In the wake of any loss of government power, political parties indulge in a period of naval gazing; what did we do wrong? What needs to be done to win power at the next election, and so on.

There’s usually also a brief bout of outrage about all the dirty tricks the opponents pulled and the nasty things they said and how they manipulated the fears of the voters, etc, etc. But that’s just the usual lashing out and it never lasts, basically because it’s useless in pursuit of re-gaining power. Admittedly given that victimhood and being oppressed has become the height of theory on the Left, this period may last longer and have a deeper impact on Labour than in the past.

But another reason why Labour may be in deeper trouble than in the past is presented by two stories told by Left-wingers themselves – and not the usual suspects like Chris Trotter and “Bomber” Bradbury, who have recently been hammering away at the loss of Working Class consciousness and its replacement by Identity Politics.

The first comes from a writer at The Standard, one “Advantage”, The Injustice of Blackball, where he writes of a recent visit to the site where the NZ Labour movement and Party were born. He finds the place in sad repair:

In the only store, the Blackball General Store, the woman who runs it has been working at that counter since she moved to Blackball at 40 which was 25 years ago. She has not had a holiday in that time because she can’t afford replacement staff, if there were any. She admits she is massively depressed. She hasn’t got further than Greymouth in a decade. The building is barely surviving. She is the living embodiment of Blackball. She now keeps the business going because she can’t sell it and she now gets the NZ Super to help her and keep it going.

From this is drawn a larger conclusion about the West Coast and even New Zealand in general, and ends with this plea:

It may well be just a cruel bit of fate that Blackball first lost gold, then its millable native forest, and then lost coal and has come to the limit of dairying. But that’s pretty much the story of New Zealand as well so let’s not dismiss it. Blackball is what many of us are facing on a nationwide scale.

Blackball is not what a just transition looks like. The injustice of the Blackball “transition” to something else is a basic lesson for the whole of New Zealand.

But what’s really telling are the comments, of which this is the best, pithy example:

The lesson is that extractive industries have a limited lifespan, often it is too late for those involved to realise and make. other plans, they just move on as we have done for the last million years.

In other words the Left have given up not only on these places but on the people in them and their means of making a living – as if successive Labour governments are not responsible for shutting down these industries, leaving only tourism perhaps. No, instead the movement of “Capital” is to blame. There’s some fightback by a couple of people who explain that this is why Labour has declined so badly in the provinces over the years, but the responses to them are just variations on that first comment. Also telling is that there are only thirteen comments on what used to be a key driver of Labour; the pain and hurt of workers.

But this dismissal of their pain and suffering is not new. Back in 2019 Chris Trotter wrote of a West Coast protest, The Message from Messenger Park, where he pointed out that it was very much a working class protest:

The rally heard speakers from all sectors of West Coast industries; mining, farming, tourism, forestry, plus lines company Westpower and Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Waewae. They railed against the freshwater action plan, the ban on new mining on conservation land, the Indigenous Freshwater Fish Bill, the rejection of windblown timber legislation, the canning of the proposed hydro dam on the Waitaha river all of which were seen as doing ‘irrevocable harm’ to the West Coast economy.

But as with the recent Standard post, there was strong disagreement in the comments from hardline Lefties, and there are few more hardline than the character known as “Sanctuary”:

Wah wah wah, cry me a river. I am heartily sick and tired of the whining exceptionalism of coasters and farmers. Plenty of people work hard for sweet f**k all, try being an all night cleaner in Tamaki’s industrial sprawl.

The world is changing. Coasters seem to think they have a right to do what they want because, reasons. Nobody forces them to live in that rainy and dreary place. Yes, their way of life is out of date. So stop whinging that the rest of us have some sort of obligation to support a dying way of life, like some sort of giant outdoor paean to the 20th century and accept it.

I see that on that post I commented as well, pointing out to “Sanctuary” that he sounded exactly like a Rogergnome, and I’d later use Trotter’s post and his comments in looking at the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Continental Drift and Its Victims, where I saw the similarities between “Sanctuary” and a US Right-wing Libertarian writer railing against Trump’s economic nationalism in an article in National Review:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too.

But on another more recent Trotter post was a story that made clear the other problems – perhaps derivative of the abandonment of the Working Class – that have emerged on the Left. “Redlogix” is another long-time commentator with a consistent nym: I recall debating with him often on Kiwiblog in the mid-2000’s, usually about the Iraq War IIRC. I’ll quote here the relevant part of Redlogix’s comment:

I was until recently the longest standing participant at The Standard – joining that site within days of it’s first appearance in 2007. For the first seven or so years it was for the most part oriented to political narratives we might largely recognise as social democrat, trad-Labour interests. With a splash of Green eco concerns in the mix. There were always a few marginal extremists about – but hell that’s the internet for you.

From around 2014 onward something changed. I could name names and point to specific events in detail. As a moderator and editor I had access to all of this in the backend. It went from being a simple administrative space to a cesspit of hatred and vileness the public facing side never saw. I withdrew from that fairly quickly.

From that time on I saw a progression of issues – rape culture as an excuse to hate men, climate extremism as an excuse to de-grow the modern world back into poverty, the BLM scam, blatant anti-white bigotry used to justify decolonisation – and more. Perhaps the most sickening was the endless, uncritical tankie cult abdicating all morality to celebrate Putin’s brutalisation of Ukraine. That plus the utter denial of any possible trade-offs around St Jacinda’s vax mandates and lockdowns – and blatant abuse of moderation to impose this caused me to permanently leave some months ago. In hindsight I stayed far too long although it has given me a front row seat and insight into what has happened. And a lot of hard lessons. I look back and shuddered at much of my naivity.

That comment encapsulates what Identity Politics – whether we call the practical outcomes “Political Correctness” or “Woke” – is doing to the Left around the world.