The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. TUESDAY, MAY 7, 1929. A DULL ELECTION.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 106, 7 May 1929, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

TUESDAY, MAY 7, 1929. A DULL ELECTION.

For cause Mat lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

The British elections are now close at hand, and the leaders of the three great parties are busily engaged in putting the linishing touches on their "platforms" and making final appeals to the electors. Mr. Baldwin's latest manifesto is less an attempt to attract the voters by the offer of a constructive policy than a pathetic request to remember what Conservatism has dons for them in the past. Ko doubt the Prime Minister can produce some material evidence in his party's favour — improvement of trade, reopening of coal mines, revival of shipping, housing, old age pensions, social legislation. But electors nearly always look to the future rather than the past, and so far the Conservatives have not succeeded in devising a programme attractive and definite enough to arouse any appreciable amount of public enthusiasm.

It must be admitted, however, that in this respect neither Mr. Mac Donald nor Mr. Lloyd George compare favourably with Mr. Baldwin. The Liberal leader has put forward a programme which involves very heavy borrowing to provide work for the unemployed on a gigantic scale, but he has apparently failed to catch the public ear. The Labour leader also selects unemployment as the topic in which the electors are most likely to be interested, and. he has suggested a vague scheme of industrial organisation and development in a speech which, according ib the "Times," displays "a singular bankruptcy of original and constructive thought."

In justice to Labour, it may,be said that the party's latest official manifesto contains more solid material than Mr. MaeDonald's address. The "public control" of land, assistance to the farmer, a minimum wage, and shorter hours for the worker, and "reorganisation" of the coal, industry, are among Labour's promised boons. But the means by which these objects are to be successfully attained are but "seen through a glass, darkly"; and even Labour's assurance that it is neither Bolshevik nor Communist, and that it believes in "ordered progress" rather than in violent revolution, has not yet cai'ried the electors off their feet. It would not be safe to take tne verdict of the "Observer ,, entirely without reservation, but Mr. Garvin probably represents public opinion accurately when he tells us that this election is the dullest known for the past 50 years. What will be the end of it all, even Mr. Garvin does not venture to predict. But lie thinks so little of the Ministerial programme that in his opinion, if it were not for "three-party confusion," Mr. Baldwin's policy "would not have the ghost of a chance." As it is, what with vote-splitting and the incursion of the "flappers," millions strong, almost anything may happen.