The Trick Of Winning Power Under Capitalism.

“Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” - Varys to Tyrion in Game of Thrones.

CORBYN’S DEFEAT, and the defeat of the Labour Party his leadership made possible, is a defeat for the Left everywhere. All over the western world social-democrats are pointing to the British Labour Party’s electoral catastrophe and saying: “See? This is what happens when you try to sell “Democratic-Socialism” to those not already convinced that it’s a good idea.” What happened to Labour’s “Red Wall” will be used to undermine AOC; batter Bernie Sanders; and demoralise Elizabeth Warren. Closer to home, it will be used as a prophylactic against the merest hint of Corbyn-style thinking inside the New Zealand Labour Party.

The question is: What lessons should democratic-socialists, themselves, draw from the Corbyn Labour Party’s historic defeat? Because the UK General Election has more lessons to teach us than Dominic Cummings has wickedly clever ideas. Not the least of which is that you receive fewer scratches when you pat a cat from its head to its tail, rather than from its tail to its head.

It is one of the great paradoxes of radical left-wing politics: that the people who rail most uncompromisingly against the evils of capitalism are genuinely shocked and horrified when capitalism unleashes a fair old swag of those evils against them.

Jeremy Corbyn was unfairly pilloried in the media, they complain. Every major media outlet was against him. The guy couldn’t get a break – not even from The Guardian and the BBC!

Well, duh! What the hell did they expect? That the leader of a party promising to restore the trade unions’ right to engage in “secondary picketing” was going to be given a fair shake by newspapers owned by billionaires? That Rupert Murdoch, the man who broke the power of the print unions in the 1980s, was going to say: “Come on in, Jezza! Sit down and tell me how I can help you devise the sort of inheritance tax that will break the power of families like my own forever.”

If you accept the proposition that we are all living in a capitalist society, then, surely, you must also accept that anyone posing a genuine threat to that society will be subjected to unrelenting political attack? And, doesn’t that oblige you, as the democratic-socialist leader of a serious electoral party, to offer the capitalist press the smallest possible target? In fact, wouldn’t the smart move be to convince the mainstream media bosses that you weren’t any kind of democratic-socialist at all?

Come to think of it, wouldn’t it mean doing exactly what Tony Blair did? Making the pilgrimage to Rupert Murdoch’s corporate lair and convincing him that from you and your “sensible” Labour Party he had absolutely nothing to fear? That way, when the election campaign got rolling, The Sun could come out and endorse you, and urge its readers to vote Labour.

Obviously, I’m not saying that Tony Blair was any kind of democratic-socialist. What I am suggesting, however, is that if you are a Labour leader who genuinely subscribes to the principles of democratic-socialism, then it would probably help a lot to keep your true ideological colours under wraps. Tactically, at least, it would make more sense for the powers-that-be to see you as a reasonable moderate – not a scary radical. Impress the electorate with your economic wisdom; demonstrate your deep understanding of, and sympathy for, the hopes and aspirations of your core working-class supporters. Speak with pride and passion about the contribution their party has made to the nation’s history. Whatever you do, don’t refuse to sing God Save The Queen. It would also probably help if you refrained from meeting with representatives of terrorist organisations – especially those hostile to the State of Israel!

A democratic-socialist leader possessed of a sophisticated strategic sense would understand that election manifestos are best restricted to promoting policies that the electorate actually wants – not policies his (or her) comrades believe the electorate should want. Let the drift of events – economically and socially – propel the party in directions which the capitalists may not like, but which they no longer feel able to redirect. Most importantly, identify the one reform most likely to undermine the institutions upon which their opponents’ rely most heavily for protection. Implement it early, fast, and without compromise.

Think of Jim Bolger, Bill Birch and the Employment Contracts Act. Radically reducing the reach and power of the trade unions – the working class’s most effective defence against exploitation and declining living standards – was the one reform most likely to enhance and entrench the power of capital. The moment it became law, everything else National and its backers wanted to do was made ten times easier.

It is worth recalling that the unprecedented scope and radicalism of the Employment Contracts Act had not been signalled to the electorate prior to National racking-up a massive majority in the 1990 General Election. Bill Birch had reassured New Zealand workers that their hard-won industrial rights – guaranteed hours and penal rates – would not be affected by the changes National was proposing. By the time the draconian provisions of the bill became clear, the leaders of the trade unions had lost all confidence in their ability to prevent its passage. This loss of confidence was crucial to the National Government’s success. A successful democratic-socialist government should be similarly positioned to demoralise their capitalist opponents.

Perhaps, then, that is the exercise democratic-socialists around the world should now be undertaking. Quietly identifying the single reform that would effectively disarm the capitalists and fundamentally diminish their ability to effectively resist the introduction of further progressive economic, social and environmental reforms.

As Varys in Game of Thrones so wisely tells Tyrion: “Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

It’s high time the Left learned the trick of winning power under capitalism: positioning a very big man in such a way that he casts a very small and non-threatening shadow – until he doesn’t.

Jezza, old son, they saw you coming!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 December 2019.

'Third Way' No Way To Go: A Reply To Wayne Mapp.

Pragmatic Idealists: When it becomes clear to both our new prime minister and her finance minister that the price they are being asked to pay to keep the neoliberal guard-dogs away from their throats is too high for any discernible good that it is doing, then we must hope that they will dig deep into the collective experience of the New Zealand labour movement and find there not only the courage to speak socialist words, but also to rally the New Zealand people behind socialist deeds.

I FEEL SORRY for Dr Wayne Mapp. He has always struck me as one of those National Party types who want to do good in the world – but not in a left-wing way. The political paradox in which such politicians are trapped, however, is that it is only under the conditions of a significantly modified capitalism – conditions created by the Left – that their benevolent aspirations can be fulfilled. Rather than acknowledge this, however, they are forever trying to convince the electorate that the Left only ever succeeds when it moves to the Right.

This is the fundamental thesis of Mapp’s latest contribution to The Spinoff, “Jacinda Ardern Is No Radical, But The 21st-Century Face Of Blair’s Third Way”. His argument, essentially, is that:

“In the latter part of the second decade of the twenty-first century, 22 years since Blair first became prime minister, his spiritual successors, Justine (sic) Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern, seem to have wholly adopted Third Wayism. The basic tenets of the neo-liberal settlement are accepted, but the state employs its power and resources to assist those who the market does not fully provide for.”

Putting to one side his transgendering of Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Mapp’s fundamental misunderstanding of what Tony Blair represents merely confirms his inability to understand the central realities of our recent political history.

The core mission of conservative politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was to tear down the Left’s modifications of capitalism and reconfigure it as closely as possible to its original nineteenth century form as was politically feasible. Thatcher and Reagan loathed politicians who, like Mapp, were happy to operate within the parameters of the “kinder, gentler” capitalism that the labour and social-democratic parties had created in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The New Right project was best summed-up by the American, Grover Norquist, who famously declared: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Mapp simply does not understand that what we now call “neoliberalism” was a last-ditch and, as things turned out, highly-successful attempt to rescue the western ruling-class from the consequences of what it perceived to be a collection of out-of-control social-democratic governments. What the citizens of those countries: most especially the citizens of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; have been living with for nearly 40 years are the consequences of their rulers’ ongoing counter-revolution.

In the course of that counter-revolution, the world has witnessed, inter alia: the collapse of actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; the dramatic expansion of the global proletariat; the general collapse of trade union power and influence; stagnating wages; the privatisation of publicly owned enterprises; an extreme concentration of media control and influence; the imposition of economic austerity; and the obscene enrichment of the owners and managers of the world’s largest corporations and financial institutions.

It is fascinating to read the way in which this counter-revolutionary world order is bowdlerised by Mapp into the innocuousness of: “an open economy with low tariffs, the private sector owning virtually all parts of the competitive economy, relatively modest tax rates so that the size of government is around one third of the total economy.”

The inevitable corollaries of Mapp’s ‘common-sense’ political-economy: rising inequality, precarious employment; poverty; homelessness; collapsing health services; a deteriorating environment; hardly  rate a mention.

What Mapp does make clear, however, and with considerable accuracy, are the sort of policies which Jacinda Ardern and her finance minister, Grant Robertson, would find it extremely dangerous, politically, to adopt. Changing the neoliberal paradigm, he rightly says, would require a different approach:

“The government would not have signed up to the [Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership]. A fund would have been established for the renationalization of at least the electricity companies. The top tax rate would be at least 40% to reverse inequality. Some form of compulsory unionism would be restored, though perhaps the promised industry wide agreements are intended to be exactly that. An economy so deeply regulated that official permission would be required for even the simplest of business transactions.”

What Mapp, rather predictably, doesn’t say, is that the response to such a radical departure from the status-quo, from the upper-echelons of the civil service, the business community, the mainstream news media and, of course, by his own National Party, would be swift and devastating. Neither Ardern, nor Robertson, require any lessons in the effects of such a backlash. The example of the so-called “Winter of Discontent” of 2000 is there in front of them all the time – reminding them of just how little real power governments exercise in the neoliberal order. Neither of them have any wish to be drowned in Norquist’s bathtub!

The “Third Way-ism” that Mapp extols, and which he believes Ardern to be the twenty-first century exponent of, has always been, at best, a pragmatic recognition of the narrowness of the political and economic stage upon which progressive politicians are permitted to operate in the neoliberal era; and, at worst, an ideological manifestation of the “Stockholm Syndrome” in which fearful left-wing politicians start identifying with the terrorists who have taken them hostage.

On one thing, however, Mapp and I are in complete agreement. The creation of the Labour-NZF-Green government has, indeed, excited me and enlivened my hopes that, when it becomes clear to both our new prime minister and her finance minister that the price they are being asked to pay to keep the neoliberal guard-dogs away from their throats is too high for any discernible good that it is doing, then they will dig deep into the collective experience of the New Zealand labour movement and find there not only the courage to speak socialist words, but also to rally the New Zealand people behind socialist deeds.

Neither Tony Blair, nor Bill Clinton, ever believed that such a course of action could lead to anything except electoral catastrophe. And, in their time, the early-1990s, they may well have been correct. But, as Mapp is so keen to remind us, this is the twenty-first century, and the skies are thick with neoliberal chickens flapping home to roost. As both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have made clear, to call yourself a socialist in “the latter part of the second decade of the twenty-first century” is not the one-way ticket to political oblivion which Blair and Clinton assumed it to be. With the grim consequences of the neoliberal counter-revolution all around us, the imminent prospect of a peaceful, democratic-socialist, revolution no longer seems so bad.

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Viable Within The System.

Playing By The Rules: Bill Clinton's overriding ambition was to become - and remain - a political player. When he was just 23 he wrote: “For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead.” To do so, however, he had to maintain his "political viability within the system." It was this urge to remain viable within the system that would lead a whole generation of Centre Left politicians to dazzling political success and abject moral failure.

 

“THE DECISION not to be a resister, and the related subsequent decisions, were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.”

 

Bill Clinton was only 23 years old when he wrote these words. Colonel Eugene Holmes, head of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at the University of Arkansas, had arranged for the young Rhodes Scholar to join what we used to call the “Territorial Force” so that he might avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Clinton was writing to explain why, after much thought, he had decided to reject the offer of ROTC training and take his chances with the Draft.

 

“For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress”, Clinton explained to the Colonel. “It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead.”

 

Had Clinton not drawn a “lucky” number in the ballot, and thus escaped service in Vietnam, his fledgling career might have been cut short by a Viet-Cong bullet. As things turned out, however, the young Arkansas law student’s “practical political ability” was enough to take him all the way to the White House. So “viable” was Bill Clinton in the American political system that, in 1993, he was sworn in as the 42nd President of the United States.

 

In office, Clinton proved that his decision to risk the draft, rather than, at some point in the future, be labelled  a “draft-dodger”, was in no sense aberrant. Because, although Clinton’s concern for rapid social progress was very real, his desire to maintain his political viability within the system was much, much stronger. Throughout his career, whenever the two objectives came into conflict, Clinton was almost always willing to sacrifice rapid social progress on the altar of his own political viability.

 

Clinton was by no means alone in making the retention of personal political viability his Number One priority. Two of his most fervent admirers on the Centre Left, internationally, Tony Blair and Helen Clark, operated in much the same way. Clark’s infamous quip: “I didn’t come this far to be burnt out in a hail of gunfire”; demonstrated the importance she attached to remaining viable. As did Tony Blair’s observation that: “Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile.”

 

Some have characterised Clinton’s modus operandi – dignified by some as a “Third Way” between the Far Left’s alleged lack of viability and the Far Right’s hostility to any form of social progress – as entirely consistent with the Baby Boom generation’s determination to have their cake and eat it too. While there is a generous measure of Baby Boomer self-indulgence in Third Way politics, there is also a harder, frankly self-protective, edge to Clinton’s “practical” political style.

 

The letter to Colonel Holmes was written towards the end of 1969. For ambitious leftists like Clinton, the previous two years had been heart-breaking and terrifying in equal measure. In 1968 the two greatest hopes for securing rapid social change in America – Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy – had both been assassinated. And the inheritor of the darkness into which the country had suddenly been hurled, Richard Nixon, left progressive America feeling angry, isolated and afraid.

 

In their hit song, Long Time Gone, Crosby Stills and Nash evoked these conflicting generational emotions with heart-wrenching force:

 

Speak out you got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind if you dare
But don’t, no don’t, no, try to get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair

 

The Centre Left’s predicament did not improve in the following decades. Object lessons like Chile, Australia and Nicaragua proved that left-wing governments could be shot down just as easily as left-wing politicians. And with the last great challenge to free-market capitalism blipping-off the screen in 1991, “it’s the economy stupid” took on a whole new meaning.

 

For Centre Left parties to remain viable within the system it had become necessary for them to surrender practically every radical item on their historic agenda. It was still possible to do good, but only if the rich were allowed to do better. It was the likes of Clinton in the USA, Blair in the UK, and Clark in New Zealand, who, finally, made the world safe for neoliberalism.

 

Meaning that if, by some miracle, a genuine left-winger (like Jeremy Corbyn) should find himself at the head of a modern, Centre Left party, the Right will have no need to go looking for assassins – either real or metaphorical. To remain viable within the system, his own colleagues – all of them politicians of the most practical ability – will strike him down.

 

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

Dictatorship Or Chaos? The Only Choice Left In The Middle East.

A Room Full Of Spiders: Shia militiamen training in Iraq. Living with dictators is never easy, but if events in the Middle East since 2003 have taught us anything, it’s that living without them is impossible. The curtailment of civil liberties that characterises dictatorial regimes has often been considered an acceptable trade-off for the peace and stability they bring with them. People living in these circumstances know that the alternative to dictatorship isn’t democracy – it’s chaos.

 

“SADDAM WAS A FAT BLACK SPIDER high up in the corner of the room. You knew where he was, and kept as far away from him as possible.” As a description of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, the metaphor was memorable enough, but what the young Iraqi woman said next was unforgettable. “Now that Saddam has gone the room is full of spiders. You can’t watch them all, and you can’t keep out of their way.”

 

Living with dictators is never easy, but if events in the Middle East since 2003 have taught us anything, it’s that living without them is impossible. There’s a simple reason for this. The conditions that give rise to dictatorship are generally so appalling that the curtailment of civil liberties that inevitably follows their establishment is considered an acceptable trade-off for the peace and stability they bring with them. People living in these circumstances know that the alternative to dictatorship isn’t democracy – it’s chaos.

 

Let us give the West the benefit of the doubt and say that its leaders failed to grasp this obvious truth. Let us assume that when Tony Blair declared Saddam a monster, and insisted the world would be a better place without him, he was being sincere. Let us accord the same honour to President George W. Bush, and assume that he, too, was speaking sincerely when he told the US Congress, in his 2007 State of the Union address: “The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity.” Where does it leave us?

 

It leaves us contemplating a number of brutal truths. The first, and the most brutal, being that, even allowing for Blair and Bush harbouring only the best of intentions, the answer to “the great question of our day” is that America and her allies cannot build free societies in the Middle East. And that the men and women living there will not be sharing the political rights of Westerners any time soon.

 

That being the case, the West’s choice is no longer between dictatorship and democracy; it is between dictatorship and chaos. And, given that chaos is the only thing the West’s intervention in the Middle East has created, there is really only one positive choice to be made, and that is to back those military/political leaders with the best chance of maintaining, and/or restoring, peace and stability.

 

In terms of the present security crises precipitated by the Islamic State, and the deadly chaos of Syria’s civil war (out of which the Islamic State emerged) this can only mean recognising what the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has understood from the very beginning; that the best hope of peace and stability in Syria, and eradicating Islamic State, resides with the Baathist government of President Bashar al-Assad.

 

It is what Emile Simpson, former British Army officer and author of War From the Ground-Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics, is calling the “cold realism” of the  West’s diplomatic and military future. Writing for the conservative American magazine, Foreign Policy, Simpson predicts:

 

“The post-Paris war on terror will affirm the West’s commitment to fighting radical Islamic terrorism, but, in the process, it will reject the idiom of revolutionary, moralizing democratic change inherited from President Bush. Syria was the end of the line for that approach. This new phase will assume that terrorists are nonstate actors, and will take the view that if you have an international system built around strong sovereign states — no matter how brutal or unconcerned with human rights — life becomes much harder for nonstate armed groups, including terrorists. This is simply a reflection of the new realities we face, not a celebration of that shift.”

 

Democrats will stand aghast at this unapologetic re-emergence of Nineteenth Century realpolitik. They would, however, be wise to curb their outrage. The Baathist regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Assad family were, indisputably, ruthlessly oppressive in the context of political rights. When viewed from the perspective of the economic and social rights these secular Baathist regimes delivered, however, the picture changes. Modern systems of public education and health opened up the prospect of a more prosperous life for both men and women. Large-scale state interventions generated both jobs and, by Middle Eastern standards, prosperity. Most important, in both Iraq and Syria, the Baathists kept Islamic fanaticism under tight control.

 

All of which raises the worrying question: Was it really dictatorship that the West was determined to eradicate from the Middle East – including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States? Or was it Baathism? Were the men behind Blair and Bush actually betting that their long-term interests would be better served by “a room full of spiders?”

 

If so, then they lost the bet.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 November 2015.

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.

Still Building Jerusalem? British Labour And The "Spirit Of '45".

Man Of The Hour? After five years of right-wing economic austerity, the British Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, should be celebrating an historic landslide victory this morning – not casting his eyes, warily, north of the border.

 

UNLESS THE POLLSTERS have got it very wrong, it’s probably too soon to say who has won the UK General Election. After five years of right-wing economic austerity, that’s extraordinary. The British Labour Party should be celebrating an historic landslide victory this morning – not casting their eyes, warily, north of the border, to where the Scots really are celebrating an historic electoral rout.

 

A great part of the problem afflicting labour and social-democratic parties all over the western world is the vast gulf that now separates the party activist from the party voter. Though many of Labour’s activists may have grown up in families only one generation removed from the mean streets of working-class existence, that gap is all important.

 

In the UK, the activist’s grandparents may have been among the tens-of-thousands who gathered outside Transport House on 26 July 1945 to celebrate Labour’s crushing victory over the old order, and to sing – no, not The Red Flag – but Jerusalem, the English poet, William Blake’s, great summons to moral and spiritual transformation.

 

I will not cease from mental fight

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land

 

That “Spirit of 45” was hot enough to keep up the pressure in Labour’s political boilers for another quarter-century.

 

Victory! The British Labour Party leader, Clement Atlee, celebrates his own re-election and Labour's landslide victory on the night of 26 July 1945.

 

The wholesale democratisation of British society, which the Spirit of 45 catalysed, made possible the next great wave of political transformation. Building on the solid economic foundations of the Welfare State, the post-war “Baby Boom” generation extended Labour’s revolution into the fraught territory of race, gender and sexuality. These “new social issues”, which also included the struggles against nuclear annihilation and environmental desecration, recalled to the men and women of 45 the words of the old trade union song, Bread and Roses:

 

Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses, too

 

The great hope, of course, was that, in the next generation – the Baby Boomers children – this  great, two-pronged assault on inequality and injustice would culminate in a new kind of society: a society in which economic and social democracy would finally be able to clothe the bare skeleton of political democracy with living flesh and blood.

 

That this did not happen is explained, at least in part, by the fact that the men and women of 1945 built too extensively and too well. Full employment, strong trade unions and massive social housing programmes joined with free public health and education to produce a generation for whom the gut-wrenching realities of want, ignorance, idleness, squalor and disease had retreated to the realm of parental memory. The power of collectivism, so essential to the defeat of those evils, would also fade. Increasingly the question asked was not: “What do we need?” But “What do I want?”

 

As the thirty-year period of reconstruction, which fuelled the great post-war boom, fell victim to stagnation and the most successful rear-guard action in defence of profit and privilege the world has ever seen, the ideological separation of social from economic freedom saw the fire beneath Labour’s boiler shrink to embers and ashes.

 

By the time Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party confessed to being “intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich”, it was clear that the Spirit of 45 was dead. A Labour Party that no longer burns to create a society in which none are filthy rich, and none obscenely poor, isn’t a “new” Labour Party; it’s not a Labour Party at all.

 

Does Ed Miliband understand this? Does he now accept that Labour, by upholding “economic freedom” as an unqualified good, has contributed hugely to the burgeoning social inequalities against which he’s spent the last five years campaigning? We must hope so.

 

We must also hope that in the ten minutes he spent chatting with the visiting New Zealand Labour Leader, Andrew Little, he reiterated the futility of promising to get tough on inequality, without also promising to get tough on the causes of inequality.

 

That mental fight, in both the UK and New Zealand, remains to be fought. A generation still waits for their bows of burning gold, their arrows of desire; for their spears – oh clouds unfold! – for the chariots of fire that only a real Labour Party can give them.

 

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, 8 May 2015.

Blair's Bilious Bloviating. Or, Jeez Tony, Haven't You Done Enough Damage?

Purveyor of Hot Air Since 1997: Tony Blair's latest essay on the Middle East was so bad that even London's Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, told him to "put a sock in it". The terms "self-deluding" and "self-serving" are barely adequate to describe Blair's bilious bloviating.

FOR NEARLY A WEEK the world has been retching over Tony Blair’s essay on Iraq. Having read it, even London’s Tory Mayor, Boris Johnson, curtly instructed him to “put a sock in it”.

This global revulsion is not solely attributable to the fact that Mr Blair, the second-most-culpable person associated with the bloody Iraqi omnishambles, is still presuming to tell the world how to fix it – though that would be reason enough. It’s because his recipe for peace and progress in the Middle East is exactly the same as it was back in 2003. Invasion, occupation and the imposition of Western values.

 

The formula that worked so tremendously well the first time!

 

According to Mr Blair, the Islamic world, being “inherently unstable”, cannot actually be damaged by anything “we” (by which he presumably means the Anglo-American imperium and its assorted hangers-on) do to it. Iraq, Libya, Syria: they’d all have gone bad regardless of “our” actions. None of it is down to “us”.

 

“The problems of the Middle East are the product of bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion going back over a long time. Poor governance, weak institutions, oppressive rule and a failure within parts of Islam to work out a sensible relationship between religion and Government have combined to create countries which are simply unprepared for the modern world. Put into that mix, young populations with no effective job opportunities and education systems that do not correspond to the requirements of the future economy, and you have a toxic, inherently unstable matrix of factors that was always – repeat always - going to lead to a revolution.”

 

So, you see, the “international community” has nothing to reproach itself for when it comes to the Middle East. Those fine fellows, Sykes and Picot, drawing lines all over the maps of the dying Ottoman Empire back in 1916, were entirely blameless. War, after all, is war. And if you’re foolish enough to thrown in with the losing side, then you can hardly complain when your territory is carved up like a (ahem) Turkey.

 

Yes, yes, yes – alright! His Majesty’s Government may have encouraged Colonel T.E. Lawrence to stir up the Arabs against the Turks by promising them their own independent kingdom if they threw in with the winning side. But that was a wartime promise – and everyone knows (or should know) what a wartime promise is worth.

 

And, no, on balance, Mr Blair clearly does not agree that the Royal Air Force’s deployment of poison gas bombs against rebellious Iraqi tribespeople in the 1920s and 30s is in any way evidence of “poor governance” or “oppressive rule” on the part of the British Empire. Any more than the 1918 Balfour Declaration, which, by promising the Jewish people their own homeland in Palestine laid the foundations for the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, could be described as the product of “bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion”.

 

Mr Blair’s essay is not burdened with such irrelevant historical detail. “We have to put aside the differences of the past”, he warns, “and act now to save the future.”

 

Brave words. And yet, among the 2,833 words of Mr Blair’s bilious essay two very important words are missing – Saudi Arabia.

 

Which is really rather odd, because it is the Wahhabism of the Saudis, coupled with the Kingdom’s extraordinary oil wealth, which is inspiring, resourcing and providing diplomatic cover for terrorist militia all over the Middle East.

 

A Caliphate of the Righteous? Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) jihadists pose for the cameras. While Western Imperialism continues to dictate the fate of the Middle East, ISIS will never want for recruits.

 

If “saving the future” does not involve imposing UN sanctions upon the Saudis. If it does not include the “international community” stepping away from the feudal potentates and military dictators it has been pleased to call “moderate Arab opinion”. If it is not about openly sponsoring comprehensive democratic reforms. Then, Mr Blair’s self-righteous and self-serving exhortations notwithstanding, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its shimmering mirage of a borderless caliphate of the righteous, will never lack for followers.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, June 20, 2014.

Staying The Course: The Legacy Of Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher's Legacy: Margaret Thatcher tested the British Left - and found it wanting. The most pernicious of all her legacies is the damage she inflicted upon the ideological integrity of the British Labour Party. Rather than repudiate Thatcherism, Tony Blair's "New" Labour Party accepted it as an irreversible historical reality.

DE MORTUIS nil nisi bonum – of the dead speak only good – is a compassionate maxim. I’m not sure Margaret Thatcher would have followed it, but in writing about the late British Prime Minister, I will do my best.

 

Perhaps the kindest (and certainly the truest) observation I can offer about Baroness Thatcher is that she tested the British Left and found it wanting.

 

So absolute has “Thatcherism’s” ideological triumph been that few now remember how little prospect of success the British Conservative Party’s new leader was granted – even by her colleagues.

 

The 1970s represented the high-water mark of the Left’s success in the English-speaking world. Even as late as 1979 – the year in which Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime-minister – the ideology we know today as neoliberalism was dismissed as extremist folly by practically all “serious” public intellectuals (including a number on the Right). If the Keynesian economic policies that had underpinned thirty years of post-war prosperity no longer seemed to be working, the cure was generally supposed to lie in a shift to the Left – not in a lurch rightwards to the laissez-faire precepts of the Victorian era.

 

In this context, the election of the Margaret Thatcher-led Conservative Government was interpreted not as some sort of ideological sea-change, but as the British working-class’s angry response to the multiple economic and political failures of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government.

 

Under the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the Conservatives had (as always) benefited from the large number of votes cast for the Liberal Party. But the size of the Conservatives’ majority in the House of Commons by no means reflected the party’s share of the popular vote. With 13.6 million votes (43.9 percent) the Conservatives enjoyed a clear plurality, but the party’s tally was still well below that of the 15.8 million votes cast for their opponents – Labour and the Liberals.

 

Baroness Thatcher’s admirers may be loathe to admit it, but at no time in her eleven year reign did the Conservative Party’s neoliberal programme ever attract more than the 43.9 percent it received in 1979.
 

What she was able to do, however, was unite the Right's plurality and bind it ever-more-tightly to the Conservative Party’s radical economic and social programme. The middle-class voters who, under the hapless Ted Heath, had all but given up hope that the “lower orders” would ever be put back in their proper place, were both inspired and invigorated by the Tories’ “Iron Lady”.

 

This unity on the Right was not, however, answered by unity on the Left. The right of the Labour Party simply wasn’t willing to follow Tony Benn into the radical territory dictated by the party’s socialist ideology. Egged on by the right-wing British media (which needed no assistance in recognising an opportunity to divide and conquer when it saw one) the 15-17 million British voters who opposed Thatcherism fruitlessly divvied up their support between Labour, the Liberal Party and the Labour Right’s breakaway Social Democratic Party.
 

In sociological terms this splitting of the Left reflected the professional middle-classes’ political refusal to surrender either their status (or their taxes!) to working-class people. When the chips were down (and Thatcherism made damn sure the chips were always down) even these ostensibly “conscience-driven” members of the British bourgeoisie refused to recognise working-class Britons as their social and intellectual equals.

 

As Margaret Thatcher set about defeating the organised working-class in the mines and factories, their middle-class "comrades" were waging a parallel campaign of class warfare inside the Labour Party.

 

Thatcherism’s ultimate triumph, therefore, is not represented in Britain’s pulverised trade unions and privatised industries (unions can be rebuilt, industries can be renationalised) but in the person of Tony Blair and his ideologically de-fanged “New” Labour Party.

 

“You turn if you want to.” Margaret Thatcher famously told the 1980 Conservative Party Conference. “The Lady’s not for turning!”

 

If only the British Left had been equally determined to stay the course.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News. The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 April 2013.

Despising The Working Class: A Reply To Josie Pagani

Farewell To The Working Class: Former Labour candidate, Josie Pagani, takes issue with Chris Trotter's Refugee Status posting. He responds by arguing that her urge to rid Labour of "outdated, misplaced dogma" only proves her inability to distinguish the winning of an election from successfully making history.

POOR JOSIE PAGANI, it’s just so unfair that politics won’t let her have her cake and eat it too. Apparently, it’s not enough to be told that your hubby’s strategies are working, and that the outcome both you and he desire most, a Labour victory in 2014, is looking more and more like a safe investment on iPredict. No, Labour victories have to be made of more than mere spin and gimmicks and tawdry compromises, they should come decked-out in all the finery of “genuine social democracy that is radical precisely because it stands beside working people who worry about their jobs and need more money in the weekly wage packet to pay the bills.”

The sort of victory that Labour won in 1938 – with 55 percent of the popular vote – and all the banners bravely flying: that’s what Josie wants. The pity of it is that everything Labour did back then, in the 1930s, to merit such a decisive electoral mandate involved the very policies that Josie now dismisses as being fit only for a “romanticised” and “pretend” Utopia.

What she wants are the sort of policies promoted by “successful, history-making social democratic leader[s] the world over”. Stand-out characters like Barack Obama (servant of Wall Street and master of the killer drones) and Gerhard Schroeder (whose policy of making Germany’s exports unfairly competitive, by suppressing German workers’ wage growth, lies at the heart of the Eurozone’s present crisis). These are the sort of blokes Josie’s looking for: social democrats who refuse to “indulge” the ideas of … um … social democrats.

Part of Josie’s problem is that she confuses “history-making” with success at the polls. It was precisely this confusion that Refugee Status – the posting Josie so vehemently denounces on her Facebook page – attempts to address.

Far from sneering at the notion of Labour winning back its former supporters by convincing them that Mr Shearer respects their values and admires their commitment to hard work and personal betterment, I recognise it as a potentially winning rhetorical gesture. What Josie doesn’t appear to understand, however, is that the statement is also a direct steal from the rhetoric of our political enemies; the sort of language you hear in the mouths of right-wing voters who “despise working people” and “look down on their values”; those very same “creatures from the barbecue pit and the sports bar” who brought down the government of Helen Clark in 2008.

As the American political psychologist, George Lakoff, constantly reminds us: using the rhetoric of our political enemies only becomes truly effective when we also embrace the values that their language expresses. That is the real historical lesson to be drawn from the careers of nominally social-democratic leaders like Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and Barack Obama. Blair, in particular, became prime minister of the United Kingdom not by repudiating Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal, militaristic and authoritarian legacy, but by convincing the English middle-class that he was the only politician fit to inherit it. Only when Labour had ditched “Clause 4” and every other shred of “outdated, misplaced dogma”; only when Rupert Murdoch felt safe to let Blair’s party bask in the radiant glow of The Sun; would “New Labour” finally be permitted to come first past the winning post.

Let’s pause here for a short historical and psephological lesson for Josie. The British Labour Party wasn’t rendered unelectable by holding fast to its founding principles, it was kept out of office by the deliberate defection of its right-wing MPs. The party they formed: called, interestingly, the Social Democrat Party; was intended to (and did) exploit the inherent unfairness of the FPP system to prevent Labour winning the 1983, 1987 and 1992 UK general elections. Throughout the 1980s, the British Conservative Party never won more than 42.4 percent of the popular vote. Between them, the Labour Party and the SDP-Liberal Alliance regularly won more than 50 percent.

Rupert's Reward: Neil Kinnock's expulsion of the Militant Tendency notwithstanding, "it was The Sun wot won it" in 1992.

So you see, Josie, it’s a very moot point as to whether it was the Militant Tendency that kept Labour out of power in the 1980s, or the right-wing MPs that Militant was lining-up for de-selection – the ones who led the split. And, paradoxically, it was Josie’s hero, Neil Kinnock, who, by expelling Militant, opened the doors to Blair’s “modernisers”. (Kinnock’s reward, incidentally, was the infamous Sun headline of 1992: “Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”)

It is also worth noting that the image of Labour that Josie grew up with: one of endless internecine squabbling and general left-wing lunacy; was a fiction carefully contrived and nurtured by the right-wing tabloid press – the power and reach of which (not to mention its moral delinquency) continues to be exposed at the Leveson Inquiry.

It is, perhaps, no accident that Josie’s take on Labour politics should have been imbibed from headlines in the Murdoch press, or that the fetid, the fatuous and the downright fake version of history and politics promoted in the “mainstream” news media should shine through practically every line of her Facebook posting. Josie is the sort of politician who, like the Prime Minister, John Key, really does believe that “perception is reality”.

Reality, however, is made of sterner stuff. Which is why the only social democrats who possess the slightest right to describe their time in office as “successful’ or “history-making” are those who left the society they presided over more equal, more free, better housed, better educated, in better health and working for higher wages in a union shop.

Mr Shearer may win in 2014, Josie, but if, when he finally leaves office, New Zealand is a less equal and a less free country, whose working people are still living in damp and over-crowded houses, and which is still failing to address the educational needs of Maori and Pasifika students, still making people pay to see the doctor, and still allowing workers to be bullied into signing individual employment agreements in non-unionised workplaces, then I ask again, as I asked in the posting which so upset you:

What will have been the point? And who will notice the difference?

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

A Study In Mauve

Mr Shearer Makes His Stand: Mauveine, the world's first aniline dye, allowed Nineteenth Century textile manufacturers to produce the same washed-out combination of red and blue on an industrial scale and without noticeable variation. A cynic might say it is the perfect colour choice for a modern Labour Party leader.

IN 1856 WILLIAM PERKIN invented mauve. He didn’t invent it on purpose, the world’s first aniline dye was the accidental by-product of a failed chemical experiment involving coal-tar. In fact, young Mr Perkin was on the point of throwing the gloopy substance away, when he became fascinated by its “strangely beautiful” colour.

He wasn’t the only one. Mr Perkin’s new colour – a soft, mellowed-out shade of purple, reminiscent of lavender and lilac – turned out to be a huge hit with the ladies. Queen Victoria chose a mauve outfit for her daughter’s wedding and the fashion-setting French Empress, Eugenie, reckoned the colour matched her eyes.

Soon mauve was everywhere. More importantly, mauve was everywhere the same. Unlike the highly variable and often unreliable “natural” dyes made out of plants, rocks, and even insects, aniline dyes offered the fashion industry consistency on an industrial scale. One person’s mauve was exactly the same as the next person’s.

Within thirty years, Mr Perkin’s patented “Mauveine” dye had become so pervasive that the 1890s became known as the “Mauve Decade”. Mr Perkin’s “applied science” had made him a very wealthy man.

The colour purple (of which mauve is but a pale cousin) is itself a combination of the two primary colours red and blue. So rare and expensive was purple-producing dye that from classical times its use was restricted to royalty and rulers. Being “reared in the purple” meant being born to rule.

In contemporary political terms, purple could be thought of as the ultimate ideological compromise: a regal blending of revolutionary red and conservative blue. In the United States such a politician would be the hybrid offspring of Republican Party red and Democratic Party blue – Bill Clinton, perhaps?

Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council can certainly lay claim to making globally respectable the long tradition of centre-left and social-democratic parties seeking to smooth-off the jagged edges of socialist politics.

Working from the assumption that it is a lot easier to change a political party’s policies than the public’s prejudices, Clinton re-branded Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Democrats into a “Republican-Lite” party, pandering to the fads and foibles of suburban “Soccer Moms” and their white-collar professional spouses. Out went social-justice and in came “the era of Big Government is over”.

"Hey, Tony, have you ever thought about mixing Labour Red and Tory Blue and then adding a whole lot of water? Worked for me." "Crikey, Bill, what an excellent idea!"

The British Labour Party leader, Tony Blair, was absolutely besotted with Clinton’s makeover of the Democratic Party and immediately began blending Labour Red and Tory Blue into what became “New Labour”. The reviews of Blair’s purpling exercise were equally mixed. While the Blues hailed him as a statesman, the Reds denounced him as “the bastard son of Maggie Thatcher”.

Long before either Clinton or Blair mounted the podium, the New Zealand Labour Party had recognised the potential electoral advantages of mixing National blue and Labour red. As far back as the early 1960s, when Arnold Nordmeyer was Labour’s leader, there had been calls for the party’s “modernisation”.

The extraordinary success of the First Labour Government’s economic and social reforms had given birth to what the British political scientist, Austin Mitchell, called “the half-gallon, quarter-acre, pavlova paradise”. Kiwis kidded themselves that this was about as good as it got. Post-war electoral contests boiled-down to a handful of “marginal” electorates – most of which encompassed vast tracts of “ticky-tacky” suburban housing chock-full of young families. These middle-class mums and dads held great expectations: both for themselves and their children.

The very proletarian intrusion of Norman Kirk in 1965 was all that prevented Nordmeyer’s modernisation programme from purpling Labour in the late-1960s and 70s. “Big Norm’s” great skill as a left-wing politician lay in convincing New Zealanders they were all entitled to great expectations, and that Labour was capable of fulfilling them. Kirk’s was a manifesto grounded in the abundance of the post-war boom, and when, in 1973, the First Oil Crisis brought that boom to an end, he and his government were doomed.

It was David Lange who finally blended Kiwi reds and blues into the ominous shades of the Rogernomics era. In terms of applied political science, his efforts far outshone those of William Perkin. Looking at New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy, the world saw only red. While the spectacle of a Labour Government privatising state assets was rendered entirely in the deepest shades of blue. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were never so bold.

Nor were Helen Clark and Michael Cullen. Under these two political colourists New Zealand saw a whole lot of water added to Labour’s ideological palette. Kirk’s vivid reds were puddled into pale pinks, and the Roger Douglas blues reduced to something much weaker. Under Ms Clark and Dr Cullen New Zealand experienced its own “Lavender Decade”.

On Saturday, speaking to the big union rally for Auckland’s beleaguered watersiders, Labour’s new leader, David Shearer, spoke reassuringly about “flexibility and fairness”.

He was wearing a mauve shirt.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 March 2012.

Tony Blair No Guide For Shearer's Labour

First and Second of the Third Way: Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson felt obliged to destroy the British Labour Party in order to save it. This is precisely NOT what David Shearer and his team should do.

TONY BLAIR transformed the British Labour Party by means of root-and-branch reform. His priorities were as clear as they were ruthless. Disable the party. Re-write its rule-book. And, most importantly, make sure Labour’s MPs were accountable to nobody but themselves.

Blair’s reforms were driven by the strategic thinking of his chief henchman, Peter Mandelson. In essence, Mandelson’s strategy boiled down to just three, fundamental, political insights:

One. Since the British working-class has no serious political alternative to Labour, the party can safely ignore its interests.

Two. Since no party can be elected without the support of the British middle-classes, and since these have multiple electoral options, Labour must not, under any circumstances, advance policies that might upset middle-class voters.

Three. To retain the support of middle-class voters, Labour must never allow its political rivals to out-bid it on matters relating to “sound” economic and social policy.

Blair’s and Mandelson’s strategy made a brutal kind of sense in the light of the British Labour Party’s recent history, and within the wider context of British electoral politics.

The party had endured years of bitter factional strife, with those who regarded Labour as the last bastion of working-class resistance to Thatcherism fighting a desperate rear-guard action against the bleak electoral logic of the “modernisers” analysis.

That logic was, of course, underpinned by the First-Past-the-Post electoral system, which allowed the Conservative Party to win large parliamentary majorities in spite of attracting considerably less than half of the popular vote.

Labour’s “modernisers” also had to factor-in the impact of globalisation on the size of Britain’s industrial working-class (the core of both the traditional Labour vote and the more militant trade unions) and the more recent ideological triumph of capitalism over its Soviet rival.

IN 2011, the strategic choices confronting the New Zealand Labour Party’s new leader, David Shearer, are very different to those which taxed Tony Blair in the mid-1990s.

Rather than a fractious, activist and openly antagonistic party organisation, Mr Shearer inherits a party in which rank-and-file members have sunk to the level of what one wit describes as “MP fan clubs”. At its upper levels, the party is caught in the grip of a sclerotic, self-selecting oligarchy based in Labour’s insular and largely unaccountable sector-groups. In effect, Mr Shearer’s Labour Party is rapidly disabling itself. His first and most urgent priority is to kick it back into life.

To do this he must, like Blair, re-write Labour’s rule-book. Not to marginalise the party and insulate the caucus from its influence, but to do exactly the opposite. Mr Shearer needs to grow his party. At 6,000 members, Labour is only slightly bigger than the Greens. If it is to re-claim the Treasury Benches it must once again become a mass party, with a membership measured in the tens-of-thousands. And that cannot happen unless those members are equipped with real powers. These include the power to determine (and not merely “contribute” to the making of) party policy. The power to choose and rank the people on Labour’s Party List – as the Green Party members do. And, lastly, the power to choose their party’s leader. (Either directly, by a postal ballot of the whole membership, or, as the British do, through an electoral college composed of the rank-and-file, affiliated organisations, and the Parliamentary Caucus.)

Unless Mr Shearer moves swiftly to force rule-changes along these lines, all of his rhetoric about wanting to “listen” to New Zealanders will ring hollow. The most effective way to “hear” what ordinary Kiwis have to say about their country’s future, is to encourage them to join your political party by promising to translate their ideas into policy. Mr Shearer needs to convince the tens-of-thousands of Labour members who have walked away from the party that he’s committed to a future in which rank-and-file votes not only shape what Labour stands for, but who stands for Labour.

The fate of Damien O’Connor points the way. Rejecting the influence of Labour’s oligarchs over the content and ranking of the Party List, Mr O’Connor staked his future on an all-or-nothing bid for the West Coast-Tasman seat. The Coasters were only too happy to reward his courage. On 26 November, alone of all Labour’s candidates, it was Mr O’Connor who took a seat off the National Party – and by a handsome majority.

Mr Shearer has another great advantage over Tony Blair. He’s assumed Labour’s leadership in a world embittered and angry at neoliberalism’s botched ideological recipes. In 1998 Peter Mandelson infamously remarked that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. In 2011, far too many people are drowning in the rich’s filth for any sensible Labour leader to utter such dangerous apostasy.

To win in 2014, David Shearer need only steer Labour in precisely the opposite direction to that of Tony Blair.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 December 2011.