That’s not left wing, it’s just democratic — taking

There is never any shortage of advice to political parties who seek to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Any indication of a wish to move away from the status quo will, they are told, be seen as a dangerous “move to the left”.

It was Mrs Thatcher who assured voters that “there is no alternative” and we see in New Zealand today the same insistence that the current orthodoxy is the only option.

Yet if they accepted that advice, parties who want to offer an alternative set of policies would be reduced to gesture politics and smiling sweetly.

The democratic process would be denied its real purpose and — in the absence of an effective challenge through the ballot box — the grip on power of already dominant interests will be further strengthened.

It is, after all, only through the democratic process that the powerful can be restrained. All societies inevitably demonstrate that power, left unchallenged, will concentrate increasingly in a few hands. That power will be used to entrench the position of those who hold it and to increase their advantage over their fellow citizens.

The whole point of democracy was to enable the political power and democratic legitimacy of an elected government to protect ordinary people against the otherwise overwhelming economic power of those who dominate the socalled free market.

That inevitable tendency towards the ever-increasing concentration of power has been graphically confirmed in an important book by the French economist Thomas Piketty. He analyses data over a period of more than two centuries to show that, with one brief exception, economic power has increasingly passed to a few at the expense of the many.

The exception is significant. In the two or three decades after World War II, power moved back to ordinary people and away from the powerful; this reflected the determination of ordinary people whose efforts had won the war to ensure there was no return to the “bad old days” that had produced war and the Depression.

They used the power of democratic government to strike a better balance between the rich and powerful on the one hand and ordinary people on the other. If they were told — even by Winston Churchill — that this would mean a dangerous “move to the left”, they paid him no attention.

Since that time, the rich and powerful have found ways to reclaim and increase