CHRIS HIPIKINS: IS KEIR STARMER HIS ROLE MODEL?

It would be a big mistake for Chris Hipkins to think that Labour can emulate the electoral success of the UK Labour Party.


LABOUR PARTY leader Chris Hipkins has travelled to the United Kingdom to attend the UK Labour Party conference in Liverpool. According to Hipkins press release, he will be taking the opportunity to meet with 'think-tanks, economists and writers.'  Hipkins says:

'As the New Zealand Labour Party undertakes its policymaking process, this is the perfect time to take stock of what is happening internationally and discuss our direction with other policymakers.'

While this, of course, doesn't give us any indication of Hipkins current thinking, its more than likely that he will return from the UK even more convinced that Labour's path to election victory lies with maintaining its present centrist policy settings, albeit with a little 'tweaking'. I'm predicting that Labour's token nod to transformatory politics will be to embrace a capital gains tax. Since New Zealand is one of the few countries not to have a GCT, its hardly revolutionary stuff.

A left wing Labour leader would take the opportunity to meet with his left wing counterparts in England. He might for example, have a chat with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his finance spokesperson John McDonnell.  He might talk with the young socialist Labour MP Zarah Sultana. He might talk socialist economics with left wing economist Grace Blakeley. Or he might meet with left wing columnist Owen Jones to get his overall independent assessment of Keir Starmer's Labour Party.

But Chris Hipkins isn't that left wing Labour leader and the only people Hipkins is likely to be meeting is Keir Starmer and the people closest to him. Hipkins, a dour centrist cut from the same cloth as predecessor Jacinda Ardern, won't need much convincing that the New Zealand Labour Party will also have to reject any kind of left wing radicalism in order to be electable.

But that would be the wrong lesson for Hipkins to take from his UK visit. It's wrong to attribute UK Labour's electoral success to its centrist politics imposed on it by Starmer. Labour got less of the popular vote than Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party did in 2017, when it won 40 percent of the vote. It also only managed to secure the same share of the vote that Labour did in 2019. But despite getting just a third of the vote, Labour still won two thirds of the seats. Labour, in the end, didn't get elected because of its 'realism' and 'pragmatism', but simply because it wasn't the Conservative Party. Since the election, Starmer's popularity has sunk though the floor.

Grace Blakeley has observed of Starmer: ''Keir Starmer is undoubtedly a timid and conservative leader who shies away from the kind of radicalism championed by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, making him a deeply inappropriate person to have at the helm at this time of unprecedented economic chaos.'

The fear for New Zealand Labour Party supporters who continue to dream of a left wing Labour Party is that they are stuck with a leader who thinks Kier Starmer is the next best thing to sliced bread.