NZ Labour leadership blah blah blah

So there has been another round of speculation about David Shearer's leadership and whether the right man got the job and so on, so forth.

Does anyone actually think Labour would be polling any better under Cunliffe? That would only be the case if he – and his supporters – were massively underperforming at the moment, and had The Solution To All Labour’s Problems worked out, and were just keeping quiet about it for their own benefit.

Which would make them sum and unworthy of leading a Scout troop, far less the political arm of the labour movement. If they aren't willing to give their best , then to Hell with them. They can piss off and form a vanity party of their own.

I’m willing to bet all the money in the world that if Cunliffe had won the Labour leadership, the party would be in exactly the same position and – apart from swapping names around – the same squabbles and arguments, backbitings and underminings would be taking place here. And National would still be looking forwards to a third term as the left eviscerates itself.

With Cunliffe in charge, I suspect Labour would still be stuck around 30% and we’d be wondering why we didn’t go for the cheerfully bloke with the amazing back story. The problem is not the leader but the talent pool the leader is drawn from – selecting one facile right wing idiot over another is not going to lead to a resurgence of anything. And the talent pool is the result of Labour becoming completely disconnected from it’s support base – the long suffering left gets offered a choice between a bunch of near identical professional politicians mouthing vacuous shibboleths and scheming against each other instead of the plutocratic toerags of the right.

Wasn’t it just a couple of months back that an upwards blip in the Roy Morgan numbers sent The Standard into paroxysms of delight at the prospect of a Red-Green coalition? And already, the baked meats of Shearer’s political wedding banquet are to furnish forth his political funeral table! Frailty, thy name is something or other