JD
Labour, founded in NZ on the backs of the – primarily Pākehā – working classes, are now hopelessly in thrall to the identity politics of the middle-class chardonnay socialists and the colonisation apologists of academia.
Looking through the list of current Labour MPs, whilst some might come from working-class families, none, with the unexpected exception of Willie Jackson, who was, for a time, a freezing worker, can be said to be working-class themselves.
Top heavy with lawyers, teachers and professional politicians, Labour is now far removed from its union roots and the 1908 Blackball miner’s strike of its genesis (with mining itself, in an absurd paradox, now denigrated by the Labour elite).
Ironically, with the party now captured by the very ‘petite bourgeoisie’ that Marx despised, past leaders in the Labour pantheon – the likes of Savage, Frazer and Kirk – must be turning in their graves.
Then there is the Green Party, which was founded on concerns about environmental issues but has now morphed into a group of far-left socialist progressives currently displaying the in-fighting and dysfunctionality that seems to be the natural end-state of such movements everywhere.
In their pursuit of their concept of “social justice”, no matter how appealing it might be to the look-at-me rebelliousness common amongst the young, the Greens fail to realise that such views alienate the majority of Kiwis. As a consequence, they sacrifice any hope that mainstream NZ can be persuaded to vote Green and this leaves the party bereft of the power to pursue their founding cause of environmentalism.
The Greens of today may be self-satisfied in their self-righteousness, but this, together with their apocalyptic visions and animosity towards industry and economic growth, turns off the working-class majority, those they most need on their side if their original objectives of “saving the environment” are to be achieved.
And finally, we have the Māori Party. Founded by Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples to pursue the idea of advocating for Māori from within and in partnership with the government of the day, it has shapeshifted to become Te Pāti Māori, the voice of a small minority of grievance-driven radicals with little interest other than the promotion of a divided nation.
Dreaming of revolution and a return to an imagined utopia of pre-1840s New Zealand, their MPs buzz around on the parliamentary backbenches like bluebottles inside a bell jar blown from the opaque glass of victimhood.
The bell jar is given the occasional shake by the party president, John Tamihere, to agitate the radical three per cent who are TPM voters and deflect the attention of grassroots Māori from the pursuit by himself and his fellow-travelling Māori elite of personal enrichment within the arcane web of Māori charities, Treaty settlements and tribal politics.
With these new parties of the left in NZ, it is very likely that we will see a duplication of the trend now sweeping US politics, where the working class, non-college-educated Pākehā voters have overwhelmingly shifted to the Republican side over the past decade and a half.(1)
While woke progressives, schismatic racists and apocalyptic environmentalists rule the roost on the left, it is unlikely that the key voter demographic of the “working class” will support them in sufficient numbers to allow a return to power.
The traditional socialists among us would seem to be in for a long, dark winter of discontent.
(1) Republicans’ growing strength with white working-class voters represents one of the biggest political schisms in the country over the past 15 years. Now, nearly two-thirds of all white non-college voters identify as Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party. New York Times April 2024
By nearly two-to-one (63% vs 33%), White voters without a bachelor’s degree associate with the Republican Party. PEW Research April 2024
