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.

Teal Park: 10/3/12

In Solidarity: Five thousand Aucklanders march down Quay Street to a rally in support of striking watersiders at Teal Park. Saturday, 10 March 2012.

Did you see it,

The flicker of fellowship,

That thin beam linking eye to eye?

Did you hear it,

The single breath sunken to a sob,

Those many voices rising to a cry?

Did you feel it,

The lash of common pain

That only a common flinch can dignify?

In solidarity.

Chris Trotter

11 March 2012

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

From Thatcher's Britain To Key's New Zealand: The Song Remains The Same

Frightening The Government

Frightening Their Government: Students gather for a demonstration on 16 October, 2010 in Paris against pension reform. Since the Student-Worker uprising of May 1968, French politicians have evinced a healthy respect for demonstrations and strikes. There was a time when the New Zealand state was similarly unwilling to risk the wrath of its citizens.

THERE’S A LINE in Michael Moore’s Sicko documentary that every democratic citizen should commit to memory. The radical film-maker declares: “Governments should always be afraid of their people, but people should never be afraid of their government.”

Mr Moore was comparing France with the United States, and wondering how two countries, both with revolutionary traditions, could end up so far apart. Americans’ fear and hatred of “Big Government” is legendary. But the French will challenge government policy at the drop of a chapeau.

In the USA you strike and demonstrate at your own risk. French governments do not like to risk demonstrations and strikes. In 1968 – well within the memory of senior French politicians – demonstrations and strikes brought the Fifth Republic to the very brink of revolution. It took the active intercession of the French Communist Party, and a ten-percent pay rise, to separate the workers from their youthful student allies. 

Governments in New Zealand were also afraid of the people – once. And the people gave them good reason.

The National Party was elected for the first time in 1949 on a rock-solid promise to abolish what they called “compulsory unionism”. In 1951 they provoked a fight with the Waterside Workers Union. If they could make an example of New Zealand’s toughest and most progressive union, then abolishing compulsory unionism would be a piece of cake.

What they got was a very different sort of example. For 151 days the wharfies and their allies fought Sid Holland’s government toe-to-toe. The Government “won” – but only because the Machiavellian boss of the Federation of Labour agreed to keep its 300,000 members “neutral”.

It would be another forty years before the National Party was prepared to have another crack at organised labour. And the only reason Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Bill passed into law without serious amendment in 1991 was because the Council of Trade Unions, dominated by “moderate” state-sector union bosses, lacked the courage to give Mr Birch and his mates a bloody nose.

Well, we’ve had twenty years to appreciate the benefits of “moderation”. Perhaps we’ve all been much too polite for far too long.

Then again, civility and moderation are qualities highly prized by New Zealanders. Our country is one of the oldest, continuously-functioning democracies on Earth. As far as possible, we prefer to communicate with our political leaders through the Ballot Box. It’s only when they deliberately and stubbornly refuse to be advised by the democratic process that we get angry.

I guess that’s why Labour, the Greens, the CTU and Grey Power have opted to fight the partial privatisation of the state-owned energy companies by launching a Citizens Initiated Referendum. Between elections, it’s one of the few ways of using the Ballot Box to make your point. CIR’s are, of course, non-binding, but a Government refusal to be guided by its undoubted success, would be extremely provocative. Knowing a majority of the electorate was against their policy – but proceeding anyway – the National-led Government would be positively inviting the people to organise a more robust response.

The precedent is there in Greenpeace’s campaign against mining Schedule Four land. The spectacle of 50,000 New Zealanders marching up Auckland’s Queen Street was more than enough to throw Mr Key’s and his Government’s big blue bulldozer into reverse.

Greenpeace's 50,000 demonstrators threw National's big blue bulldozer into reverse.

Discretion will, once again prove to be the better part of National’s valour if Kiwis respond to the Labour/Green/CTU/Grey Power call for volunteers. If anything, the spectacle of ordinary citizens, muffled against the Autumn gales, standing on tens-of-thousands of street corners clutching clip-boards and ball-point pens, or knocking on the doors of tens-of-thousands of former National Party voters, is likely to prove even more terrifying than Robyn Malcolm, Lucy Lawless and their Greenpeace legions.

The task of gathering the 307,000 signatures required to force a referendum on asset sales is not a small one – but it can be done.

And, frankly, we need to do it. As citizens, we’ve been passive for far too long. As the veteran British Labour politician, Tony Benn, tells Michael Moore in Sicko: “An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.” Much harder than a nation that’s beaten-down, demoralised and genuinely frightened of its own government.

Democracy is not a political system for fearful people: to function properly it requires regular displays of unreasonable and immoderate courage.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 February 2012.

The Duty Of Care

The Good Samaritan: When someone is being attacked, or is in need of our help, we all have a duty of care to those afflicted. Whether it's on the road to Jericho or down on the Auckland waterfront, we are never justified in passing by on the other side.

YOUR BEST MATES are being attacked by a gang of thugs – what do you do? Most of us wouldn’t need to think twice. We’d pile on in, fists swinging, to back them up. It’s the most human of responses: defend your friends and protect your loved ones from harm.

What sort of legal system would expressly forbid people from standing up for their mates? What sort of law-maker would try to stop us helping our fellow citizens?

Nobody would do that – right? I mean you hear about cases of mothers being charged with failing to provide their children with “the necessities of life”; or for failing in their “duty of care”. Because that’s a universal duty – isn’t it? To care for each other?

Well, no. It isn’t. Not when it comes to people being attacked by their employers. Not when a Board of Directors is beating up their own staff; stripping them of their livelihoods; impoverishing their families.

If you see that happening, and you try to do something about it, you’ll end up in court.

New Zealand prides itself on being a good international citizen, but when it comes to the rights of working people we are seriously delinquent.

Convention No. 87, Article 8, of the International Labour Organisation (of which New Zealand is a member) clearly states that:

1. In exercising the rights provided for in this Convention workers and employers and their respective organisations, like other persons or organised collectivities, shall respect the law of the land.

2. The law of the land shall not be such as to impair, nor shall it be so applied as to impair, the guarantees provided for in this Convention.

The guarantee provided for is, of course, the right to organise with the intention of  furthering and defending the interests of workers.

How, then, are we to account for Section 86 of New Zealand’s Employment Relations Act (2000) which states:

Participation in a strike or lockout is unlawful if the strike or lockout relates to … a dispute.

It is this section of the Act which prevents workers from taking action to protect and defend other workers – by means of “secondary picketing” and “sympathy strikes”. We have seen this section of the Act in operation at the ports of Tauranga, Wellington and Lyttelton, where workers attempted to prevent the unloading of ships serviced by non-union labour at the Port of Auckland. These men were subsequently forced by the Courts to do violence to their own consciences, and the interests of fellow union members, by obeying their employers’ “lawful” orders to unload the ship.

Interestingly, this is not something we ask citizens to do when their country goes to war. If a person can demonstrate a genuine “conscientious objection” to bearing arms he or she is excused from active service. Strange, then, that when ordered to do something that he or she knows is bound to hurt a fellow worker, citizens are afforded no such opportunity to conscientiously object. On pain of losing their jobs, paying a fine, or even being sent to prison, working people are obliged to put the boot into other working people.

Which brings us back to our earlier question: What sort of legal system, what sort of legislator, requires people to behave in this way? The answer, of course, is a legal system and legislators dedicated to facilitating the accumulation of private wealth. It is Capitalism which tells us that we cannot go to the aid of our mates; and that, when ordered to do so, we must put the boot into our comrades.

Is such a system morally acceptable? I would argue that it is not. Any more than the old “Jim Crow” system which (quite legally) denied African-Americans their basic human rights was acceptable. The laws that kept white Southerners in a position of social and economic dominance were fundamentally immoral, and they were laid low by the direct action of ordinary people who simply refused to obey statutes deliberately framed to oppress them.

It has long been understood by students of democratic theory that the citizen is not obliged to co-operate in his or her own oppression. As Thomas Jefferson put it in the American Declaration of Independence:

[W]hen a long train of [government] abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

The train of abuses of New Zealand’s working people has indeed be a long one, and perhaps its most depressing aspect is that when the party ostensibly dedicated to the rights of “labour” had the opportunity, it did not abolish the legal prohibition against sympathy strikes. Through nine long years in government, the New Zealand Labour Party declined to allow even its own voters to come to the aid of their mates.

Even now, in 2012, Labour’s new leader, David Shearer, declares his anxiety not to “take sides” in the Ports of Auckland dispute – not even as members of MUNZ, a trade union affiliated to his own party, are being stripped of their livelihoods. And, in spite of the fact that ILO Convention No. 154 stipulates that:

In order to secure the greatest social advantage of new methods of cargo handling, it shall be national policy to encourage co-operation between employers or their organisations, on the one hand, and workers’ organisations, on the other hand, in improving the efficiency of work in ports, with the participation, as appropriate, of the competent authorities.

Auckland’s Labour Mayor has very publicly elected to “pass by on the other side”.

For the sake of our mates, and our own consciences, the sooner we provide “new guards” for their “future security” the better.

How else can we honour our duty of care?

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

No Ifs, No Buts, Be There!

Steady, Comrades, Steady

No Surrender! New Zealand workers have counted for nothing for far too long. If they mean to have a class war - let it begin here.

STEADY, COMRADES, STEADY. This is the worst they have. This is all they’ve got left. After this, they have nothing. So, hold steady, comrades, hold steady.

Nothing has changed down on the wharves. The ships are still sailing past. There’s still only a handful of useless scabs sitting on their hands. The people who keep the Port of Auckland running are the members of MUNZ. You were out yesterday. You’re out today. And you’ll be out again tomorrow.

Gibson still has no workforce. The port still lies idle. Yes, he’s announced your dismissal – but you all knew he was going to do that sooner or later. That he’s opted to do it sooner is a measure of how much and how badly you’ve hurt him.

The tipping-point was the demonstration of international and local solidarity. The ships that have not – and will not – dock at Auckland. The heroic secondary picketing at Tauranga and Wellington which held up those scab-loaded ships for 24-48 hours. What choice did Gibson and his Board of Directors have except to “go nuclear” and issue the redundancy notices?

It’s time for cool heads now. Time to sit back and have a quiet think.

Where’s Gibson going to get 300 stevedores? Australia? Really? The same show of international solidarity that saw all those ships steam past Auckland will stop all but the most scabrous of Aussies from crossing the ditch. And why would they come here anyway? What sort of wages and conditions can they look forward to receiving from any stevedoring company willing to sign Gibson’s contract?

No. Gibson and his minions can only recruit a new workforce of stevedores from the stevedores he’s already got – yourselves. Stay strong, don’t waver, and the Port of Auckland will stay closed.

Gibson’s made a mistake. He’s left you with no option now except to fuck him and his mates completely. It’s no surrender now, comrades, and no quarter asked or given. This does not stop until Gibson and the POAL board are sacked. He’s trying to take your jobs. That leaves you with no choice but to take his.

So, don’t worry, and don’t flinch. There are thousands of Kiwis standing with you in spirit. They’re ready to dig deep into their pockets for you and your families. And if Gibson tries to moves scabs onto those wharves, you just wait and see. There’ll be hundreds ready to stand at your shoulder. As General Petain assured the soldiers of France at the Battle of Verdun: “They shall not pass!”

And there are other means of defence. You’ve got some of New Zealand’s best legal brains at your disposal. The POAL’s lack of good faith is there to be exposed; their actions are just begging to be struck down. There are good men and women ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court – if that's what's required.

Political support is there, too. Labour, the Greens, Mana – even Winston – will take up your cause. They know that you are New Zealand citizens: people with rights; not slaves. Working people have counted for nothing in this country for far too long. As the American militia commander told his men before the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775: “Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

So stand steady, comrades. If it seems dark now, it will be lighter soon. You are not alone. You have right on your side - and time as well. Every day and every ship that passes brings the moment of reckoning for Tony Gibson and his mates one day and one ship closer.

And the same goes for that filleted jellyfish formerly known as Len Brown. If I may conclude by paraphrasing the Australian Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, on the day he was dismissed:

“Well may you say ‘God save Auckland’s port’ – because nothing will save Auckland’s mayor!”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.