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Willie Jackson

Willie Jackson on RNZ recently called the National Party ''tories''. Whenever left-wing commentators use this exotic and historical term - other than in the UK - it is meant to represent some deep truth about the local political right, and to be insulting.

Tory is the traditional nickname first used in the 18th century for what became the Conservative Party in Britain, and what Willie Jackson meant was that the NZ Nats are ''really'' (perhaps, secretly) conservatives.

The fact is we have no mainstream conservative party. (Let's all agree to forget about Colin Craig, shall we?) The Nationals are a liberal party - which is, of course, what their equivalent in Australia is actually called.

But in a political context, ''liberal'' is a technical term. The Kiwi Nats and the Aussie Liberals are liberals of a very particular kind: they are what in Britain used to be called Whigs.

Liberals of this kind believe in economic liberalism, involving lower taxes, free trade and minimal regulation. The name Whig has - unlike Tory - dropped out of our political vocabulary for the simple reason that the whigs have won.

When I did politics at school in Australia, I was curious to learn that at the start of the 20th century the present two main parties in Australian politics didn't exist.

Government went back and forth between Free Trade and Protectionist parties. The Free Traders, being economic liberals or whigs, were the party of the employers; the Protectionists wanted to protect local jobs and the local economy, even if it meant that the bosses didn't make as much money as they'd like.

So, protectionism has not always been promoted only by unenlightened fascists.

Over the next 80 years, free trade was - confusingly and counterintuitively - adopted by labour parties in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. That's what Rogernomics was all about. The rationale for this was that regulation was not allowing enough money to enter the NZ economy, that money was fleeing to deregulated economies.

Not so in the US, for there was no-one to adopt it. The US has never had either a mainstream labour party or conservative party. In America, it seems, there are only the rich and those who would like to be rich, and free trade suits them both.

The US has now discovered the results of forcing every other nation into unbridled free trade. Under free trade, the rich get richer; and the thing is, it actually works. But when every nation is now richer than they were, the formerly most rich nation is now less rich than it was, and in no position to compensate the victims of free trade - the people who elected Donald Trump - for their (in global terms) uneconomic industries having moved overseas.

Getting back to Willie Jackson, liberals - like the National Party - do not, at bottom, believe in very much else than economic liberalism. They used to have conservative social policies because they weren't interested in social change.

Now that social change has happened anyway, most of them - like John Key - are just as happy to have liberal social policies, for the same reason. (It's a bit more awkward for Bill English, who's a Catholic and believes other things.) Which is why in the 18th century Samuel Johnson described whiggism as the ''negation of all principle''.

Tories, on the other hand, actually agree with socialists that some forms of government control are necessary if we're not to freely trade ourselves into oblivion.

Eighteenth-century British tories supported the monarchy, the national interest, the established church, and the landed gentry. The whigs, proponents of laissez-faire capitalism, saw all these traditional phenomena as potentially limiting their power to make money.

Socialists have different principles. They believe workers have rights, and government should intervene in the economy to reduce social inequality: all things that potentially get in the way of the free flow of capital. Free trade ends up being just a non-military version of ''might is right''.

It's not a principle per se, as there are so many anomalies. The US has long provided tariff protection to its leather industry. New Zealand has a Commerce Commission because free trade doesn't extend to being free to advertise dishonestly - sad, really.

So when we see working (or formerly working) people in the US and UK voting against left-wing (for the US, less-right) parties, it's partly because the ground has moved.

We see supposed right-wingers wanting to protect local industries and industrial workers, and people who think they're left-wingers embracing vast corporations such as Facebook, Starbucks, McDonald's: your classic chardonnay socialists.

Unlike north and south, left and right depend on where you're standing.

-Dr Paul Tankard is a senior lecturer in the department of English and linguistics at the University of Otago.