Political Parties.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18346, 1 April 1925, Page 8

Political Parties.

In the course of the speech at Wairoa to which wo referred yesterday, the Hon. A. D. McLeod gave some good advice to the Farmers' Union, which, under the influence of some of the politician-farmers of Auckland, supported by the President of the Union, has been flirting with the vision of a political Country Party. Nothing, he said, would kill the Union moro quickly than engagement in party politics. It is not that the farmers of the Dominion, or those farmers who support the Union, are divided into sections favouring the Reform,, the Liberal, and the Labour Parties. They are not so divided. A certain proportion of them may, indeed, imagine that the Liberal Party can satisfy them, but the farmers, like other people, aro realising that tho Liberal Party as we know it today is politically nothing better than an ally of . the Keds. What Mr McLeod means is that if the Union were to set up a new political party , would be deserted by Jill those farmers —and they are a majority—who realise, on particular as well as on general grounds, that the formation of a political Farmers' Party would be a suicidal blunder. Tho particular ground is this: the withdrawal of the farmers from the army of moderates would strengthen the Liberals and the Reds, and might place an anti-farmer party of Reds and Liberals in offico at once, with results which no sensible. farmer could contemplate without alarm. The general ground is this: that the farmers, as farmers, are a minority, and ought not to 'seek, and cannot seek Avithout peril to themselves, for special representation with the idea of exercising greater influence than they exercise at present. If a Farmers' Party, fighting purely for the farmers' special interests, and giving its support in Parliament only in return for services rendored, were to come into being, it would provoke the specific hostility of other groups, and would stimulate into effective opposition the antiagrarian sentiment which at present can only snarl impotcntly in a Parliament which, whatever its faults may be, is really representative of all national interests without any bias in favour of any particular section of J,lie nation. It is ama/.inp that at the

present time, when the party of revolutionary change is solid, strong, and aggressive, and when the Liberal Party is bent upon maintaining a division in the ranks of moderate men—it is amazing that any farmers anywhere should be so foolish as to wish to make that division more dangerous than it is.