If Covid-19 Can Make A Government('s) Fortunes, Then, Ipso Facto, It Can Just As Easily Break 'Em: Some Emerging and Ominous Cracks Appearing In The 'Thus Far, Picture Postcard Perfect' Response of New Zealand's Ardern-Led Labour Majority Government To the Coronavirus...

 -As witnessed in the vaccination rollout debacle on the streets of our main city, Auckland, yesterday evening, as shown upon the 6p.m. News Bulletin of Newshub TV3...

If British Labo(u)r is Summarily Trashed/Trounced/Routed in Today's Parliamentary By-Election, It Has Only Itself to Blame/It Cannot Blame Anyone But Itself/It Fully Deserves What(ever) It Has Coming/Everything Coming to It...-It Has Totally Deserted and Alienated Its Traditional Voting Base (Though Newbie Leader Keir Starmer Can Hardly Be Blamed; He's Probably Done the 'Bestist' Anyone In the Party Could've Done In the Circumstances)...

In what can only be deemed the bitterest irony, by eschewing Jeremy Corbyn's radical economic plans and by simultaneously dining out at the altar of political correctness/identity politics/cancel culture/virtue-signalling/post-nationalism - and all the rest of the horrid socially 'progressive' agenda - it has jettisoned any remaining commonality it once so proudly shared with its traditional, heartland, working-class base...

...evidently having learnt next-to-nothing from its absolute thumping in the December 2019 General Election. 

As Rod/Rob Little, (Aotearoa-New Zealand's) Newstalk ZB U K correspondent (on the Mike Hosking Show) so aptly expressed things this very morning, the Labo(u)r Party's working-class heartland base in the industrial north didn't really mind/object all that much - the very converse in fact! - to socialist-style economics (my terms, not Mr Little's), but what they do find all too difficult to stomach - and will doubtless give full vent to in today's parliamentary by-election there - is the party's extreme social liberalism (again, my own phraseology/summation of the gist of Little's comments).

Not altogether that different from yours truly, who, though never a voter for, much less a supporter, let alone a paid-up party member of any left-wing party here in New Zealand - though the local Social Credit party official here did (at his own expense; and ever so briefly) make me a member of the party not long after my own unsuccessful attempt at political office as an independent in our 2008 General Election - came to see as much in relation to New Zealand's own Labour Party awhile ago now...

...especially whilst hearing noted political scholar/author/pundit/friend and party colleague of my long- (16 years)deceased Dad, one-time New Labour/Alliance Party political activist/co-founder and regular blogger/editorial writer Chris Trotter at a public meeting in our hometown DCC Public Library:

Trotter chronicled in fascinating and meticulous detail how literally hundreds of thousands of active, generally evangelical members of Aotearoa-New Zealand's own Labour Party left/abandoned /deserted/forsook the party in mega-droves in the early-to-mid-nineteen eighties as social reforms such as the landmark Homosexual Law Reform Bill promulgated and pushed relentlessly by 'social progressives' passed into law here - against the petitioned opposition of 700,000-some signatories...

Much in the same vein as yours truly, who, while never an actual Labour voter as such, ever had strong political sympathies in that particular direction (and even more to the left, embracing both the then Values Party and the Social Credit Political League)...

...being - actually very much like Social Credit - pretty well ever decisively left-of-centre on economic matters whilst strongly right-of-centre upon 'social issues', whereas Labour - especially following the forced retirement of thrice-losing Bill (Wallace) Rowling and his replacement by the charismatic, Norman Kirk-like (and similarly to Kirk, socially conservative and globe-bestriding) David Lange - adopted pretty well hook, line *and especially sinker a right-wing Thatcherite/Reaganomics economic deregulation regime whilst actively embracing social causes promoted by the professional 'chic' set... 

*I jive in those italicized words, I simply couldn't resist the unavoidable emphasis...

P.S. Hopefully Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) lot itself gets spanked by Alex Salmond's renegade/breakaway rump/faction, deservedly so in light of the way she has apparently and to my mind and that of many others (especially 'Scotlanders') trashed the well-and-justly earned reputation of the party's former (?and founding?) leader...and moreover, to merely satisfy/gratify political ambitions - while quite possibly fully knowing the allegations against him were so much mere flim-flam, flotsam and jetsam; but well realizing the penchant of today's mainstream media to swallow wholesale any and every allegation and accusation, however tenuous, against **middle-aged white males, to placate Feminazis Incorporated...

**'Pale, stale males' as some wags have termed us...

Too Little, Too Late: Though Prime Minister Ardern Appears To At Last Give Speaker Trevor Mallard A Well-Deserved Serve, Following the Remarkably and Admirably Similarly Unsparing Chris Hipkins...Her (Effective In-)Action/s Thereabouts Are Simply Another Instance of 'Too Little, Too Late', While Stealthily and Shrewdly Changing the Narrative New Zealandwide, To Pleasanter Matters of Her Wedding-To-Be...

But sorry, folks - especially you natural justice-denying Greens (a sorry remnant of a once proud party): hugging someone not only doesn't constitute rape, it don't even remotely approach sexual assault...

...unless, that is, you're living in George Orwell's 1984, a very scary place in which, as the Good Book itself so aptly puts things, good is now evil, and evil good, black is white and white is black etc etc etc...

But the Holy Bible also therein pronounces a curse upon those partaking of such self-delusion, declaring

Woe unto thee who [do such]...

"Don't Mention the Genocide": New Zealand Lawmakers Finally Get Around to Debating China's Horrible Little 'Secret'...Of Their Mis/Ill-Treatment of Uighurs (& Others) in One of Its Far-Flung Provinces...

...And Act New Zealand especially covers itself with 'glory' in its prosecution of such...

as indeed even do the other four speakers (Labour's Foreign Minister, Nanaia Mahuta, National's one-time leader Todd Muller, the Greens' Gohriz Ghahraman, and the Maori Party's co-leader, what'shername...

And though I'd been privately disparaging, even excoriating both major parties and their seemingly softly-softly, don't rattle the feathers approach, agreeing with that taken by Act, the Greens, and the Maori Party ...that the on-the-ground reality of genocide (in Xinjiang Province) ought to be specifically named and shamed... 

...I'll concede after hearing Mahuta speak that no, until such a charge of genocide is *actually conclusively proven and established, it is the better part of valour (my description) to hold one's fire/keep one's powder dry, but that yes, such a serious possibility *most definitely necessitates due investigation...

*But, of course, unless you've been living in ye proverbial cave over recent times, you'll well realize that the chances of China's CCP authorities allowing United Nations investigators in to determine such is about as likely as their doing so vis-a-vis the origin of Covid-19, which itself is **about as probable as any or all the folk claiming to have set foot upon the moon admitting publicly to not actually having done so...

**Though of course yours truly doesn't for even a split-second countenance that ***far-out conspiracy scenario, I'm simply employing it in our discussion to make a point...

***For no other reason than the simple one that if indeed that epochal event had not taken place, you tell me how you'd keep 180,000 or so NASA scientists and the like collectively shut up for half a century, with not one of them ever breaking ranks to spill the beans, and that despite there doubtlessly being lucrative pecuniary rewards in so doing...