MARCH OF THE UNEMPLOYED.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 10, 12 January 1929, Page 8

MARCH OF THE UNEMPLOYED.

It has been proposed at Home that large bodies of the unemployed should be organised to march to London and rouse public sympathy by a huge demonstration against the supineness and inefficiency of the Government in the face of this great spectacle of national misery. The movement is being opposed by the Trade Unions for two good and sufficient' reasons. In the first place, the enterprise has been planned by the Communists, who are working for a violent social revolution, and who hate the Trade Unions quite as much as they detest Conservatives and capitalists. In other words, this march of the unemployed is merely an ingenious trick to exploit the workers for political purposes and induce them to lend themselves to the purposes of Bolshevik propaganda. But apart from this consideration the Trade Union leaders argue with much force that there is no material advantage to be gained by staging the woes of the workei-s in this melodramatic fashion. The facts about unemployment and the deplorable state of destitution in which millions of men and women, chiefly the miners and their dependents, are now living at Home, are so well known that this projected march of the unemployed could not be expected either to stir private philanthropy to unwonted efforts or to bring any additional pressure to bear upon the Government to relieve the situation. Such experiments have been tried often enough before; but neither the march of the Blanketeers in England a century ago, nor Coxey's march through the United States forty years back, nor any of their numerous imitations in either country down to last year's march of the Welsh miners to London, ever did anything for the workers except to increase the miseiy of the homeless and destitute wanderers. More especially in view of the character of the scheme, the Trades Unions do well to oppose it, and the true friends of Labour everywhere will wish them success. . . . ......