Making the world’s labour parties safe for educated middle-class reformers

By Chris Trotter* 

I’m too old for this sort of thing. That was the thought that kept knocking on the “Common Sense” door at the back of my mind. The thought had a point. It was a bitterly cold night in the windy canyons of downtown Wellington, and I was heading for a meeting of the Fabian Society.

The Fabian Society?! Who even knew that New Zealand had such a thing. The United Kingdon, yes, of long standing. The British Fabians have been doing what they do since the early years of the Twentieth Century. Some of the most luminous talents of that cursed century were members: George Bertnard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sydney & Beatrice Webb and every single Labour Prime Minister of the UK.

New Zealand, on the other hand, has never had much appetite for intellectual elites hellbent on defanging and redirecting the workers’ movement into safer and more manageable regions of the political environment. It is, therefore, no accident that New Zealand’s pale imitation of the British Fabians only came into existence after any semblance of an unruly and independent workers’ movement had been smashed to smithereens by the twin hammers of Rogernomics and Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Act.

Making the world’s labour parties safe for educated middle-class reformers has always been the Fabians’ core mission. It’s why their preferred political weapon has always been the closely-argued and statistically-supported Policy Paper. Preferably authored by individuals with academic credentials as prodigious as they are unassailable.

Strikes, pickets, mass demonstrations, free-wheeling and open-ended debates: these were the weapons of grubby proletarians who wouldn’t recognise the force of a closely-argued policy paper unless it was rolled up tightly and applied to their skulls like a policeman’s truncheon.

Hence my consternation at being out after dark in a howling Wellington gale en route to a Fabian Society meeting convened to discuss – of all things – “Left Populism At home and Abroad – Possibilities and Problems”. Had my old comrade Dr Bryce Edwards not been one of the guest speakers, I’d have been safely ensconced in one of the capital’s many fine eateries.

The things we do...

To be fair, the other reason for braving Cook Strait’s icy breath was the other guest speaker scheduled to join Bryce on the Fabian’s stage. This was Dr Van Jackson, a young-ish American academic employed by Victoria University, who somehow manages to lecture on international security issues while remaining an enthusiastic supporter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

United States global hegemony and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – yikes!

According to Comrade Bryce, Left populism launches itself against enemies which the populists of the Right mostly leave unscathed. The anger of the marginalised and unheeded is driven primarily towards:

“Concentrated economic and political power. Its targets are monopoly corporations, landlords, the very wealthy, corporate lobbyists, political insiders and institutions captured by vested interests. In that version of populism, the migrant down the road isn’t the problem. The focus is on those who possess disproportionate economic and political power. The political question is therefore not simply whether anger exists, but who gets blamed for the conditions producing it.”

True enough and, as Van would later point out, Bryce’s list of Left Populist targets matches up neatly with those at the centre of Zohran Mamdani’s freakishly successful campaign for the mayoralty of New York City. 

But if Mamdani’s campaign promises were tightly-focused, positively-framed, and delivered with the warmth and conviction of a superb retail politician, then they were also, like all populist campaigns, driven forward by the incandescent rage of an “Us” being ground into historical dust by a “Them”.

Without multiple frothing torrents of rage there can be no populist moment, no electoral surge. More importantly, the roaring of those waters will be lost on the wind if there isn’t someone with the political skills to channel and direct them.

That person must speak the language and embody the experience of the aggrieved, most obviously by presenting themselves as the person they have been waiting for; the person they wish they could be. Trump, the rogue billionaire who scorns the good opinion of the liberal establishment. Mamdani, the super-cool son of privilege who “gets” how much the downward social mobility afflicting unemployable college graduates sucks.

Sitting in that dark little auditorium two floors above Wellington’s “Unity Books”, I was struck by how little rage there was among these polite Kiwi Fabians.

Struck, but not surprised.

Rage was never the driving force behind British Fabianism’s determination to carry-off a top-down revolution, and it couldn’t be the motivation of Fabianism’s antipodean offshoot. When New Zealand’s current Fabian Society was founded in 2009 the country’s top-down revolution was already decades old.

Browsing the local political offerings in Unity Books earlier in the day I had been struck by how little interest now exists among recently published New Zealand leftists in helping ordinary Kiwis get back behind the political steering-wheel. Indeed, “ordinariness” and “Far Right” are fast becoming interchangeable terms among this country’s “progressives”.

This evident mistrust (or is it fear?) of the masses raises legitimate concerns about the future of representative democracy itself. When a former prime minister feels able to observe approvingly that a chink is beginning to appear in the armour of parliamentary sovereignty, I begin to think that it might be time for the people of New Zealand to start feeling afraid – very afraid.

Given the holy trinity of issues currently motivating the New Zealand Left: Te Tiriti, Transgenderism, and the tribulations of Palestine; none of which score high on the bread-and-butter-meter; a left populist upsurge coinciding with this year’s general election seems unlikely

But not impossible. During his presentation Bryce made reference to the recent re-birth of the Alliance – last seen alive around 2005. The reanimator of the late Jim Anderton’s political project (which for brief periods in the 1990s polled in excess of 30 percent of the Party Vote) is the doughty trade unionist, musician and writer, Victor Billot. Speaking to a party meeting recently Billot is reported as saying that what New Zealand needs is “a left-wing NZ First”.

When the Fabians heard these words there was an audible collective intake of breath. Personally, I thought Billot’s suggestion was brilliant, but that was not the response of the majority.

On a bitter Wellington night, in that little auditorium above Unity Books, the idea of a political party shorn of wokeness and dedicated to putting ordinary working people back in the driver’s seat, was not one the Fabians were willing to endorse. 

To paraphrase Dylan Thomas’s famous poem: there were far too many ready to go gentle into that windy political night; far too few who were ready to rage, rage, against the dying of the fight. 

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http//:bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.