Heaven forbid that an abrasive punk duo that calls itself Bob Vylan should lead a hostile chant at the Glastonbury music festival against a military organisation – not a state, not an ethnic group – that has killed tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, and which is enforcing a famine that is starving thousands of children to death. We are shocked, shocked that anyone should wish ill of such an organisation.
For balance, shouldn’t Bob Vylan have brought onstage an Israeli government spokesperson to rationalise the IDF actions? On a daily basis, mainstream media outlets in Britain – and here as well -– broadcast the hateful lies of the IDF and the Netanyahu government about what is happening in Gaza. Why, just yesterday Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu was claiming that the IDF was the “most moral military in the world.”
But lo, there was more. During the same Glastonbury weekend, the Irish rap act Kneecap lead a huge, enthusiastic crowd in chants of “Fuck Keir Starmer.” That abuse too, was well earned. This week, Starmer’s grudging, partial backdown on cutting disability payments (and on raising the eligibility barrier for them) has occurred only because of a horrified public reaction, and in the face of a threatened caucus rebellion by 100 Labour MPs.
Closer to the Glastonbury point, the Starmer government had previously authorised the laying of terrorism charges against one of Kneecap’s members for holding up a Hezbollah flag that had been flung on stage at a gig in London last November. (Fuck that seems like a pretty mild response to that abuse of state power.)
In an extension of this moral crusade against youth culture, Starmer is now urging a Police investigation of the comments made on the weekend by Bob Vylan and Kneecap, with a view to criminal prosecution. Evidently, in Starmer’s Britain, it is forbidden to publicly wish the same fate on the IDF as it is daily imposing on Gaza’s innocent men, women and children. Go figure.
Footnote: Keep this in mind. On gaining power last year, the UK Labour government reportedly sold more weapons to Israel in three months than previous Tory governments had done in four years.
Following the UK model
Point being…on any number of cultural, economic and welfare policy grounds, Keir Starmer is the last person that current Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins should be looking to for tips on policy and political management. Arguably the steep decline in UK Labour’s fortunes since its deceptively lopsided election victory last year – it won 64% of the seats with only 34% of the vote – is because the British public has realised that it has put in power only a slightly milder version of its much loathed Tory predecessor.
On a similar quest, Labour’s likely future leader and campaign chair Kieran McAnulty was in Australia this year to observe how the centre-right government of Anthony Albanese won re-election. (Reportedly, McAnulty attended Albanese’s election night party.) These are not good role models.
Needless to say, no-one in the NZ Labour Party has paid much attention to the stunning victory last week by 33 year old Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York.
Mamdani’s perfectly executed grassroots campaign not only beat the lavishly financed campaign of political centrist (and serial sexual predator) Andrew Cuomo. More to the point, Mamdani’s victory has more to offer Labour in its current time of need than either Starmer or Albanese.
Mamdani’s victorious campaign (as I’ll explain below) had a single-minded focus on one issue – affordability – from which all of his other policy proposals flowed. I’ve substituted New Zealand” for “New York” in this passage from one of Mamdani’s early campaign ads:
“Every politician says New [Zealand] is the greatest [country]on the globe. But what good is that if no one can afford to live here?….New [Zealand]is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier.”
Why should the message of affordability be relevant to our own Labour Party? Because it cost Labour the 2023 election. Between the beginning of 2021 and the end of 2023, the Ardern/Hipkins administration had presided over the ending of the central government supports that got the country through the Covid pandemic, but at the cost of a subsequent spike in inflation.
Hipkins in particular, could never find a way of explaining, or defending, or alleviating that inflationary spike, which National focussed on relentlessly. Labour’s utter failure to defend its record – thousands of lives saved, jobs and incomes preserved – has left it with a toxic political brand. In late 2023, Labour lost power because it was widely seen to be an out of touch party unsure and/or ashamed of its own left wing credentials. Seemingly, it was more concerned with cultural identity issues than with the public’s everyday struggles to get by.
To compound this problem, the Hipkins administration’s other policies – Three Waters, the centralisation of public health– were not judged by the public on their merits, but as distractions from the public’s ongoing battle with the cost of living.
Ironically, if Labour had been willing to go toe to toe with National on the cost of living, both of those pet reforms could have been re-framed – a la Zohran Mamdani – as affordability issues. Three Waters was the most affordable way of rebuilding our failing water infrastructure. Te Whatu Ora was a far more affordable delivery system for healthcare than wasting money on 19 DHBs that were delivering uneven health results according to what post code that patients had the good luck/bad luck to be living in.
Footnote: Talking about the affordability of access to health…As t Auditor-General John Ryan has just detailed in an extensive report, Health Minister Simeon Brown’s recent decision to outsource the easier elective surgery cases to private hospitals is likely to increase health inequity. That’s partly because the more difficult and more serious operations will be left behind, to be treated within an underfunded and understaffed public health system.
In addition, as Ryan’s report also notes, many rural areas in National’s heartland will have no access – or only limited access via expensive travel – to private hospitals. That’s a recurring theme. National’s health policy initiatives tend to be affordable mainly to wealthy Aucklanders e,g. today’s much vaunted 24/7 digital health service. Even for those with a community concession card, cost will remain a barrier preventing many people from “choosing” to access this 24/7 service.
We already know that cost is one of the significant drivers of the declining access to GPs, and of the rising attendance at hospital emergency departments. On figures contained in the 2023/24 New Zealand Health Survey as reported in the NZ Doctor magazine, here’s how affordability is reducing access to healthcare :
- Some 15.5 per cent of adults reported not visiting a GP due to cost in the latest survey results. Those on the 25–34 age group were more likely to report cost as a barrier (25.4 per cent) than those in other groups.
- Among disabled adults, 11.2 per cent reported cost as a barrier to filling a prescription compared with 3.8 per cent of non-disabled adults.
Affordability Rules
Unfortunately, these affordability hurdles are the result of how the past 40 years of market reforms have turned New Zealand into a very expensive place to live – as even recent American migrants who like it here, are quick to point out.
As Mamdani did, Labour needs to focus in Election 2026 on one theme – affordability – and shape its policy package so that everything in it
reinforces this message. Labour also needs polices above and beyond the capital gains tax that Labour still has to be dragged kicking and screaming to adopt, even after ten years of indecision. So, as for policies…how is Zohran Mamdani proposing to make New York City more affordable ?
1.By making public buses free. Making city buses free for everyone is only part of it. Mamdani also supports congestion pricing as good environmental policy, and as a driver of public transport use. (Reportedly, he does not own a car, takes the subway every day, and often bikes.)
As a New York state legislator, Mamdani has strongly advocated for a range of investments in public transport, including funding to improve subway service during weekends and at night.
2.By making food cheaper. In New Zealand, we are still tinkering with imploring predatory supermarket chains to comply with voluntary codes of behaviour. Instead, Mamdani is promising to tackle rising food costs by creating a city-owned grocery store in each city borough. As the New York Times explains:
The stores would operate on city-owned land or in city buildings, buy food wholesale and be exempt from property taxes, which would keep the cost of their offerings down, he said.
Experts say the logistics of such a plan are complex, but similar initiatives are already in place in other parts of the United States. Municipalities in Kansas and Wisconsin have operated similar models since 2020 and 2024, and Chicago and Atlanta are working on their own versions.
Mamdani’s political message: if you are serious about tackling food poverty, then create the competition yourself. Don’t wait for a competitive rival to fall out of the sky.
3. By making the tax system more equitable. He aims to raise the raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, which could deliver an additional $5 billion in revenue. As the NYT reports, Mamdani also plans to charge the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers a flat 2 percent tax i.e. he is tackling head-on the risk of capital flight, and is betting that wealthy New Yorkers will not shift to Florida for good, rather than just to escape the winter.
4. By making housing/renting cheaper. He aims to (a) freeze rents, and (b) build more public housing, in co-operation with the private sector.
5. By enabling the Police to chase serious criminals, and not spend half their time as mental health workers. Mamdani is proposing to re-direct Police back to their traditional core business, and separate them from policing homelessness and mental health. To do so, he aims to put serious funding into creating community mental health units working in unison with social housing providers.
Tough on crime policies are expensive. They are not socially or financially affordable. They allow politicians to posture about law and order, but in the long run, they leave the community just as unsafe. (Tough law and order postures have no viable end game.)
Not all of Mamdani’s policies could be/should be adopted here intact. But they go to show that politicians on the left can lead and provide positive solutions that – if anything – are less expensive, once all of the longer term socio-environmental costs of mainstream centre-right policies are factored into the equation.
In sum, Labour shouldn’t be spending so much time and money on focus groups to finely calibrate policies whose priority target is some mythical moderate voter in the political centre. Making the status quo look a bit kinder is neither an identity, nor a winning political strategy.
After all, if Labour is serious about helping the victims of market economics, it can’t continue to support the economic policies that keep on generating them – while pretending that in future, things will somehow turn out differently.
Footnote: During the run-up to the mayoral election in November, Mamdani is going to face attacks from (a) incumbent mayor Eric Adams and Adams’s good friend in the White House and (b) from the Democratic Party machine. The old saying is true. Mainstream centre-left parties treat the right as their opposition, but they treat the left as their enemy.
Here’s Mamdani the campaigner out walking the streets of New York City:
And below, there is an extensive interview about the issues, with Mamdani and his friendly rival, NYC’s financial overlord Brad Lander. In the authoritarian age of Donald Trump, this alliance between a Muslim activist and a leading Jewish official has to be cause for hope.
In the middle of this interview it is also fascinating to watch Mamdani – whose strong support for Palestine is on the record – navigate questions about antisemitism on one hand, and Gaza on the other. In the US, it is politically impossible to unilaterally condemn the state of Israel for its violations of humanitarian law.