Is the Labour Party too soft? Too PC?

This is another issue we discussed at the recent Labour Party meeting in New Plymouth.

One of our members said he considered that people did not vote for us because they found us "too soft" or "too PC'.

Another member reckoned that younger voters were turned off all voting, because their votes did not count as compared with the large numbers of older people who had already reaped the benefit of earlier measures. Young people, she said, resent the fact they have to pay heavily to take their provisional driving licence, and then pay heavily again to convert it into a full licence, and if they don't get this done before the provisional one lapses, they have to start again from the beginning.

And young people finish their education with a large student loan, when older generations got it all free. And so on.

But soft? Did you hear Jacinda Ardern's speech about the IPCA Report into the Roastbuster case? That was anything but soft.

And Andrew Little's response to John Key's announcement about sending a handful of trainers to help the Iraqi Army? Surely not!

What do people mean by PC? or Political Correctness?

We understand they mean it to be a derogatory term for some ideas they disapprove of. When they give examples, though, I begin to wonder.

To me it comes very close to saying the Party is too ethical, or too moral; as if that is possible.

It is easier to start with a definition of unethical laws, or immoral behaviour. I have come to believe that unethical actions always involve what we would ordinarily call "bullying".

If you do something because you can, because you have the physical strength, or the money, or the status, or your group has the numbers, and in doing so you harm the interests of some less powerful people, that is unethical. You may not even be aware of the collateral damage of your own  power! But if the less powerful person or group points out the damage to them, the only ethical thing to do is to talk about the problem and find a win-win situation, to protect the weak from the collateral damage of your strength.

I have found this a useful way to think about ethical issues.

The Labour Party's original purpose, and still its central objective, is to find ways of mitigating and preventing the harm done by extremely powerful capitalists to the interests, persons and lives of ordinary workers who have nothing to live on but their labour.

Hence the Party's overriding emphasis on inequality, on full employment, on fair wages, on safe, healthy housing, and on fair access to education.

We still need to complete the task which Micky Savage, followed by Peter Fraser, and Walter Nash set in the nineteen-thirties:  by establishing fair industrial negotiation procedures, unemployment benefits, the Sate Advances Corporation, and the Education Act of 1944.

It may be true that the damage to these policies over the last thirty years of neo-liberal ideology (Rogernomics), has been so great that we only have time and energy for these central efforts.

But I believe we can never lose sight of our responsibility to look after the interests of other less powerful  groups in our own society, and other less powerful nations in the international arena. That's why we have been elected to the UN Security Council, according to our politicians of all persuasions: to help the smaller nations have their voices heard amid the shouting of the major powers. That is ethical behaviour, not PC nonsense!