Cope and ANC can learn much from Keynesian view
July 27, 2009
By Donwald Pressly
There was an attraction at first in the fact that Stanley Baldwin should not be clever. But when Baldwin forever sentimentalised about his own stupidity, the charm was broken.
John Maynard Keynes wrote those words about 80 years ago, when Baldwin's Conservative Party was in the ascendant and upset the Liberals' long-term dominance of British politics.
Keynes was a liberal who believed in certain state interventions but he was not fond of the working class, the Tories or communist dogma.
He could have been referring to President Jacob Zuma, or even more so to the entirely uninspiring Mvume Dandala, the Cope parliamentary leader. The bishop in particular has a penchant for delivering sermons, but has great difficulty in answering unscripted questions.
Yet Keynes changed his mind by Baldwin's third term as prime minister in 1936. He cited Baldwin "as a model statesman who could bring about a modified socialism if his party would let him". So perhaps there is hope for Zuma - and, indeed, for Dandala - in the longer term.
Both Cope and the ANC can be broadly described as socialist parties and Keynes probably would not have liked them much. Indeed, he did say that the British Labour Party was neither communist nor Bolshevik, but it tended to put on the appearance of being "against anyone who is more successful, more skillful, more industrious, more thrifty than the average.
"This is most unjust and most unwise," he commented. May the ANC and Cope take a lesson from these words.
The ANC can get away with conspicuous consumption and little dedication to the work ethic, but Cope does not have the political glue of patronage and power to hold it together.
Cope's MPs seem to believe they have found highly paid sinecures. Instead of driving the debates about economic transformation, they are silent. Its public representatives, of whom there are 30 in the National Assembly, are largely invisible.
Its leaders are bogged down in squabbles about who should be leader. It appears most unlikely that Dandala will turn out to be a model statesman.
Keynes, as quoted by erstwhile Warwick University politics professor Robert Skidelsky, said the Labour Party "is a class party, and the class is not my class. If I am going to pursue sectional interests at all, I shall pursue my own.
"I can be influenced by what seems to be justice and good sense, but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie."
Mbhazima Shilowa, Cope's deputy president, has hinted about pacts with other opposition parties, including the DA, to consolidate the opposition force in the 2011 municipal polls.
But the party is missing the political plot. It is not consolidating the educated bourgeoisie into a powerful voting block.
Keynes was writing about a different era, a different country and different political parties.
But Cope's future - if there is to be one at all - lies in encouraging exceptional effort, good management, courage and character - words that Keynes used so long ago to describe the keys to success.
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