The Pig in the Middle

I'm struggling to remain calm and rational in the face of on-going provocation from and about the so-called, self-proclaimed 'centre'.  

The world is firmly in the grip of gargantuan global corporations with no moral compass but somehow the answer still lies in trying to keep your political legs either side of the rapidly widening and deepening gap between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, and the protected and the expendable.

I read the following somewhere in the lead up to the election before last here in NZ and copied them but forgot to note the sources. No matter – they sum up a common viewpoint here in Godzone.

"To become attractive to middle NZ, Labour will need to cut its links with the unions. Unions have had their place in history, but are now just far left wing political organisations that have more in common with Mana or the Greens. Cunliffe is beholden to the Unions, so will have to go before this can happen." 

And – 

“The labour movement is dead. Labour needs more than another leader selling old policies. Its (sic) needs a completely new brand and a completely new focus. There's more the world and our lives than the now redundant struggle between workers and employers."

 The sheer vacuity and narrow political focus of those assertions about the struggle between capital and labour aside, I get seriously irritated with all this blether about 'middle NZ'. What the hell is it?  Where does it start and stop?  Is it as much a state of mind as a state of pocket? Is one's location in it ascribed or chosen?

  
How do we establish the boundaries of this influential construct?  Income level, paid weekly or monthly, educational achievement, shared ideology, square meterage of dwelling/s, number of bathrooms or cars, owning a holiday home, weekly shopping bill, amount of high fructose corn syrup in the diet, the sort of school the kids go to, owning a ride-on lawnmower, level of debt, job security, belief in a deity?

The truth is that middle NZ is a PR concept and pretty meaningless but it's considered to be very important because it's where the floating voters hang out.  To get into government we are told, the main parties have to pitch their policies to appeal to these swinging voters, i.e. to be attractive to 'middle New Zealand' politicians have to be seen to be of, and for the centre - i.e. eschew the politics of the extremes of both left and right. 

There might be a huge swathe of the electorate who do not vote, or who cannot vote for various reasons, but parties must still focus on that flip flopping section of society which does not have a fixed loyalty to a particular party and can be bought with appeals to celebrity and tax cuts or other lifestyle enhancing bribes.

The problem is that – logically – a political centre only exists when there are two opposing sides. When the main parties are actually just the same thing wearing a different coloured tie and waving a different flag – where's the political centre?

 
The right has become very adept at disguising itself as moderate even though its core economic and social policies are overtly right wing. The appearance of moderation overlays the essence of adherence to monetarist economics.  The left has shifted to the right to counter the right's apparent centrism which effectively shifts anything that might be called a middle, rightwards and it all becomes a bit of a muddle.

 
Social democratic politics are labelled hard left by commentators who either wouldn't know hard left from a hole in the ground, or do know and are lying.

  
A case in point is the fact that Bernie Sanders is labelled a socialist, but only in the grimly right-wing mess that is US politics could the good senator be seen as being in any way radical. 

The same applies to Jeremy Corbyn who is a socialist and a democrat who is, and always has been committed to the parliamentary route to socialism. He can only be labelled as a hard left radical in the right-wing mess that is British politics.

So, here's to middle New Zealand and all who set their political course to keep it safely ensconced inside its various little bubbles, may you all soon founder.