The Lyttelton Contest.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17617, 21 November 1922, Page 6

The Lyttelton Contest.

I Like so many other Labour candidates, .Mr J. McCombs lias decided that, face to face with the electors, he had better keep in the background the full objective of his party. lie had a great deal to say last night concerning what he would have the electors believe axe the misdeeds of the Government, bnb almost nothing at all to say concerning ihe policy of confiscation and destruction to which he is pledged as a member of the Labour Party. This omission, however, is not likely to avail liim, berfuise he is quit© well known to the Lyttelton electors by now, not as a useful member, or as a real representative of the district, but as a pushing and active colleague of the leader of the Reds. He may avoid ae carefully and as completely as he pleases all mention of the Communist objective of his party, but he has been too closely connected with the direction of that party to be mistaken for a reasonable Radical. At the election in 1919 he was fortunate in that the rotes of the moderate majority in the electorate were' divided. We do not in the least complain that he was elected by a minority of the voters; members of all the parties were in a similar position, and in the total these results balance each other. But the figures of 1919 give lis good ground for our confidence in expecting that in the duel with Mr Macartney Mr McCombs will be defeated. He may, and probably will, secure the votes of those people to whom Mr Massey appears as a usurper —those die-hard Liberals to whom all changes of time and conditions are as nothing, to whom politics consists of voting against the Reform Party- regardless of the consequences. These people are, however, very few. The Liberal Party's tacticians may do their best to encourage their ci-devant supporters to vote for a Red where" no Liberal is seeking election, but we know that most of those former friends of the Liberal Party have realised that the only real issue to-day is between Reform and the Reds. In Lyttelton they should hare little hesitation in 'voting for Mr Macartney, who is a capable and popular citizen, thoroughly representative of the moderate and progressive people who are still, thank Heaven, a majority in this Dominion. Mr McCombs is merely a professional Labour politician of an unattractive kind. There is nothing large or constructive about him, as nearly everything he says or writes makes clear, and as he made manifest once more last night. He is exactly the kind of representative which Lyttelton can profitably do without at a time like the present, when the forces of organised Labour are the only serious menace to the complete recovery by the country of it 3 former prosperity.