The Local Karori free newsletter is not my usual source of political information but, this month, a brief profile of Labour’s Wellington North candidate, and current list MP, Ayesha Verrall, is revealing. Verrall’s comments make clear the demoralising campaign Labour plans, and suggests some of the dangers it poses for all of us who want to resist the Coalition governments cuts and attacks on workers and the poor.
Most of the profile involves the usual comments about the electorate and door knocking and all the rest and then, towards the end, three lines become clear. “When the economic climate is so bad, people just want help with the basics. They don’t want grand promises,” Verrall tells interviewer Jane O’Loughlin. This chimes with what Joel MacManus at The Spinoff calls Chris Hipkins’ strategy of “batting for a draw”: lowering expectations, lowering hope, casting scorn on “grand promises” and betting that, somehow, National can lose for itself.
Verrall makes clear what follows from this strategy of campaigning against hope. She makes a pitch to National voters (“there’s a number of people who are giving their party vote to National […] and are likely to give their support to me”) and attacks the Greens drawing directly on the attack lines of National and the right (“there’s a lot of Left voters who are recognising the economy as the dominant issue and want a party with credibility on those issues”).
The gamble here obviously is that drawing right-wing voters’ electorate votes in a seat split between Labour and the Greens can push her to victory. Although she is never mentioned by name in the article it is clear that Verrall sees current Green MP Tamatha Paul as her main rival and intends running against her from the right.
Even if this is no principled way to campaign for someone claiming to oppose the “destructive and reckless” public sector cuts, it may well work tactically and could push the electorate numbers to Verrall’s victory. But, as Bob Marley puts it in “Small Axe”, you can boast yourself playing smart and not being clever. Keir Starmer’s Labour won a crushing victory over the Tories in Britain by whittling away any sense of their own status as an alternative and letting their rivals implode. It may have won them a large parliamentary victory numerically (something impossible in our system, at any rate) but, only a year on, their party was in chaos, its political and moral authority in tatters and the right and far right resurgent.
If Labour’s campaign in Wellington thinks normalising the attacks of the right (“economic credibility”) and pitching “across the spectrum” is their way to power, they show up their own emptiness of vision and the danger of such cynical, hope-diminishing politics. A “victory” on those terms in one electorate would, in the political atmosphere it encouraged, make a second National-ACT-New Zealand First government more likely.
The current MP, Tamatha Paul, has made active campaigning against the government’s attacks central to her political identity and role. That encourages campaigns beyond parliament and in our unions, movements and on the streets. Her holding the seat would bolster all of that resistance, resistance we’re bound to need in the years ahead whoever “with credibility” ends up in government.
