaders. And yet, that is exactly what the Spanish Government did.

Catalonia, moreover, could not point to the arrogant over-ruling of its own people’s clear, democratic, and twice-expressed preference to remain a part of the EU.

Proud Boris should keep England’s army south of the Tweed – lest, from Nova Scotia to Dunedin, the indignant clans of the Scottish diaspora, give him cause “tae think again”.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 December 2019.

Jeremy Who?

Polarising - In A Good Way: As the British Labour Party's leadership contest drew to a close this week, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign team estimated he had taken his message, face-to-face, to more than 50,000 people. Literally hundreds-of-thousands more have paid Labour £3 for the right to participate in the leadership vote. The polls predict a Corbyn win on the first ballot.

 

IN LESS THAN 48 HOURS the world will know whether Jeremy Corbyn has won or lost. There will be many, still, who scratch their heads and ask: “Jeremy Who?” And why not? Until the unexpectedly savage defeat of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party in the recent British General Election, the identity of the MP for the London seat of Islington North was known to very few people outside of … well … Islington North. And even among those who have regularly returned him to Westminster since 1983, only a handful would have picked their MP – a bewhiskered, 66-year-old, self-proclaimed socialist, by the name of Jeremy Corbyn – as Ed Miliband’s most likely successor.

 

That his name appears on the ballot-paper at all is, like so many other aspects of his candidacy, a virtual accident. Other, better known, left-wing flagbearers had already been approached, and declined, before Corbyn said “Yes”. He accepted the nomination in a spirit of honourable self-sacrifice: the left-wing of the Labour Party had to have someone to vote for. (And it wasn’t as if there was any chance of him winning!)

 

Hah!

 

The Germans would blame it on the Zeitgeist – the Spirit of the Times. Others would say that Corbyn’s candidacy only took off when Labour’s Interim Leader, Harriet Harman, urged her colleagues to join the Tories in putting the boot into Britain’s already bruised and battered beneficiaries. His hard-line left-wing comrades would merrily opine that there has always been a massive constituency for Jeremy Corbyn’s simple socialist message, but until he came along no one had quite mastered the knack of communicating it effectively. Whatever the explanation, the brute fact of the contest for Miliband’s replacement was indisputable: the moment Labour audiences saw and heard Jeremy Corbyn, they fell head-over-heels in love with him.

 

And no one in the British punditocracy could work out why. It wasn’t as if Corbyn was especially telegenic. (Dear Lord – that beard!) Nor was he an especially gifted speaker. And the nonsensical things he was saying: who could possibly take such antiquated socialist sloganeering seriously? Certainly not his rivals for the leadership: lynx-eyed Yvette Cooper; bluff and blokey Andy Burnham; the ambitiously lissom Liz Kendall. Those three all looked completely at home in the Labour Party Tony Blair had made. The Party that no longer believed in “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. The Party that had allowed Blair to lead it into the crime that was Iraq.

 

But that was just it! Corbyn had never swallowed a drop of the Blairite Kool-Aid. He still believed in common ownership. He’d voted against going into Iraq. He was, 32 years after being elected to the House of Commons, the same unashamed socialist he’d always been. And when the TV interviewers asked him questions about where he’d like to take Britain, he answered them. Without the benefit of pollsters, or spin-doctors, he talked about renationalising the railways, reanimating the trade unions, restoring the NHS. Cooper, Kendall and Burnham were dumfounded. The pundits were non-plussed. The Blairite Faction was, very publicly, appalled. But Labour’s members and supporters just couldn’t get enough.

 

The people who now find themselves vilified as the opponents of “Jez we can!” Corbymania should have seen it coming. But, not only did they fail to grasp the meaning of the emergence of left-wing populist parties across Europe; they also (and quite wilfully) refused to comprehend the meaning of the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) near clean-sweep of Labour seats north of the border.

 

The SNP ran on an anti-austerity platform, positioning itself well to the left of Labour. But their crushing victory was about a lot more than that. By optimistically orienting themselves towards the future, and promising the Scots that it would be a future they determined, the SNP unleashed that most potent of all political forces: Hope.

 

Corbyn’s authenticity and simplicity have encouraged similar hopefulness among the English. As the leadership contest drew to a close this week, Corbyn’s campaign team estimated he had taken his message, face-to-face, to more than 50,000 people. Literally hundreds-of-thousands more have paid Labour £3 for the right to participate in the leadership vote. The polls predict a Corbyn win on the first ballot.

 

If that happens, it will no longer be a case of “Jeremy Who?” But of “Jeremy – What Now?”

 

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, 11 September 2015.

Hearts And Souls: When People And Parties Make History.

Scots Wha Hae! SNP Leader, Nicola Sturgeon, pumps the air alongside her elated Scottish National Party followers as the scale of their victory over Labour becomes clear.

 

“I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”

 

Margaret Thatcher 1981

 

WALK INTO the Opposition Leader’s Office with ideas about changing the heart and soul of the nation and see how long you last. Andrew Little’s advisers don’t really do souls. And the average punter’s heart doesn’t exactly lend itself to metrical capture. Try to run either of them through a computer and things are liable to get messy. No, Little’s advisers prefer polls and focus groups, and the joys of regressive analysis. They’re much more fun.

 

Much more fun, but, apparently, not much use – as the events of 7 May in the United Kingdom have just proved. South of the River Tweed, metrics proved to be one of the UK Election Day’s biggest losers. The pollsters, statisticians and data-crunchers, in which the British Labour Party had invested so much, got it wrong. Turns out that the heart and soul of a nation can’t be measured – it can only be felt.

 

North of the River Tweed, the politics of hearts and souls (as opposed to stats and polls) had triumphed in truly historic fashion. As the results were posted, it soon became clear that the Scottish National Party (SNP) had wiped the Labour Party off Scotland’s electoral map.

 

Throughout the campaign, Labour had equated the national fervour stirred up by the SNP with the worst kind of nationalism. Former Labour supporters were accused of succumbing to the SNP’s “rapture” – as if they were a bunch of slack-jawed American fundamentalists. It didn’t work. No matter how many times Labour demonstrated that the SNP’s promises could not possibly be paid for, the voters blithely ignored them. Their hearts and their souls were elsewhere.

 

Meanwhile, south of the border, the right-wing parties were only too happy to present themselves as the staunch defenders of England’s heart and soul. The UK Independence Party, UKIP, implored voters to stop the EU, and the mass influx of foreigners its rules continued to sanction, from destroying what it meant to be British. It was a message that resonated just as loudly on the Left as it did on the Right. UKIP wasn’t a threat to the Tories alone; in Labour’s heartland UKIP candidates were moving, ominously, into second place.

 

The Tories themselves needed no lessons in the politics of hearts and souls. England, they warned, was about to be squeezed. Labour, that great defender of the EU, was about to enter into an unholy alliance with the SNP. The English people risked being caught between Labour’s socialist internationalism and the demands of the independence-seeking Scots. The country was in danger!

 

Against these nationalistic battering-rams, the gates of Labour could not hold. It had asked the voters to stand with the poor and the underpaid; it had asked them to make the wealthiest 1 percent pay their fair share of tax; and it had pledged to defend the NHS. But, what it had not been able to do was convince those who were neither very poor, nor very rich, that Labour had the faintest idea what was going on in their hearts, or cared very much at all about what was happening to their souls.

 

Margaret Thatcher knew that true political success would only come when the Conservatives’ explanation of what it meant to be British proved to be more compelling than Labour’s.

 

“What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years”, she told The Sunday Times on 3 May 1981, “is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter?”

 

Thatcher’s emphatic answer was: “Yes – you do!” To all those hundreds-of-thousands of “personal societies”, inhabited by the families and friends of the individual voter, the Conservative Party proclaimed the unequivocal message: “You do count! You do matter!”

 

You do count! You do matter! Margaret Thatcher campaigning in 1979.

 

Browbeaten by the boss; burdened by mortgages they could only just afford; resentful of strikers in the factories; frightened by unemployed youngsters on the streets: these Britons turned gratefully towards the one party that reassured them they were, and always had been, the heart and soul of the nation.

 

The great irony, of course, was that just 36 years earlier, in 1945, exactly the same message had been taken into every home by Labour. After 10 years of economic depression, and six years of war: when it had grown easier and easier to believe that individuals were no more than the dust ground out between the massive cogs and wheels of the economic machine; or, nameless soldier-ants, fighting in defence of the nest; Labour came into the lives of millions of fragile families and said: “You do count! You do matter!” And their hearts were warmed, and their souls soothed, and for more than 30 years the Tories dared not dismantle what the socialists had built in England’s green and pleasant land.

 

Scottish Labour may scorn its former supporters for succumbing to the rapture of the SNP, but New Zealand Labour could learn a lot from the Scottish experience. The amazing collapse of Labour’s vote in Scotland was about much more than the SNP. Somehow, out of the thwarted referendum and its aftermath, a majority of Scots came to the collective conclusion that the heart and soul of their nation, for so long forsworn, was theirs to save.

 

As with the British people in 1945 (and the New Zealand people in 1935) such historically charged moments are capable of transforming a political party into a vehicle for both national salvation and cultural renewal. And the reason why so many voters are willing to climb on board is that from some place deep within, unreachable by polls, focus groups or data crunchers, the conviction arises that, together, they and their party have come to represent, if only for one brief breath of history, the heart and soul of the nation.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 May 2015.