What Is "Rogerpolitics"?

Hand In Hand: "Rogerpolitics" is the term coined by the New Zealand political scientist, Richard Mulgan, to describe the form of politics required to make sure that Rogernomics “took” in a country which, on the face of it, should have rejected neoliberalism out of hand. Had Rogerpolitics not been so successfully embedded in the key organs of the New Zealand state, then Rogernomics would not have lasted.

“ROGERNOMICS” is political shorthand for the neoliberal economic policies introduced by Labour’s finance minister, Roger Douglas between 1984 and 1988. While most New Zealanders have heard of Rogernomics, nowhere near as many have heard of its inseparable companion, “Rogerpolitics”.

The term was coined by the New Zealand political scientist, Richard Mulgan, to describe the form of politics required to make sure that Rogernomics “took” in a country which, on the face of it, should have rejected neoliberalism out of hand. Had Rogerpolitics not been so successfully embedded in the key organs of the New Zealand state, then Rogernomics would not have lasted.

Critical to the success of Rogerpolitics was the widespread public disillusionment with the style of politics that preceded it. In New Zealand’s case, the principal target of the public’s hostility was the National Party Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, and his highly interventionist economic policies – “Muldoonism”. An additional factor in the public’s antipathy towards Muldoon was his facilitation of the extremely divisive Springbok Tour of 1981. In the eyes of younger New Zealanders, “The Tour” was proof of their elders’ unfitness to rule. The people referred to by the then prominent political journalist, Colin James, as the “RSA Generation” had, in the eyes of the “Vietnam Generation”, been confronted with a straightforward moral test – and they had failed.

Without Muldoon and Muldoonism; without the Springbok Tour; the hunger for a new way of managing the economy and running the country would not have been so acute. The proponents of neoliberalism, or “free market forces” (as the ideology was more commonly referred to thirty-five years ago) were pushing against an open door.

It was the same all over the advanced capitalist world. The interventionist economic policies that had played such a crucial role in generating the unparalleled prosperity of the post-war period had finally run up against the buffers of the capitalist system. Every attempt to reduce the rising levels of unemployment and inflation that were the primary manifestations of the system’s failure only ended up pushing them higher. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party captured the growing sense of unease with its 1979 slogan: “Labour isn’t working.” The following year, in the USA, the Republican candidate for President, Ronald Reagan, summed-up the popular mood when he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem.”

In its essence, this is what Rogerpolitics is all about: getting government out of the way. If politicians, by interfering in the economy, only made things worse, then the obvious solution is simply to prevent them from interfering.

Accordingly, the Economic Stabilisation Act, which had since the Second World War allowed the Cabinet to more-or-less run the New Zealand economy by decree, was repealed. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand was freed from political interference. The State Sector Act, by introducing market disciplines to government departments and agencies, fundamentally reshaped the structure and purpose of the New Zealand civil service. Whenever possible, state-owned enterprises were sold into private hands.

At both the national and the local level the effect of these economic and political reforms was to significantly disempower the country’s politicians. Regulation, where it couldn’t be avoided altogether, was to be “light-handed”. The day-to-day running of things was to be left to the market’s “invisible hand” or, in those places where “free market forces” had yet to make their presence felt, to the new order’s administrative proxies – the CEOs of the new government ministries and local government bureaucracies.

With remarkable alacrity, the ideological and practical political infrastructure required to support the new economic regime was cemented into place. In the nation’s schools and universities; in it’s publicly and privately owned news media; in its local and national institutions, Rogerpolitics became the new orthodoxy. For the next thirty years it would not only inspire the design of the mechanisms by which political power is exercised, but also the moral justifications for their use.

Those New Zealanders born after 1984 – New Zealand neoliberalism’s “Year Zero” – have absorbed the “free market” catechism practically without thinking.

The market organises human activity much more efficiently and effectively than the state.

The freer the market, the better the organisation.

Private ownership generates much better outcomes than public ownership.

Capitalism works best when Money, Goods and Labour are all permitted to move freely around the globe.

Free trade promotes peace, prosperity and global understanding.

Protectionism is an outgrowth of nationalism – both of which are very bad things.

Trade unions distort the signals of the labour market – which makes them very bad things also.

Capitalism celebrates individual freedom and embraces human diversity – racism, sexism and all other forms of discrimination have no place in a properly functioning capitalist society.

In summary, the only sort of politics which it is ethical (and advisable) to practice in the New Zealand created by Rogernomics is the politics which exerts the least influence over the smooth operation of the free markets it brought into being. Rogerpolitics both asserts and insists that the best politician any New Zealander can be is the politician whose actions produce the least effect on the operation of the nation’s economy. The very worst politician a New Zealander can be is the politician who mobilises the envy of the many who have failed in the marketplace against the few who have succeeded.

Rogerpolitics does not believe that democracy is a market friendly form of government, and all Rogerpoliticians are expected to act accordingly.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 November 2018.

Leaving Babylon: The Effect Of A Jeremy Corbyn Victory.

Jeremy Corbyn Makes His Case: Some will argue that the events of the past 30 years, in both the UK and New Zealand, have so eroded the electoral support for democratic socialist principles and policies that any Labour manifesto based upon them is bound to fail. And yet, opinion polling in both countries shows solid majorities in favour of the public ownership and/or provision of those utilities and services considered essential to a wholesome and inclusive society.

 

ON 12 SEPTEMBER, the world will learn if the British Labour Party has opted to move sharply to the left. If that is the result, and, as the polls suggest, Jeremy Corbyn is decisively elected Leader of the Opposition, then the impact of the Labour membership’s decision will reverberate around the English-speaking world.

 

The reverberations of a Corbyn win will be especially loud here, in New Zealand. Not only because of the very strong personal links between the British and New Zealand labour parties, but also because of their very similar experiences vis-à-vis the policy aggression of their parliamentary wings, and its consequences for internal party democracy.

 

The year 1983 figures very prominently in the stories of both parties – and not only because that was the year Jeremy Corbyn entered the British Parliament. The British Labour Party ran for office in 1983 on a frankly socialist manifesto and were soundly defeated – receiving just 28 percent of the popular vote. This defeat prompted Labour’s critics to describe the party’s pitch to the voters as “the longest suicide note in history” – implying that an open appeal to vote for socialism was pure electoral poison.

 

This was certainly the lesson that the right-wing of the New Zealand Labour Party was to draw from the British Labour Party’s electoral drubbing. Labour MPs Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble argued strongly that their own party must, at all costs, avoid its British counterpart’s disastrous example. Very few New Zealanders, however, were aware that even as Douglas and Prebble were denouncing the policies of the Labour Left, they were eagerly imbibing far-right economic and social theories from selected Treasury officials.

 

The other factors leading to Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 victory were, naturally enough, downplayed (or not mentioned at all) by Labour’s right-wing faction. The effect of her stunning victory over Argentina in the Falklands War was conveniently ignored – as was the defection of British Labour’s leading right-wing MPs. These turncoats set up the Social Democratic Party to prevent a Labour victory, and, by forming an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party, that’s exactly what they did. Though the Conservative Party’s support fell by 700,000 votes in 1983, it was able, thanks to the vagaries of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, to celebrate a landslide victory.

 

The full-scale assault on Labour’s core values, unleashed by Douglas and his faction, following the party’s 1984 general election victory, both demoralised and divided its supporters. Membership of the party shrank dramatically (from 85,000 to less than 10,000) and its outraged left-wing, frustrated at every turn in its efforts to wrest back control of the party, eventually split away to form the NewLabour Party (later the Alliance) in 1989.

 

Accordingly, it is possible to argue that, in the charismatic figure of the principled left-wing maverick, Jim Anderton, New Zealand has already had its Jeremy Corbyn. Certainly, Anderton played a crucial role in hauling Labour back from its “free-market” apostasy under David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer and Mike Moore. By the time Helen Clark (in coalition with Anderton) led Labour back to power in 1999, most of its far-right deformities had long since been lopped-off.

 

In Britain, however, Labour first had to endure the rise and rise of the man who, with the benefit of hindsight, might be called its “Anti-Corbyn” – Tony Blair. Rather than lead his party back to its ideological roots, Blair and his “modernisers” persuaded it to embrace what might best be called “Thatcherism-Lite”. In doing so, however, Labour effectively capitulated to an unforgiving coalition of the Left’s most effective opponents: the right-wing tabloids; the right-wing electoral spoilers in what was now calling itself the Liberal-Democrat Party; and that implacable enemy of all forces hostile to the claims of untrammelled greed – the City of London.

 

It is, however, a common feature of both the British and the New Zealand labour parties that, for the duration of their Babylonian captivity, by the waters of Neoliberalism, neither of their respective memberships ever forgot, or gave up hope of returning to, the Zion of democratic socialism, from which they’d been so ruthlessly uprooted.

 

Some will argue that the events of the past 30 years, in both the UK and New Zealand, have so eroded the electoral support for democratic socialist principles and policies that any Labour manifesto based upon them is bound to fail. And yet, opinion polling in both countries shows solid majorities in favour of the public ownership and/or provision of those utilities and services considered essential to a wholesome and inclusive society.

 

If Corbyn wins on 12 September, many political commentators are convinced that the reaction of left-wing voters, across the English-speaking world, will mirror the reaction of the French to their liberation by the Allies in 1944. Flags will be waved, and kisses freely exchanged, as the people welcome themselves back home.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 September 2015.

UKIP's Genteel Xenophobia.

Loudly Defending "Little England": Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is the product of Thatcherism's elimination of the threat of Labour's "socialism" and the trade unions' "communism". Their greatest fears allayed, the Little Englanders are now voicing their xenophobic antipathy to globalisation and its consequences.

 

IN LESS THAN A MONTH the people of the United Kingdom will have a new government. Depending on how the votes fall, one of the key figures in that new government could be Nigel Farage – leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

 

Frequently interviewed outside a traditional English pub, pint of beer in hand, Mr Farage has spent a decade perfecting his populist political persona: that of the loud, but fearless, member of the local golf club who isn’t afraid to call a guest-worker a “bloody foreigner” – and political correctness be damned!

 

UKIP claims to speak for “Little England” – think Hobbiton with Range Rovers – a place where retired small businessmen and local branch managers keep their suburban hedges neatly trimmed, and their little squares of lawn as closely shaved as their own ruddy cheeks. Safe within the confines of the golf-club, or down at their local, these Little Englanders grouse and grumble about what they see as their country’s slow dissolution in the acidic cosmopolitanism of the despised European Union (EU) and the caustic demographic backwash of Britain’s long lost Empire.

 

The success with which Nigel Farage has given voice to this genteel suburban xenophobia has the British Conservative Party running scared.

 

Time was when Little England’s visceral fear of the “socialists” in the Labour Party, and the “communists” in the trade unions, was sufficient to keep them safely inside the Tory Party’s big tent. But thanks to Margaret Thatcher (the woman Little Englanders would canonise if they could) the great left-wing bogeymen of the 50s, 60s and (especially) the 1970s have been reduced to things of vinegar and brown paper. Ed Miliband undoubtedly possesses many talents, but the ability to frighten Tories isn’t one of them.

 

With the Left no longer strong enough to keep the Right united, the natural fissures within British conservatism have grown wider.

 

Little England and UKIP wishes their beleaguered country could look like Inspector Barnaby’s Midsomer (minus the lethal homicide rate). Theirs would be a land of picturesque cottages, thriving high-street shops and large Anglican congregations. A world in which everybody’s white, nobody’s red, and blue is still the colour you call true. UKIP and Little England have no time for the EU’s circle of stars; no time for the Euro; and no time for the tens-of-thousands of “bloody foreigners” pouring across the English Channel.

 

In their heart-of-hearts they must know that their Little England has never existed outside the pages of Agatha Christie’s whodunits. What made England – and Britain – “great” were her factories, her cities and her highly-skilled working-class. William Blake’s “green and pleasant” England is a place rooted in “ancient time” – one that is quite incompatible with the “dark Satanic Mills” that have made the Britain of modern times so prosperous and heroic.

 

For all its aristocratic heritage and old-Etonian chic, the modern British Conservative Party was built by Stanley Baldwin, a Big England iron-and-steel industrialist who understood that if British capitalism showed itself to be incapable of sustaining a prosperous and growing middle-class, then its much larger (and considerably less prosperous) working-class would, eventually, put an end to it.

 

Little England may have loved Margaret Thatcher for smashing Labour and the unions, but it never really grasped the fact that the Left was not broken for the sake of the posh and the toff. On the contrary, Mrs Thatcher broke the Left because she regarded it as an impediment to the modernisation of Britain’s economy. She didn’t want to turn England into Midsomer Worthy, she wanted to turn England into Canary Wharf. Thatcherism was about barrow-boys breaking into boardrooms. It was about the City of London sucking the wealth of Europe into a very big British bang. It was about refashioning the British Labour Party in Thatcherism’s own image.

 

Mr Farage can sup his traditional English pint, and excoriate David Cameron’s Tories for selling England’s inheritance for a mess of EU-approved pottage, but the truth of the matter is that a Conservative-UKIP coalition government; one at odds with Labour and the Scots, and out of the European Union altogether, would very quickly have the nation on life-support.

 

What UKIP has yet to grasp is that, given the goals they share, David Cameron and Ed Miliband would rather rule Britain together, than see it decline, out of Europe, on its own.

 

This essay was originally published by The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 April 2015.