Early ideas on politics

 

My family had always been staunchly in the Liberal camp. My grandmother Julia and her family came from the midlands of England, where non-conformist religion and support for Parliament against Royalists had always been strong. Her father came to New Zealand partly because he was dissatisfied with the slow pace of electoral reform in the UK. 

Julia Gaze, nee Goodwin

They were strong supporters of the Temperance movement, which refused to drink alcohol, and campaigned for prohibition of its sale.  Julia Goodwin had tried to convince her grandfather of the evils of drink at home in Kettering, but he still stuck to his ale at dinner time. The Gazes supported the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, not only in its stand against drink, but also in its campaign for women to have the vote. 

That generation of non-conformists regarded the Labour Party as “soft” on the temperance issue. They considered its leaders to be in the pockets of the beer barons, as they called the brewery owners. And many of their leading preachers had Northern Irish backgrounds and brought from that a fierce hatred of Roman Catholicism, which they saw as backing the Labour Party. 

So that when the Labour Party won the 1935 election, the Gazes and the Bigelows were dismayed. My grandfather, William Bigelow, had been a special constable in the 1913 Red Fed strike, one of “Massey’s Cossacks”, and on Sundays after church, when he got older, would regale my father with all the sins of the Labour Government, especially its Minister of Works, Bob Semple. He agreed wholeheartedly with the Herald cartoonist, Minhinnick, who pilloried the Labour leadership every day. 

My mother, however, was not so sure.  She had worked for a Stock and Station Agent, and had seen the misery created when farmers who had bought their land in the boom years of the twenties had had to walk off the farms with nothing during the depression years. 

My father was something of an expert on the subject of constitutional law, having studied it for his Master’s degree; when we discussed such matters, he explained that he preferred a constitution like the US rather than the Westminster one we had in NZ; which meant, I presume, that he favoured a republic. These discussions, brief as they were, were over articles we were both reading in “Time”, which he subscribed to in the fifties, when I was at University, and worked one day a month on his accounts at his legal practice in Queen Street. Smoko chats! 

He took me to some political meetings to hear the local National Party candidate in 1954, when I turned 21 the day before the election, and so qualified to vote by the skin of my teeth. Then and in 1957 I voted for well-regarded National politicians, Rae in Eden and Hilda Ross in Hamilton, following the family tradition. 

So I had a modicum of education into politics from my family before I reached the stage where I started to think about it all for myself.

India changed me 

Life in a culture as different from New Zealand as we were living in Tripura (there was no electricity for our first two years) must certainly make one think. After a few years in India reading the local papers, talking with local people, and learning the local language, I began to realise that the world was much more like Karl Marx had described than I had thought previously. 

This did not mean that I thought violent revolution was in order. In fact I was more impressed by Gandhi’s non-violent methods than by those of the communists.  But I did see the world from a Marxist persepctive. I still believe that the poor nations are poverty-stricken because they are oppressed by the capitalist nations, which suck the assets out of them, as Marx explained. 

At the time of the Indian occupation of the Portuguese colony of Goa, Prime Minister Holyoake criticised the Indian Government roundly. We were advised not to go to town, but to stay home for a couple of days after this news, because our PM had dared to criticise Nehru, and New Zealanders were not popular. 

Watching the Vietnam War from India is different from watching it from New Zealand.  In Asia the struggles of the Vietnamese to rid themselves of French imperialism was at the basis of the fighting. The War we were involved in was simply an attempt by the US to reimpose Western control. And Indians generally were sympathetic to other nations struggling to be independent, as they themselves had done for so long.