BRITISH LABOUR

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 119, 22 May 1945, Page 5

BRITISH LABOUR

DESIRE FOR ELECTION - ,K Unable To Co-Operate With Conservatives ; 3 N.Z. Pres« Association—Copyright Rec. 10 a.m. LONDON, May 21. Labour could not work with the Conservatives in the major tasks of reconstruction, said Miss, Ellen Wilkinson, in her presidential address to the Labour party annual conference at Blackpool. "We know that a Britain without unemployment cannot be built on the shifting foundations of private monopoly and capitalism," she declared. Assuming that there would be no further prolongation of the Parliament Act, the election would come either early in the summer or in the autumn, the speaker" proceeded. Those who were urging a July election hoped to snatch a party advantage from the transient position, and from the moment of victory, as in 1918. The people would have to decide whether they would place Britain under the rule of big business or advance to a society in which the nation's entire resources would be efficiently used in the interests of the community. The Labour party's policy was straightforward. Its objectives were 1,000,000 houses, jobs for all, social security and. educational opportunities for all, a national health service, based on and paid for by highly efficient industry and properly planned agriculture., which would me.ke possible a steady advance in the standards of living. . Miss Wilkinson said she believed that Labour was particularly fitted to deal with the psychological problem of finding in Germany people able to provide democratic leadership under Allied supervision.

"We and our Allies will have to do things we hate to do," she continued. "We shall have to be stern to our beaten enemies and keep open old wounds because we must bring home to the German people that they are the people responsible for Germany's Government." The danger of having a Government in Britain run by the upper social crust was that it tended to think that the corresponding uppercrust in Germany consisted of rignt people. " These upper crust people in Germany were, from the British viewpoint, the wrong people. ,It would be a tragedy if the progressive Governments of the new Europe had to deal with a rigid Conservative administration in Britain of a type that alienated Britain's best friends in the years before the war. . The conference decided to hold a secret session this afternoon to discuss matters of primary impiprtance, relating to tne forthcoming general election.