The Interregnum:
Rethinking New Zealand
edited by Morgan Godfrey, BWB Texts, Wellington, 2016

This collection of essays seeks to “rethink” New Zealand, offering suggestions as to how public policy might be improved. The scene is set at the start with a brisk reminder from Andrew Dean (whose “Ruth, Roger And Me: Debts And Legacies” I reviewed in Watchdog 139, August 2015, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/39/12.html) of Rogernomics and the neo-liberal onslaught that ensued. This is hardly new material, but it could well be for the intended audience, young people. The best thing about the book is that its contributors are all themselves young, new voices. Their target audience, living entirely in the post-Roger world, might need such a reminder. 

That’s not to say that the authors are themselves innocent of historical context. Continuing the theme of economics, Wilbur Townsend can imagine a society that pre-dates 1984’s fourth Labour government, taking us all the way back to MJ Savage’s 1935 Administration to suggest that it’s time to re-examine current assumptions about the role of the State.

We’re told ad nauseum these days that the Government needs to get out of the way so efficiency and growth can flourish. But Townsend points out that the critique is always of State-managed enterprises, not State-owned ones. As private corporations themselves hire managers to run their businesses, the nature of the owner doesn’t matter.

He could go further than this. By tacitly seeming to allow that State-owned entities might indeed be the awkward monsters of the conventional wisdom, Townsend makes an unnecessary concession. But fair enough: in a breezy “text”, space doesn’t allow elaboration. The key point is that, were businesses to be publicly owned, the benefits could be assigned to citizens instead of being whisked away, usually overseas, as private profit.

Expanding this theme in his chapter on climate change, Edward Miller argues that “if we own the machines” that power the economy, we can all benefit, and “by socialising capital within sovereign wealth funds, the income they earn can be made a universal income”. The State has the resources to fund strategic projects, as Savage did by “printing money and putting it to work”.

Miller cites the UK Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn (see my review of “Corbyn”, below), who has talked about “quantitative easing for the people”. In this way, we could counter the existing assumption that countries have to choose between the economy - usually seen as something called “the real world” of Trumps - or the environment – “a nice to have” diversion. Most people resent being told they have to choose between the two, so we might call such a society a democracy.

Lamia Imam, contributing “from afar” in Texas, tells us that she is a NZ citizen who identifies with three countries, her ethnic origin being Bangladeshi and her parents’ values being Islamic. Of all the ten essays perhaps Imam’s piece, often amusing, best captures the spirit of our emerging culture. She discusses, for instance, blogging and her Twitter account, vital expressions of 21st Century life, but subjects that remain largely mysterious to that distant NZ where older people can reside.

Politics Of Love

Not long ago, Holly Walker was a Green MP but she says once she had a baby she had to quit. Her suggestions as to some specific reforms that would allow motherhood and career to co-exist are interesting, a happy complement to Imam’s more discursive approach to feminism.  As a conclusion to the selection we’re offered Daniel Kleinsman’s “Religion And The Real World” and “The Politics Of Love”, from Max Harris.

Kleinsman is training to be a Catholic priest; Harris is studying at Oxford. Both seek to nudge our thinking to more moral clarity than is generally the norm these compromised days. We can agree with their take on what the problem is but, in both cases, the ambitious titles are misleading. Kleinsman does no more than paraphrase various teachings of the present Pope, who seems to be generally popular.

That’s probably because his approach seems to be more grounded and humane than what has often emanated from the Vatican in the past. In fact, the Pope’s social policies are borrowed from secular humanism. Kleinsman himself might be hinting at this when he writes that “the problem is that the traditional religious story is incompatible with our complex cultural context; it is … dysfunctional in our modern-day reality” (despite Kleinsman’s straw man of an otherwise rigid and reactionary Church, social justice themes have a long history in Catholic theology or the Pope couldn’t appeal to them).

Edward Miller‘s take on “love” is discussed exclusively in terms of Maori tradition, specifically based on the concept of “aroha”. He offers a translation that sees aroha as “an all-encompassing quality of goodness”. In limiting his big topic to Maoridom, his approach mirrors Kleinsman’s close focus. But, again like Kleinsman, he is ascribing what are universal values to one tradition. Why exclude almost the entire planet? Don’t lots of the world’s cultures cherish goodness?

And, again like Kleinsman, he finishes by contradicting himself, offering as examples of Kiwi morality Ed Hillary and Brendon McCullum, the recent NZ cricket captain. Ed’s always been everyone’s favourite, but, as Miller says, the qualities of modesty and humility we associate with him and Brendon are central to traditional NZ values. Yes, if we’re Maori or liberal Catholic we might well like these two chaps, but so might anybody else. And when the crowd cheers another Bazza wallop into the stands, they’re happy all right, even loving, but the opposing bowler is not feeling an all-encompassing quality of goodness.

Polluted Inheritance
by Mike Joy, BWB Texts, Wellington, 2015

At the end of June 2017 Greenpeace released a report on the effects of dairying. According to the Minister for Primary Industries and a spokesman for Federated Farmers, they shouldn’t have. Nathan Guy is reported to have complained that the report, which slammed the environmental impact of too many cows, unfairly targeted dairy and left out industrial and urban pollution. Dairy intensification has been based on irrigation, but Guy said that irrigation is not just about dairy. Irrigation brought a return to the taxpayer and regional councils had to consider overall environmental impacts.

Federated Farmers thought that the report was “extreme” and left “little room for constructive dialogue” (Press, 29/617). At the time of writing there was no mention of support for Greenpeace from other parties except for the centrist and pragmatic Opportunities, but that would come because all the themes, as reported, have been expressed for a long time by a lot of people.

Here are six main arguments made by the minister and the farmer. To anyone unversed in the politics of water and cows in New Zealand the extreme language used by the reports’ critics would suggest that someone has been very wrong about the whole business of dairying. Or is it that – as in conflict-averse Godzone we usually hope - the truth is somewhere in between, in a place where we will eventually all meet?

The best person to provide accurate answers might well be Mike Joy, a scientist at Massey University who has long been investigating the ecology of rivers, especially the Manawatu River, which has the unfortunate distinction of being the most polluted of all 100 rivers in a global study. Joy’s work has enabled the rest of us – those of us, that is, who still cling to a pre-Trumpian world - to ponder the matter with the benefit of facts. Joy points out that NZ’s landscape, pre-human contact, was comprised of wetlands, forest and sand dunes. Most of what we see on a daily basis – most times all of what we see – is the result of human modification of the original geography as our forebears settled the land. 

In Manawatu, wetlands predominated, but 98% of them have gone as swamps were drained for farming. In the rush to colonise the raw new land, early settlers paid no attention to the natural environment but any condemnation aimed their way would be ahistorical and unfair (in Manawatu and Horowhenua the early economy was largely based on flax). Joy doesn’t make any such smugly sentimental charge. He’s talking about us now; his interest is in what we can do in the present and in the immediate future.

Across NZ, at least 90% of wetlands have been drained. Joy makes the insightful remark that lowland areas with wetlands tended to be where poorer people lived. They were especially significant for Maori, for whom the marshes were sources of food and fibre. These low watery spaces, which had few human friends with power, are vital as they act as “kidneys … and their value as soil and sediment filters, bio-accumulators, climate regulators and flood energy dissipaters is almost immeasurable. And they do it all free of charge”.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Ok, so let’s do a cost/benefit analysis, as the Ministry and Federated Farmers frequently urge. A 2011 estimate came up with a figure of $US125 trillion. That’s what the world’s wetlands are worth. An objection might be that this number cannot possibly be exactly right. No, it can’t, but it’s the best guess that we, via our experts, can make.

Joy calculates the cost through the loss of Manawatu’s wetlands at $40,000 per hectare per year. Dairying makes at best $5,000 per hectare per year. As dairying becomes more intense, more sediment ends up in the river, necessitating stopbanks. The build-up then forces the need for pumps so that tributaries can keep flowing. Ever higher, the river’s sediment fills up estuaries, lakes and harbours.

The resulting habitat loss for native species is huge, enough to earn NZ the unpleasant distinction of having the highest percentage of threatened and at-risk species in world.  44 of 100 monitored lakes are “eutrophic”, meaning that they host more nutrients than they can assimilate. It’s already the case that – given the continuation of current practices - they can never be clean. How much worse can it get?

As Greenpeace and Joy both report, NZ has the highest rate in the developed world for four water-borne diseases. Some other nasty statistics from Joy: NZ has the highest rate of increase in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the use of phosphate, a chief villain in the tragedy. There has been a 429% increase in the use of nitrogen fertiliser, which is produced from fossil fuels - doubling the damage. NZ is the world’s biggest importer of unwelcome palm kernel expeller, which is used to feed the cows.

In 2014 the winner of the Ballance Farm Supreme Environment Award was surely a farm which had cleaned up its act. Joy isn’t so sure, having worked out that it would cost $2,000,000 a year to clean up its pollution to make its water drinkable, while a return to the higher standard of a safe ecology would cost more than that. To clean up the whole country would cost $2,600,000,000 a year.

These vast numbers, it might (wrongly) be thought, could begin to justify themselves as the price of earning more than that in milk sales. Joy shows that this is not the case. On the contrary: past a certain point the land has reached a finite capacity and cow productivity increases can’t happen. Worse, the spiraling cost of trying to extract ever more cow feed results in actual losses of profit. There’s a certain sustainable point, after which dairy intensification leads to less efficient production and greater costs. In narrow financial terms, to keep pushing for ever denser numbers of cows and cow poo is irrational. 

In social, environmental and economic terms, the grossness is stark. Which raises the inevitable question: Why continue with more and more cows when it makes less and less sense? We’ve got to this point in just a few years of intensification, so how long can it continue, when the trend is leading inevitably to increased rates of environmental degradation? If we’ve already reached “peak cow” for the cost of a devastated environment, what good news can we expect over the next one or two generations?

(In a monograph that limits itself to ecological topics, Joy doesn’t venture into trade forecasting, but those who do warn that the exporting gains based on the recent imbalanced reliance on bulk exports of one product, milk powder, to one country, China, are not likely to continue in the future). Joy suggests it’s wrong to blame the farmers. They’re responding to those market signals they talk about in the Treasury. This most short-term of short-term Governments wants to see bullish gross domestic product (GDP) numbers, even if the “gross” part of the equation has a meaning that the “production” part lacks.

Always the country is asked to choose between the economy and the environment, but the “consultation” that is on show whenever the public is invited to offer an opinion is weighted so that the process ensures that the economy is what really matters. One obvious example was Canterbury, where the regional council, Environment Canterbury, was disbanded because it made some effort to take its name literally. As the Minister for the Environment, Nick Smith, explained, democracy “carried too many risks”. Commissioners were installed, along with the explicit mandate not to put too much emphasis on “science”.

The Minister says councils should consider “overall environmental impacts”. Meaning? That’s what’s happening in Manawatu and Canterbury? Those councils have the ability to clean up their patches which the central Government lacks? That the state of the Manawatu River is a minor part of Manawatu’s woes? That people in Manawatu and Canterbury think their rivers and lakes are doing just fine? Has Mr Guy heard of the Selwyn River, which has disappeared in places? Or Lake Ellesmere, where at best it’ll be decades before it’s less than poisonous?

The Environment Or The Economy?

Any policy which seeks to favour either at the expense of the other is irresponsible, but the present drive to degrade both is nonsensical. The cow craze is dumping huge costs on to taxpayers and ratepayers, lavishing vast subsidies to the polluters. So, when Nathan Guy says that cities and industries cause pollution he’s doing more than offering an irrelevant evasion.

An absurdity, the implication is that unless every problem can be solved totally and immediately, there’s no point making a start on any of them. It’s a reissue of National’s climate change policy. Or, is he saying that, as urban pollution is not part of this particular report, that its authors have no interest in urban affairs?

Is industry responsible for Manawatu’s woes? Perhaps Guy is saying that one of the world’s most polluted rivers is that way because of the towns in its catchment. We’re looking at you, Woodville, Ashhurst, Palmerston North, Shannon and Foxton. You must be worse polluters than Shanghai or Delhi. If so, Nathan, do something about it, please.

Federated Farmers don’t seem to like townies so our self-described “guardians of the land” will be happy to champion the cause. And while you’re at it, do something about those big industries that must exist upstream on Canterbury’s Selwyn River in Whitecliffs and Glentunnel. Federated Farmers thinks the report is “extreme”. No, it’s the facts that are extreme.

Joy’s fine critique came out two years ago and he’s been giving talks ever since. He says that the usual reaction he gets from agricultural interests is to the effect that there might be a problem but what can be done? This is saying that polluters are not about to change their ways. Why would they? They have friends in high places who do all they can to shut down “constructive dialogue”.

Hit & Run
Nicky Hager & Jon Stephenson, Potton and Burton, Nelson, 2017

Jon Stephenson is the journalist who first reported on events in Afghanistan and thus incurred the wrath of the Prime Minister. Nicky Hager is a researcher, who’s also previously looked at Afghanistan, notably in his “Other People’s Wars”, which I reviewed in Watchdog 128, (December 2011, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/28/13.htm). He, of course, has been copping it from Governments for years.

Hager & Stephenson have teamed up now to investigate an incident in 2010, when a Special Air Service (SAS) raid went badly wrong. For years, the Government had said that no civilians had been killed. It’s now admitted that they had been. Without the tenacity of Stephenson and Hager, the incident would have remained unknown to the public; the voices of witnesses and relatives would have remained mute. That much is clear.

Inevitable Official Evasion & Diversion

In the days following publication we were treated to the inevitable official evasion and diversion until Hager, who was responsible for the writing, while Stephenson covered the in situ aspects, admitted to having the wrong name for the village that was attacked. This error was insignificant in that the story of the attack is otherwise surprisingly intimate. We’re provided with maps and Googled photos identifying the names of all the individuals involved in the tiny villages. One such picture is of the homes of four affected locals, all related. Another shows a second location, with all the relevant sites marked.

So, an inquiry would be able to establish with confidence the accuracy or otherwise of the basic facts. Governments of whatever stripe don’t want to expose themselves to the sort of charges the authors would like to bring, and the Government’s unwillingness to look closely should not be taken to mean that there’s nothing to be seen here, folks, move on please.

Hager and Stephenson claim that the raid was motivated by revenge, the intended targets being the insurgents who detonated a bomb that killed an NZ soldier. In a radio interview (on RNZ, 26/3/17) Stephenson opined that: “You don’t go around like a hammer looking for a nail”. Whether or not the motivation was hot-headed, SAS units are by their nature inclined to wield the hammer.

Was the attack, in which 21 villagers were killed or wounded, a war crime? According to a human rights lawyer, a war crime has occurred when the military has failed to distinguish between civilians and combatants, when they do not tend to the wounded, or when they destroy property for no military reason. The authors don’t say so in so many words, but their narrative is shouting a guilty verdict on all these three grounds. Any ambiguity as to responsibility would likely be based on the role of the helicopters which the NZ SAS called in to carry out the raid, these being part of the American forces.

Given the seriousness of their accusation, the inevitable reaction has been that Stephenson and Hager have come up with “nothing new” (Bill English) and “a surprise” (Gerry Brownlee). Denials of this type are the default position of the Government - any Government at any time it’s on the receiving end of bad news. Officialdom says either that (a) the charges are boring old news or (b) that they’re outrageous. Or, as here, you throw in both (a) and (b). It doesn’t matter that they’re contradictory. The idea is always to shoot the messenger, to delay and divert. Only hippies and peaceniks are paying attention to the facts.

Our present Prime Minister, like the previous one, will not expect political damage from the book. He will calculate, almost certainly correctly, that his party won’t lose votes in the imminent election over an event in Afghanistan. Other issues press more directly. Stuff happens, his supporters will shrug. It could even be that, as with the Kim Dotcom and Glenn Greenwald election eve meeting in Auckland last time round (in 2014), it stirs up the base.

Upholding Our Highest Values

The Government knows that media reports will back its response, especially – if paradoxically – the news is bad. In the first days after the launch of “Hit & Run”, when those with a ready access to the media seek to “control the narrative”, commentators rushed to blunt Stephenson and Hager’s sharp message, either by appealing to the “fog of war” gambit or by pointing out that Hager isn’t the sort of bloke with whom you’d share a beer.

Hager is an investigative researcher respected internationally, which indicates to the morally lazy that he’s nothing but a “peace activist”. He’s motivated politically.  He’s a master of manipulating the media. It’s possible that some of the journalists who prefer to stick to recipes and “lifestyle” anecdotes do believe this sort of thing. If Hager’s the only writer of his kind in the whole country, then he must be an odd sort of bloke. 

But a moment’s thought suggests what’s wrong with this analysis. We all have preferences and interests. If conservatives and conformists don’t recognise that, in this, they are no different from Hager, they should get out more. Hager’s public profile has been one of consistent purpose. It’s the investigation that matters. The insultingly improbable implication behind the attempts to marginalise him is that – in contrast to Government people - he’s willing to bend the story to suit his biases.

Those who would remind us of the daily excesses that go unremarked and unpunished should not think that one incident in Afghanistan involving the NZ military is thereby of little concern. The repeated suggestion from State leaders has been that Hager’s refusal to accept their self-serving compromises makes him less than a true blue Kiwi. Let’s accept the contrary: that he is upholding our highest values.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour, Verso,London and New York, 2016

On a BBC TV panel in May 2017, during a programme where studiously sensible and moderate journalists from the international media looked at the UK election campaign, the mention of Jeremy Corbyn evinced dismissive amusement. The old coot was stuck in the 70s, said one. Michael Foot territory. No, said a colleague, it’s worse than that, he’s retroing all the way back to the 40s. Chuckles round the table.

In George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, you’ll remember, the pigs get the sheep and cows to chant: “Four legs good; two legs bad”. That was all they had to know. This model seems to have inspired the august brains in the studio. For them it was enough to say: “Future good; past bad”. That’s what passes for considered analysis these trivialised days.

Why was Britain in the 1940s so self-evidently a laughing stock? The Attlee Labour government that won a landslide in 1945 invested in public infrastructure, created a national health service and built massive numbers of houses. The parents and grandparents of the BBC panelists, as likely as not, were “in service”, virtually feudal retainers of a parasitic aristocracy, eking out their lives in cold, damp flats. That they are now smug TV presenters is a legacy in part of the democratisation of life chances that began in the Attlee years.

It’s not as if the poverty of pre-war Britain has been eradicated. On the contrary, the resemblance that the 2017 Labour platform bore to the one in 1945 is that both emphasised the need for the economy to be stimulated and for working people to be decently housed. Teresa May’s Conservatives were offering austerity, just as had Winston Churchill in 1945 - that most reactionary and anachronistic of all Tories. The Tories were the party stuck in the 40s.

“Unelectable”

In the middle of the campaign, as the Conservative government, the media – all the conventional wisdom – banged on about Corbyn’s “unelectability”, the grievous Tony Blair let it be known that he was considering forming a new party, offering the suggestion that “I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it”. For that former Labour Prime Minister, a Labour loss wasn’t enough. He wanted his former party, that dinosaur, to become extinct.

Seymour quotes Blairites, “New Labour” in Tony’s 1990’s formulation. An MP told a journalist that he had to offer some token support for his Leader while “secretly we’re all thinking: ‘But I hope he loses”’. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, of the Liberal Democrats, a sort of New New Labour, the Deputy PM in the recent David Cameron Conservative government, pointed out that whether he or Blair spoke for a new outfit was unimportant.

A man called Peter Mandelson had been Blair’s favoured manipulator, the operator at the centre of the web. In support of his former boss’s musing he remarked that in France Emmanuel Macron had won by leaving his party. In fact, the outgoing Socialist President, Francois Hollande, was unpopular because he was Blairite. When the spin doctors misconstrue so blatantly we are left to wonder if they don’t understand the basics of their own societies or whether they will say anything to get them through the day. Macron won on the back of a Gallic shrug at the conventional wisdom and a drastically reduced poll.

The BBC panelists, the “quality” newspapers, Clegg and Blair were agreed. The public were told it was unanimous. The old crank Corbyn was dead in the water. There need be no alternative to Conservative hegemony. Voters disagreed. The unifying myth that informs the commentariat in the UK (and NZ) is that to have that “electability” factor you have to move to a place called The Centre and get your speech writers to phrase vague clichés.

Several times Seymour talks about “triangulation”, the name given to this tactic, as developed notably by Bill Clinton. This trick allowed the Tony Blair “New Labour” Party to shed 5,000,000 votes between 1997 and 2010, so it’s not readily apparent why triangulation – betrayal of your supporters – is so self-evidently a good move.

Perhaps it’s simpler than that. Perhaps the Blairs of the world have never believed what they once claimed to have believed. Perhaps they’re mere opportunists.  Blair’s instincts have always been amoral – except for when God told him to invade Iraq in 2003. Seymour reminds us that Blair introduced “private finance initiatives”, which were unpopular with 80% of the population. Tony didn’t really think that a working person with a small baby and a big mortgage would find Labour “electable” if he invaded Iraq and cosied up to the one per centers. He wanted them to think there was nothing he could do for them. They needn’t vote.

In the UK the so-called quality papers, most of which are pro-Tory and all of which are anti-Corbyn, were hysterical in their abuse of Corbyn’s moderate manifesto. Seymour gives an idea: one called it “sub-Marxist drivel”. On another day, it thought that Corbyn was displaying “gratuitous unreason… outside the parameter of rational expectation”.

The Guardian, usually measured but also Blairite, took a different if obscure tack, deciding that under Corbyn, Labour had been “poncified” (is being poncified in the UK like being a chardonnay socialist in NZ?) To offer, all at once, sub-Marxist poncified drivel that’s beyond rational expectation is an achievement to be sure, but scarcely one that would lead you to expect that in 2017 Labour would lift its vote from around 30%, where it had stagnated for decades, to 40% in 2017.

An example of the extravagant and deliberate misconstruing of Corbyn is discussed by Seymour. Corbyn was said to be anti-women, a charge that would be electorally fatal if accepted as true. Two rival candidates for the Labour leadership had been women, both Blairite MPs, both unwilling to challenge austerity, the policy most responsible for forcing gender inequality.

Aligning itself with this self-mutilation, the Independent, a supposedly moderate newspaper, put out an editorial that advised the membership to vote for a woman “regardless of her policies”. Fortunately, the unsophisticated ignored this mad suggestion. Among the Party membership women voted 60% for Corbyn; the two austere females mustered 20% between them.

Winning Over Young People

Meanwhile, in the real world, Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet was the first in British history to have more women than men, and new members, doubtless both male and female, were joining the Corbyn Labour Party at more than twice the rate that the Tories attracted them. The Corbyn camp’s Facebook hosted 11,000,000, a hint of the support from younger people that the general election confirmed.

In this accidentally Brexitting culture the “narrative” was consistent and illogical: the Corbynites’ policies were said to be at once popular and “unelectable”. Besides the Keynesian boost, Corbyn’s “quantitative easing for the people”, Labour wanted to renationalise rail and the Royal Mail, both popular ideas. The main policy (as is likely to be the case in NZ) was to (return to the 40’s and) boost housing stocks. Under Blair’s tenure the supply had not increased at all.

Just as #JohnKey had borrowed a Labour policy he had previously derided as “creeping Communism”, so too did Teresa May copy a Milliband (Corbyn’s predecessor) policy she had dubbed “Marxist”. When language can shift from one extreme to its opposite without general ridicule and rejection, when politicians seek power by claiming to believe what yesterday they had declared to be the epitome of folly and evil, we’re in trouble.

Teresa May, the Tory PM, campaigned like a robot, making it all personal. She was strong; Corbyn, weak. She would deliver a “hard Brexit”; Corbyn wouldn’t. What did this mean? What actual policies that the civil service would present was she referring to? It was never explained. Like Hillary Clinton, it was all about her, and like Clinton, it didn’t work. The Tory spin doctors, apparently the same Aussie outfit that had informed National in NZ, would have told Teresa to “stay on message”. She seemed to be channelling the Iron Lady Herself. Teresa was strong.

All the commentariat were initially surprised that it didn’t work. They didn’t really think that the wooden May, prattling about herself and Brexit, would be received with joy on Struggle Street. They assumed that Labour’s traditional supporters would be bored by this and scared of Corbyn and therefore stay home. They assumed that the alternative vision of investment in public assets would be seen as “unelectable” and (this time it was an insult) “Marxist”.

The “strong stable” regime which May promised followed the weak and insecure state of affairs brought about after David Cameron’s unnecessary call to hold his 2016 Brexit referendum and May has now been rendered weak and confused as well. With all the resources on hand to know what’s going on in the countries they’re running, the top politicians keep on misreading their public and making dumb mistakes.

Seymour offers us an informed potted history of the British Labour Party, rightly pointing out that it has never been a radical vehicle and won’t become radical under Corbyn. Labour evolved alongside the 19th Century Liberals (rather than Marxists) and owed much to Methodism and the impulse of “Christian socialism”.

Labourism was “a dense movement of labour movement organisations, from cooperatives to working men’s clubs, gardening and brass band clubs to sports fans’ associations…. Intellectually Labourism was not exactly endowed with the most riveting champions – such a Leftist intelligentsia as existed in Britain at the time was either anaemically moralistic or redundantly schismatic”. Yes, he could have been describing the NZ Labour Party, all the early leaders of which were British (or Australian) born.

Never has the Labour movement claimed to want to fundamentally change the way things are done and it’s never done anything to (as the tiresome cliché has it) scare the horses. In the 1920s, when the get-rich-quick economy was about to end with the 1929 Wall Street collapse, workers were told to accept austerity. It was then called the “national interest”. Labour’s finance spokesman, Philip Snowden, lectured the Party conference: “Parliament is not a competent body to deal with such highly delicate and intricate matters” as finance policy. As wealth flowed to the stock markets Snowden regretted that “drastic and disagreeable measures” to cut public spending were unavoidable.

This forelock-tugging masochism was the history that the Corbynites rejected. They might have known that the result of seeing the interests of working people as being the “national interest” - allowing wealth to stay with the 1% in the depths of the Depression – was that in the 1931 election that followed, the National Labour Party, as it was briefly and humiliatingly called, polled 1.5% of the electorate. Sixty-six years after “National Labour”, Blair’s “New Labour” residue wants to repeat the error. As Seymour puts it, New Labour “sought to deny its own vulgar parentage, and to disown as far as possible the movement that gave birth to it”.

Sticks To Ideas, Facts & Policies

Seymour wrote well before the election and it’s clear that he, too, wasn’t expecting it to turn out as well as it did. Despite the title, Seymour doesn’t discuss Corbyn’s earlier career beyond opining that he was never popular with the Party bureaucrats because he was always involved in politics for the sake of the issues. He seemed to have been entirely uninterested in grasping for power within the Party machine. Of his opinions and actions that earned him his reputation as “unelectable” we hear nothing, probably because they have slender relevance to his present role.

Neither does Seymour look too closely at the real reason Corbyn was deemed “unelectable”. He writes as if politics was a rational affair in which participants judged policies on their merits, as Plato might have done. Corbyn was always “unelectable” as long as he was more interested in ideas and policies than in triangulating. Principled politicians are never trusted within the party bureaucracies as they can’t be relied on to lie or dissemble.

His other fault was to be an older white man, an uncool species that includes the likes of Donald Trump, Churchill and the thousands of their predecessors. Once they ruled unchallenged, and some of them needed to step aside. But if the reason the species is suspect is that it held the monopoly of power, that doesn’t mean that old white men like Corbyn are all powerful. We need progressives. Full stop. We find out now from the psychologists another guide to how people vote. Recent research shows that having an angular face is a disadvantage. Round-faced people do better.

It’s so easy for the neo-liberals to align with the prevailing popular culture, see an old guy, and label Corbyn a dinosaur, but who else could safely be deemed “unelectable” on the basis of factors like age, gender, the shape of the face, or ethnicity. Few other leading Western politicians currently known to the public at large could be so gratuitously insulted – not if they lacked one or more of the qualities of being principled or old or male or thin-faced or of European descent.

The Tories will always play the man and not the ball because if they played by the rules they’d never win. They’ll always tag along with the cool crowd. Progressives need to get beyond the personal. They need to assume most of us have moved well beyond tribal and identity crudities. Like Seymour and his mate Jeremy Corbyn, they need to stick to facts and policies.