Colin James: Learning the trick of making realism look principled

Politics is a realist's trade; the most artful practitioners keep principle in the back pocket, if anywhere.

Bill English says he is hewing a principled line on Iraq. This fits in with his declaration in his first speech this session that National will hold the Government to account according to National's principles.

Whether it does, we will have to wait and see. English has yet to restate National's principles in a manner that distils out the policy positioning that hardened into dogma during the 1990s.

He will do that as part of a reshaping of the party, which will include a constitutional conference early next year to turn it into a truly national party that, unlike in the July disaster, can fight for the party vote as a single unit. Reform will also involve a wider policy debate than the musings of a caucus that has lost respect.

To restate principles does not mean inventing new ones. It is to state again, in a form relevant to the issues of the 2000s, National's enduring principles - which you might sum up as embodied in a property-owning, liberal democracy that values order.

Helen Clark did that for Labour in her conference speech in 1995. It was at that point that Labour's inner recovery started.

Principles are not doctrine or dogma. Many National MPs have intoned policy as if reciting a catechism, so that too many voters have come to see it as narrow and dry. English will aim for something with greater breadth.

Low taxes demonstrate the difference. Low taxes are not a principle: they are a policy mechanism to give effect to the principles of self-reliance and private enterprise. In the past 10 years they have become National dogma, with limited appeal to a majority that fears inadequate social services.

The value of principles is in branding: they are flags to run up a party's mast; they are gauges against which to measure performance.

But they do not substitute for performance and they must not conflict with the real world. Politicians too hung up on principle are not realists and are confined to the margins.

The Greens have shown how. They elevated a principle about genetic modification to a tablet-of-stone commandment. That ensured they lost Coromandel and punctured their ballooning poll ratings.

New Zealand First elevated getting tough on crime to the status of principle during the election campaign. But Brian Donnelly, mauled in the street, did not forthwith lay a complaint with the police. Did they fix it? No, they didn't.

So let's check out English's principled stand on Iraq.

The strong principled case for intervention in Iraq is liberation of the Iraqi people from want, fear and a dictator's murderous habits.

Saddam Hussein could lift the blockade on his suffering people by bowing to United Nations demands to prove Iraq has not made, and is not developing, "weapons of mass destruction".

Now he is unnecessarily courting a United States attack. He is failing a governor's first responsibility: the responsibility to protect his citizens.

English's case is not liberation in accordance with the principle of the responsibility to protect. It is alignment with our "traditional allies", who are claiming, on weak publicised evidence, a strategic threat by Iraq. And actually he is not in favour of ally status with the US, since he won't repeal the anti-nuclear policy that keeps us, at most, a friend.

So in reality he is making a realist's case. This is the one made by his senior MPs Lockwood Smith and Wayne Mapp. It is that the less we support the US, the less likely we are to get a free-trade agreement.

This was underlined at the weekend. The new US national security strategy includes Australia and excludes New Zealand from the list of "focal point" countries for free-trade agreements.

So much for English's principles, appropriately, in a centre-right party subservient to realism.

Is Clark more principled? She has stuck to a principle of a multilateralist, rules-based approach to critical international issues: action against Iraq needs an explicit United Nations sanction.

Nothing there about liberating the Iraqi people. Lots there about ensuring no rebellion in her ranks. Clark is a realist.

* ColinJames@synapsis.co.nz

Further reading:
Feature: Iraq

Iraq links and resources