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Like many folks, I have been following the news reports surrounding the gerrymander proposal for local body elections in Rotorua which even the Attorney General cannot pretend is justified. One presumes the intention is for a socialist local body power grab in perpetuity? Perhaps they think that if they gerrymander the wards the Maoris will vote left-wingers onto the Council indefinitely? Once it works there they can “rinse and repeat” elsewhere? Am I getting warm?
One of the great things about socialists is their ignorance, which means that this plan could spectacularly backfire as most left-wing power grabs have backfired throughout history. I have far more faith in the common sense, and lack of cynicism, of Maori voters than in the Labour party.
The most amusing power grab backfire was in 1987 when the Labour party decided to flood the country with immigrants who would vote Labour indefinitely as they didn’t trust the male working-class not to become “Rob’s Mob” once again. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.
Most immigrants are aspirational, don’t want handouts or sickeningly patronising attitudes, and ended up voting National. The foreign-born percentage of the population really took off about the time Labour’s vote percentage collapsed into the 20s.
The classic example of this in history was women getting the vote in Britain in 1918. The suffragette movement was fully supported by the nascent Labour party and left-wingers everywhere who saw votes from women as the road to socialism. Even back then the left-wing ‘chattering classes’ simply extrapolated their own opinions across the entire population – and inevitably came a cropper.
At the same time as the suffragette campaign was in full swing in Britain, the Conservative party was basically a joke. It had few political heavyweights in its caucus, most of whom were oddball retired army officers or Knights of the Shire gentry types. In the lead up to Parliament giving UK women the vote had anybody suggested that the Conservative party would dominate UK politics for well over the following century – until literally the present day – they would have been laughed out of town.
For reasons that are complicated to explain, British women never voted Liberal – despite what is vaguely known as “Gladstonian Liberalism” being the dominant political status quo for generations and despite their husbands and fathers voting Liberal. Instead, British women have mostly voted Tory; eschewing the horrors of socialism at the ballot box, often to the surprise of the Labour party itself.
One of the target groups of the Labour party and socialist movement a century ago was the ‘servant class’: over a million, mostly women, domestic servants. According to socialist intellectuals they were oppressed, exploited by cruel employers, and ripe for the plucking on the road to socialism. The response from these servants was to vote Tory – and do so almost unanimously! Perhaps because they were perfectly happy with their lot, were not exploited and respected their employers.
Right up until the 1959 UK election current or former servants were a large bedrock constituency for the Conservative party.
So picture the scene in 1918 on the day Parliament gave women the vote. The Labour party, the intellectuals who knew what was best, the ‘chattering classes’, the media: all cheering, all pontificating about how this new voting block would do as “instructed” and confirm a new status quo (with them in charge, naturally) and then, six weeks later, several million women walked into polling booths across Britain.
