The Press Thursday, December 6, 1923. The Three Party System.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17939, 6 December 1923, Page 8

The Press Thursday, December 6, 1923. The Three Party System.

Ir. to-day's budget of news about the general election in Britain Mr Lloyd George is recorded as having made a sharp attack upon the Socialist Party, meaning, as the context shows, the Labour Party. The presence of this "third "party," he said, people " into the arms of the reactionaries," and this, he said, was fatal to progress. We have sometimes heard members of the Liberal Party in this country using language very similar to Mr Lloyd George's, and although there is this important difference between the Liberal Party in Britain and the Liberal Party here, that the New Zealand Liberal has no distinctive policy or set of principles, yet the general political situation in each of the two countries, leading to this quarrel between the Liberals and the Labourites, is much the same. In Britain, as. in New Zealand, the Liberals upbraid the Labourites for splitting what they call the forces of progress, forgetting that this implies a unity of spirit between Liberalism and Socialism which every genuine Liberal would repudiate, and forgetting, also, that the Socialists might retort, in either country, that it is the Liberal Party which is splitting the "progressive" 'forces and which ought therefore to efface itself. If the Liberal Party stands for a clear and consistent political doctrine not shared by any other party, and if that doctrine is one of safe and sober progress, it ought to have as good a chance a 8 any other non-socialist party to be chosen as a refuge by those electors who are frightened by the Socialists. If these electors prefer not to rally to the Liberals, but to those whom the Liberals choose to describe as "reaction- " aries," this must be because they do not trust tho Liberal Paity to give them protection against the [revolutionary designs of Labour. Mr Lloyd George seems to admit that his party does not inspire confidence in tho antirevolutionary progressives. In New Zealand it is notorious that tho Liberal Party is regarded as a very unsafe refuge from Socialism. The Liberals are slow in learning that the fundamental issue," growing ever stronger and clearer, 13 between moderate men of progressive outlook on the one hand and revolutionaries on the other hand. In Britain, to be sure, there is for the moment an issue—the fiscal issue—which, although exceedingly important, has no sort of relation to the fundamental issue, since Protection and Freetrade both find support from Conservatives and Socialists alike. But this issue is temporary, and the fundamental cleavage to which we have referred remains and deepens. That there is permanent room for a party which is neither "re- " actionary" nor revolutionary, but a wobbling mixture of both, is a delusion, in Britain as in New Zealand. There, as here, there must be, and there will be, a return to the two-party system which has always been the expression of the natural division of opinion in ! countries with the British political tradition" behind them.