Most Read
Most Commented
Read more like this
mk-logo
News
Disturbing parallels between Umno and Labour

COMMENT Come to think of it, parallels in the predicaments between Umno and the British Labour Party are disturbingly familiar.

The former is stuck with a leader who is daily becoming more unelectable; the latter is headed towards endorsing a leader who will ensure that the party will remain in the wilderness of British politics for a long time to come.

To be sure, comparisons between Umno and the British Labour Party are incongruous.

Umno is more easily comparable to the Conservatives than to Labour, both tending to adopt policies that are right-of-centre than left-of-centre which are more characteristic of Labour.

But both Umno and Labour are in the same boat now, having come off successive general elections whose messages suggest that they have to change to keep from falling off in the popularity charts.

True, Umno won both polls, held in 2008 and 2013, but the signs are unmistakable that they will have to remodel to remain on top of the popularity game.

In partial contrast, Labour has lost two successive general elections, its second defeat earlier this year so clear that it cannot avoid the conclusion that it, like Umno, will have to reconstitute or it’s curtains for them with the voters.

Though it’s hard, policy-wise, to see parallels between Umno and British Labour, the comparisons become clearer once you see them as mainstream political parties in their countries competing for power and when empowered, striving to keep it.

Each now is faced with a similar predicament in the face of evident popularity.

But both Umno and Labour have reacted to the chill winds of rising unpopularity with regressive moves rather than reconstitutive ones.

Umno is headed by a leader of whom it is difficult to remember that three years ago this month he pledged to build the “best democracy” in this region.

Presently Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, plagued by corruption allegations and a sputtering economy partly brought on by slumping business sentiment, is seen as having curtailed constitutional government in order to stay in power.

Similarly, British Labour, faced with a stinging setback at the polls, appears about to elect in Jeremy Corbyn, an unreconstructed leftist who is going to adopt policies that at a previous promulgation in 1983, under a similarly unrepentant leftist, Michael Foot, were dubbed as “the longest suicide note in history”.

Harakiri is what critics say beckon both Umno and British Labour, but the two are not short of chorus boys to urge them to stay their gallop to the precipice.

Dissimilar ideological orientations

In fact, in placing Ahmad Zahid Hamidi as the No 2 in his government, Najib has chosen precisely the man who is a facsimile of the leader British Labour is about to anoint, Corbyn, except that their ideological orientations are dissimilar.

Both rely on a reflex rather than an original idea anytime, save that Zahid takes his seasonings from the right while Corbyn takes his from the left.

In the centrist context of Malaysian and British politics, both ought to be marginal figures but now they are poised to make the running in their parties.

Umno is 69 years old and has held power for 58 years which is the age of the nation’s independence from colonial rule; British Labour is 115 years old but only came to prominence after it made an alliance with the trade unions in the 1920s.

Labour emerged when the senior left wing party, Liberals, went into a long eclipse from the 1930s and only reemerged to something like their formidable previous selves when the party was subsumed under the Liberal Democrats, but that, too, could not prevent them from being the perennial also-rans in British politics, though they were in a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservatives after the 2010 polls.

Something similar has to happen to Umno if it wants to retain power in its presently straitened circumstances - perhaps, a tie-up between the less reactionary rump of the party that wants to jettison Najib with the help of an opposition that knows an obdurate cynic at the helm of a country that’s in a meltdown is the worst of possible scenarios.

In Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Umno has the centrist who can lead country from its severe wobbles of recent times.

In other words, Umno need not necessarily play from the script the trends it set for itself in recent years have propelled it to, which is rightward from voters’ centrist preferences, just as British Labour need not elect at its head someone who is redder than ‘Red Ed’, which is Ed Milliband, the man who led the party to disaster in the recent general election.

Surely Malaysia and British Labour can do better.


TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.

ADS