New Zealand election yesterday - a landslide for the Labour Party and an absolute massacre for the National Party. Labour have managed to get an absolute majority despite NZ having proportional representation. Reflects Jacinda Ardern's personal popularity I suspect. Obviously the attention will focus on that but another point to note is how well the classical liberal ACT has done, raising its number of MPs from 1 to 10 and its vote share from 0.5% to 8%. Meanwhile the populist and xenophobic New Zealand First has gone down to 2.6% and been eliminated from Parliament.
UK Labour has been heavily infiltrated by hard left activists who really shouldn’t be in the Labour Party at all, & even the influx of new blood who aren’t as militant, are still advocating a largely redundant socialist agenda. I know very little about St Jacinda of Adern but if she’s left wing, successful & popular then she’ll be a competent social democrat rather than a socialist, probably closer to Tony Blair in policy than Corbyn or even Starmer for that matter. UK Labour’s new blood have been baptised in stale water & even if they manage to purge the militants, it’s going to be very, very difficult to get rid of the smell. Corbyn’s “appeal” has done lasting cultural damage.
And don’t forget that brain drain & centre left exodus from the party benches. They lost lots of quality people while Corbyn was leader. Andy Burnham is still around but no longer in Parliament, but many others just left completely & are doing other things. Tristram Hunt left for the V&A. Chukka Umuna, Lucinda Berger, gone. So many talented people just aren’t there anymore.
The truth is, if Jacinda Adern had first appeared in the Labour Party in the UK, she’d have been marginalised by Corbynistas by now & she’d have been subjected to abuse, coup attempts in her local Labour Party & I very much doubt she’d have been interested in leading it, let alone in a position to try. Labour UK wouldn’t be able to recognise or tolerate someone like Jacinda Adern in its present form. I don’t doubt many Labour Party members wish there was someone like Jacinda Adern to lead them out the wilderness, but they’ve got more chance of spotting them in the rear view mirror than they have on their own benches. Arguably Lucinda Berger had all the charm of Adern but they didn’t like female, centrist Jews so there you go....