Blaise Drinkwater has a new blog, on which one of his posts was an analysis of my Tuesday post on National's value-less government. Blaise is a smart guy: his blog ought to be well worth reading. He links to a post I did in 2004, which talked about the role of pragmatism in politics.
Re-reading that post, what strikes me is that over four years and a bit, my views have not changed much. In that typology, I still define myself as a Group 2. My post on Tuesday defined the fifth National government, to date, as being Group 3.
I also don't usually talk about the audience for posts I write but in this case I'll make an exception. As a centre-left activist I have heard too much complacency for my liking: too many people saying "National will revert to type, don't worry."
They are wrong, those people, and I want my fellow lefties to consider the opposite extreme: that National might stand for nothing.
There is a good tactical reason for this: National would be hardest to beat if indeed it would do anything, and indeed stood for nothing. My view is that they are closer to that (than principled extremism) than they have been for some time, and that that is why they did well in the election and why they will be hard to beat.
What the left needs to do is have a project and a campaign that can take on the Nats and beat them in 2011 no matter how hard that is. The complacency of "revert to type" thinking makes inventing and running that campaign harder, not easier.
It is far better, after all, to overestimate your opponents and to think them hard to beat, than to do the opposite.
That's why I wrote the post: as a wake up to some of the left readers here.
The strange thing, which I alluded to yesterday, is that instead the people it has got going are on the other side of politics. From the tenor of their critique, they reacted more to the slightly over-puffed rhetoric and swipes more to the substance.
Question is: where's the left? Do you lot agree with my view, of steely pointless pragmatism? Or do you think there is a Douglas ghost ready to ooze out? Or some combination? Or another answer altogether?
They have a hidden agenda. Unfortunately for them, they cannot remember where they hid it.
Really, I do not think they have a clue. Murray McCully's candid but undereported admission that the Government does not have a foreign policy is one indication that these clowns have no thoughts beyond undoing the Labour legislation to which their backers object.
Posted by: Paul Litterick | Thursday, 12 February 2009 at 08:03 PM
I think Key may well be a 3, but that there are many 2's and some 1's in his caucus. And ACT is made of number 1's.
Labour should aim to heighten the differences. Give them a wedgie. ;-)
Posted by: Pascal's bookie | Monday, 16 February 2009 at 10:33 PM