Posted by Blogger Name. Category:
Claire Trevett
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Josie Pagani
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Labour Party
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Quote of the Day
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Self-destruction
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Shane Jones
Claire Trevett from the Herald provides this perspective on the Shane Jones departure:
Whether it is truth or simply perception is irrelevant: Jones was seen as the last bastion of the centre ground for Labour as well as providing an important buffer from the view that the party was more obsessed with identity politics and political correctness than everyday grafters.
He was certainly the one who articulated it best.
The party now has to work out how to at least hold those voters and shed the perception it is lurching ever leftwards without Jones.
Josie Pagani - a Jones supporter and former Labour candidate - says it needs to do that fast.
"With Shane gone, it feels like the message to people who think like Shane, or identified with Shane, none of those people have received a message saying you're still welcome in the Labour Party. I think that's the problem."
She said the anti-Jones brigade among Labour's activists erupted in celebration on social media without appearing to realise they were effectively sending a message to others that if they identified with Jones, they were not wanted in Labour.
"All you have to do is look at the parade of people popping champagne and saying 'good riddance' in the blogosphere. Are we really saying to people who look and think and sound like Shane that they may as well go and vote National because you're not welcome in Labour?"
Josie Pagani will get no love from the left-leaning blogosphere. But she is just being honest. Readers with long memories will remember that Mrs Pagani copped a serve from factions within the party when she described the difficulty of selling Labour's policies at the 2011 General Election; especially the daft policy to extend to in-work tax credit to people who were not in work.
The Labour Party seems hell-bent on self-destruction, and the divide between the party's liberal Left and those who still purport to represent Chris Trotter's mythical Waitakere Man is wider than it has ever been. Who are we though to dissaude the Labour Party from imploding?
