Gould has the solution for Labour – go even harder left!

Please please please please will Labour listen to the advice of Bryan Gould.

This may be where Labour is falling short. It has perhaps failed to grasp that what it is really up against is a hegemonic force – a neo-liberal revolution – that has shaped political attitudes in western democracies across the globe for more than a generation and that now represents a norm so powerful that it is not even recognised as such by those who might be expected to oppose it.

This hegemony cannot be changed or challenged just by nibbling at the edges – by attacking short-term policy failures on specific issues, or by sharpening up campaigning techniques. What is needed is a fundamental statement of what the Labour Party stands for, and a persuasive account of why it will produce a better and more successful society than has been delivered by the current neo-liberal orthodoxy.

Many of those who might consider voting Labour do so precisely because they are looking for a different set of values than those demonstrated by our current Government and than are reflected in today’s New Zealand.

This is the approach taken by the UK Labour Party with electing Jeremy Corbyn – reject basically the last 35 years and try to turn the clock back to the 1970s. And that is working so well for UK Labour isn’t it.

In the same article Michael Cox responds and notes:

You have to give it to Bryan Gould. He is persistent in his claims that the politics of envy and socialism are the only saviours for the people of New Zealand.

As a British Labour MP he failed to convince his own parliamentary colleagues that he should be their leader way back in the 1990’s. Even they rejected his hard left philosophies.

Recently we have seen another socialist government fail dismally. Under President Dilma Rousseff’s Brazilian Workers Party government for the past 13, the once wealthy Brazil has gone down the fiscal tubes.

She led her country into its worst ever recession. The people she hurt the most with her socialist policies were those she tried hardest to protect. One in nine workers is jobless, up a third in the past year and inflation is close to 10 per cent. The economy has shrunk by 3.8 per cent.

This is just another modern day example of how socialism, as proposed by the likes of Professor Gould, doesn’t work.

Just as the Prof was making his bid for the leadership of the British Labour Party, the painful 60 years of Russian Socialism was beginning to crumble and his opponents for the leadership, John Smith and Tony Blair, sensibly moved into the centre ground, leaving Bryan floundering on the left; and he still is.

Just because socialism has failed in every other country that has adopted it, is no reason to stop pushing it eh!