The Trouble with Labour

What’s wrong with the New Zealand Labour Party?

Why are they in such a poor state, reduced down to their rock-bottom core support?

I believe that there are several factors at play, which I will outline below.

The first is the natural cycles of politics. They had nine years in power, nine long years of the natural process of the erosion of support that happens with every party that is in power. Nine years for more and more people to gradually get more and more pissed off at them, for all sorts of reasons.

It is only natural that, the longer one is in power, the more anger and resentment that builds up against one. It’s a simple law of arithmetic.

It doesn’t matter all that much what the specific reasons were. “Shit happens”, and some of it sticks to the perceived perpetrator of that shit.

Yes, they made plenty of mistakes, but that’s inevitable in politics.

The next reason is their personnel. They currently have no David Lange or Norm Kirk to lead them back from the wilderness. They basically have nobody with much of that “X Factor” at all.

National have John Key. I shudder to think how National would be doing without Smiling John. Without John, National’s line-up would look rather thin. Think back to when Don Brash was the leader, and how fragile and unconvincing National was with him at the helm. That’s how much difference a really good leader can make, and Labour do not have one.

Labour has no-one. Just look along their front bench. A line-up of has-beens, wannabes, and never-will-be’s. A collection of academics and politically ambitious hacks.

Both the above are important factors, but there is another factor that is even more important.


They lost their way. Politically, they lost their way, and this was inevitable, it was always going to happen, and nothing they could do could prevent it.

Think back to the days of the original roots of the Labour Party. The 1920’s and 30’s. The Great Depression. The old class wars, between the bosses and the workers.

After centuries of oppression by the ruling classes, the workers finally wake up to the fact that they have been had. In a crescendo of people-power, at the 1935 election, the workers have had enough, and the old order is swept away at the ballot box. They repeat the dose in 1938.

The political “right” is in disarray. The animals have taken over the farm. We can all march together, united into a glorious future!

After years of struggle and disappointment, the representatives of the ordinary workers finally get into power. They set about their reform agenda with a great zeal. The social welfare system, old age pension, minimum wage, decent award wages, better funding for universal free health-care and education, the state housing system….  The list goes on and on.

Their day in the sun lasts until 1949, but then the reformed “right” gets back into power, and we have the disasters of the 1951 waterfront dispute, the abolition of subsidised prices of basic foodstuffs, and many more reactionary policies.

Fast-forward to 1957, and then to 1972.

Labour gets back into power, but each time it all turns to custard, and they are thrown out again after only one term.

There were various reasons for that, each time, and it’s beyond the scope of this blog to go into them.

However, there is an overall trend, a trend of history, that no-one can change, that is an overriding reason for Labour’s fall from grace.

My dear old father stated it to me, many years ago. He was a life-long Labour supporter, and it saddened him to see this happening.

“The trouble with the Labour Party, is that they are always too successful. They get into power when times are tough, and the workers are downtrodden by a Tory government. They then set about correcting the injustices, and giving the workers a better standard of living.

“This is great for everybody but are the workers grateful for this? Some of them are, but many of them now aspire to become little Tories themselves. What us? Vote for Labour? Don’t be silly, we are far too well-off to support them!”

In other words, a proportion of Labour’s natural base support erodes away, as those people become yuppies, climbing the social ladder, and henceforth forgetting what made it possible for them to do that. They become “political snobs”.

Some of these people start up their own businesses, some go to university, some work their way up the corporate ladder into higher-paid managerial positions.

They become “little Tories”. The superb irony of the situation being the fact that they only got into those yuppified positions, they only became bank managers, or university lecturers, or business-owners, or corporate accountants, because of the efforts of a Labour Government. But now, the worm turns, and they don’t want to have a bar of that government.

This is a natural process of history, and nothing can change it.

What has the Labour Party done in response to this natural process of history?

It’s obvious. They have moved further into the “centre”, following those former supporters, desperately trying to retain their support.

The Clark government did succeed in this, in that they had nine years in power. But, to do so, they sold their soul to the highest bidder. The classic example of a Clark-era policy that illustrates this is Working for Families, which really should be called “Welfare Payments for the Well-Off”.

They took their traditional working-class constituency for granted, after all the people at the absolute bottom of society have nowhere else to go.

Michael Cullen became a master at using our own money to bribe us, and thus bribe his party back into power. Which is no different to what National habitually does.

So now, in 2011, the Labour Party has painted  themselves into a corner, with nowhere else to go. They cannot go back to the “old Labour” of the workers. There are hardly any genuine workers left anyway, as all the low-paid jobs have been exported to Chinese factories and Indian and Phillipine call-centres, etc.

Labour are desperately casting around, trying to differentiate themselves from National, in a search for some kind of “National Lite”, that might be less unpalatable than the real National Party.

But, as I said above, Phil Goff is no David Lange, and every twist and turn they take, they are out-smarted and out-manouvered by some very smart political operators in the form of Smiling John and his team.

What can they do? Nothing much, apart from wait patiently for the eventual erosion of support that Smiling John and his colleagues will inevitably suffer from eventually.  That will take at least two terms, possibly three.

In the meantime, they cannot do much, apart from refreshing their ranks for the future, and waiting.