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To have any real hope Labour needs to become………. ahem Real Labour. That will require a refocus and a move away from giving identity based causes overdue prominence.
Don’t take my word for it. Here is what Thomas Picketty and Michael Sander say progressive center left parties worldwide must now do;
“The American philosopher Michael Sandel and the French economist Thomas Piketty are among the world’s most influential political thinkers. In their writing on inequality and the moral limits of markets, both are critics of the neoliberal order that has governed the West for the past few decades, and of the capitalist system that has facilitated the savage iniquities of the global economy. In May 2024, they met at the Paris School of Economics. The US election was six months away, but the spectre of Trump was present throughout the conversation between the two thinkers.
“Trump’s victory seemed likely to me then,” Sandel recalled to the New Statesman, the day before the inauguration, “mainly because the Democratic Party had failed to address the legitimate grievances of working people and voters without university degrees.” When Kamala Harris inherited the nomination from Joe Biden, Sandel urged her, in a piece in the New York Times, “to break explicitly from the neoliberal version of globalisation that had brought growing inequality and decades of stagnant real wages for most workers”. The only way of defeating Trump, he felt, “was to speak convincingly to the widespread sense of disempowerment and to offer a bold project of democratic renewal”.
What the left needs, according to Sandel, is a “political vision that combines populism and patriotism – a radical critique of inequality and unaccountable, concentrated economic power (that’s the populism) and a greater emphasis on community, solidarity, and our mutual obligations as citizens (that’s the patriotism)”. It is a mistake, he argued, for the left to “cede patriotism to parties of the right”. (New Statesman, Uk, 23-1-25).
See; https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/01/the-left-after-trump-michael-sandel-thomas-piketty
It’s a fair question to ask whether overly middle class NZ Labour is up to it though.
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