“The outrage over the Migrant Workers Association’s mock guillotine misunderstands one of
the oldest traditions in Western democracy: symbolic public political theatre.”

“It has no place in a democracy.”
That was the unmistakable message behind much of the reaction to the Migrant Workers
Association of Aotearoa’s symbolic guillotining of Winston Peters. Peters reportedly
suggested those responsible should be arrested. To many commentators, the protest
represented an abandonment of democratic norms, replacing legitimate political debate with
intimidation and implied violence.
I believe that criticism has history almost entirely backwards.
The question is not whether the protest was tasteful. Political theatre rarely is, and people are
perfectly entitled to find it offensive or politically counterproductive. The real question is
whether symbolic public theatre of this kind belongs within the democratic tradition at all.
History suggests that it does. Indeed, it has been one of the defining features of democratic
politics for more than two centuries.
Before explaining why, I should acknowledge my own perspective. Over many years as an
immigration lawyer I have worked alongside and supported the Migrant Workers Association
in its efforts to improve the treatment of migrant workers in New Zealand. I have enormous
respect for the organisation and much of what it has achieved. For well over a decade it has
been one of New Zealand’s most effective civil society organisations, exposing migrant
exploitation, advocating for fairer immigration laws and playing an important role in the
campaign that ultimately led to the Government’s introduction of the 2021 One-off Resident
Visa. Whether one agrees with all of its politics is beside the point. It is an established
organisation with a long record of democratic advocacy, not a fringe movement that suddenly
appeared last weekend.
Modern democracies instinctively associate political participation with elections,
parliamentary debate, newspapers, television and social media. Yet those institutions are
comparatively recent. For much of the history of representative government, ordinary people
had no newspaper columns, no broadcasting licences and no digital platforms. If they wished
to condemn kings, ministers or governments, they did so publicly, through symbolism,
performance and spectacle.
Before democracy had newspapers, it had streets.
Politics was not simply argued; it was performed. Processions became political arguments.
Effigies became editorial cartoons. Mock trials became public commentary. Symbolic
executions became vivid declarations that those exercising authority had lost their moral
legitimacy.

Modern historians increasingly recognise these performances as an established language of
democratic dissent. Florian Göttke, whose work on political effigies is among the most
comprehensive studies of the subject, describes the hanging and burning of effigies as a
“well-established genre” of political protest. These rituals drew on older traditions of carnival
and public justice, where communities dramatised their moral judgement through symbolic
rather than literal punishment.
Britain provides some of the clearest examples. Throughout the eighteenth century, crowds
regularly constructed effigies of unpopular ministers, tax collectors and public officials.
These figures were paraded through towns and cities before being ceremonially hanged,
burned or otherwise symbolically punished before large audiences. The events combined
speeches, music, banners and humour. Their purpose was not to organise assassinations.
Their purpose was to communicate political judgement in the most public way imaginable.
An important study of radical politics in the 1790s describes mock executions, paraded
effigies and symbolic beheadings as central features of British popular political culture. In an
era when political participation was limited, public theatre allowed ordinary people to express
approval or condemnation of those who governed them.
Across the Channel, the French Revolution transformed this language forever. Although the
guillotine was a real instrument of execution, it quickly became something more powerful: a
political symbol. Over time it ceased to represent simply death and came instead to represent
the removal of authority itself.
That symbolic transformation survives in everyday language. Ministers are “for the chop”.
Chief executives “get the chop”. Newspapers predict that “heads will roll”. Nobody imagines
literal executions. We instinctively understand these expressions as metaphors for dismissal,
accountability and the temporary nature of political power.
The symbolic guillotine belongs to exactly the same family of political imagery. Its message
is not necessarily that someone should die. Its message is that someone should no longer
govern.
Nor was this tradition confined to Europe. Colonial America inherited Britain’s traditions of
public political theatre. During protests against the Stamp Act, the Sons of Liberty famously
hanged tax officials in effigy before large crowds. Mock funerals, symbolic punishments and
public spectacles became familiar features of political life both before and after
independence. American democracy inherited this theatrical language; it did not reject it.
That history should give us pause before concluding that symbolic political theatre somehow
lies outside the democratic tradition. For much of democratic history, public performance was
one of the principal ways ordinary citizens challenged those who exercised power.
The distinction between symbolic political theatre and genuine threats has also shaped
modern constitutional law.
In 1969 the United States Supreme Court considered the case of Robert Watts, an eighteen-
year-old protesting the Vietnam War. At a political rally he declared that if he were forced to
carry a rifle, “the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” On its face, the statement
described shooting the President of the United States. Yet the Supreme Court unanimously

overturned his conviction, recognising that political debate is often, in its words, “vehement,
caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp.” The Court distinguished genuine threats from
“political hyperbole”—the exaggerated, provocative language that has always accompanied
democratic politics.
That distinction remains fundamental. Democracies have never required political expression
to be polite. They have required it not to become genuine violence or genuine intimidation.
Symbolic political theatre has always occupied that uncomfortable space between offence and
freedom.
Those of us who grew up in the early 1980s encountered the same tradition in popular
culture. Punk thrived on provocation. The Dead Kennedys’ Kill the Poor appeared, from its
title alone, to advocate something monstrous. In reality it was savage political satire,
exposing elite indifference by pretending to embrace it. The shock was the mechanism
through which the political point was made.
Britain’s political culture produced similar examples during the Thatcher years. The Beat
urged listeners to Stand Down Margaret. Elvis Costello imagined standing over Thatcher’s
grave in Tramp the Dirt Down. Morrissey’s Margaret on the Guillotine became one of the
most controversial political songs of its era. Across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan appeared in
equally provocative punk posters, artwork and satire.
Few people seriously believed these artists were organising political assassinations. They
recognised the performances for what they were: symbolic acts of political dissent, drawing
on the same tradition that had once produced effigy burnings, mock trials and public
processions through the streets of London, Paris and Boston.
The tradition extends well beyond music. Editorial cartoonists have long portrayed politicians
on gallows, beneath guillotines or marching towards symbolic execution. Protesters have
carried coffins representing unpopular governments. Trade unions have staged mock funerals
for public policies. Demonstrators have hanged presidents, prime ministers and monarchs in
effigy throughout the democratic world. These images are often controversial and sometimes
offensive, but they form part of a remarkably consistent political vocabulary stretching back
centuries.
None of this means every use of execution imagery is beyond criticism or beyond the reach
of the law. Context matters. A symbolic performance in a public protest is very different from
conduct intended to terrorise a particular individual. Mature democracies are capable of
recognising that distinction.
Which brings us back to Winston Peters.
Many New Zealanders, myself included, regarded his “go back to your own country” remarks
directed at Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan as racist and inconsistent with an inclusive vision of
New Zealand democracy. Others disagreed. That disagreement is itself part of democratic
politics and is not the subject of this article.
The irony lies elsewhere.

Mr Peters has consistently presented himself as a defender of democratic values. Yet when
confronted by one of democracy’s oldest forms of symbolic public protest, he appeared to
suggest that it somehow lay outside the democratic tradition altogether. History suggests
precisely the opposite.
The Migrant Workers Association’s mock guillotine did not emerge from nowhere. It belongs
to a political language that has evolved over centuries—a language of effigies, mock trials,
satirical songs, editorial cartoons and symbolic public performance through which ordinary
citizens have challenged those who hold power.
People are perfectly entitled to dislike that language. They may regard it as crude, offensive
or politically counterproductive. Those are legitimate criticisms.
What they should not do is imagine that symbolic political theatre is somehow foreign to
democracy.
For centuries, democracy has spoken in two voices. One belongs to Parliament and the other
belongs to the street.
Parliament debates, legislates and governs. The street performs a different function. It
dramatises public anger, celebrates public victories, ridicules public failures and reminds
those who govern that authority ultimately rests not with governments but with citizens.
The mock guillotine in Auckland will eventually be packed away. This week’s headlines will
fade. Winston Peters will one day leave public life, as every politician eventually does.
What will remain is something much older.
For more than 250 years, Western democracies have allowed ordinary citizens to speak back
to power not only through ballots and speeches but through symbols, satire, music, caricature
and public performance. Sometimes that performance has taken the form of a song.
Sometimes an editorial cartoon. Sometimes an effigy hanging from a gallows. Sometimes a
mock guillotine in a city square.
Those traditions are not an embarrassment to democracy, they are among its oldest
expressions. Perhaps that is the greatest irony of this week’s controversy.
The politician who claimed to be defending democracy was condemning one of democracy’s
oldest forms of public speech.

Alastair McClymont is a veteran Immigration Lawyer still practising in Auckland as
Immigration Principal of Righteous Law.