The Press Wednesday, May 23, 1928. The Unwanted Party.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19317, 23 May 1928, Page 8

The Press Wednesday, May 23, 1928. The Unwanted Party.

For some time past our chief source Of information about the United Political Party has been the " Publicity " Department" of the Party, which frequently sends a stereotyped letter concerning the " latest information " available. As a rule this "latest in- " formation " is that Mr Somebody-or-other has gone South or gone North; and when he has done neither, the " Publicity Department" sends a statement he has made concerning the astonisliiug progress and brilliant expectations of the Party. In one respect the Party has really achieved a kind of feat: without a leader, without a named executive, without a policy, it has contrived to induce various optimistic people to accept selection as candidates for Parliament. One can always find people, of course, who will stand for Parliament if anybody will help them, but it was lefL for the United Party to make use of that fact. Within the last day or two the Party has actually succeeded in naming candidates for one or two local seats, and the people in this district will perhaps desire some information concerning the Party's programme. We were hopeful of getting this information when the local Liberal paper printed a long interview with Mr George Forbes yesterday. Mr Forbes is the interim leader of the new Party, and he is also the leader of the National Party. He is, moreover, still the prominent member of the Liberal Party that he always has been. In the statement printed by the Liberal paper, however, Mr Forbes had nothing to say about the policy of the United Party. He was concerned only to defend that Party's " right to nomi- " nate candidates for as many seats as "it might decide to contest." His assertion of that right, which nobody would dream of questioning, was his answer to the charge that this obscure and undefined avatar of the old Liberal Party can do nothing but split the votes of the anti-Socialist majority for the benefit of the Labour Party. His organisation, he says, is not, and cannot be held, guilty of vote-splitting. On the contrary, he argues, it is the Government which must be held responsible. There might be some show of reason in this if the Government were invading a multitude of safe Liberal seats hitherto well heltj by Liberals against the Reds. But there is not one safe Liberal seat anywhere,' and in the whole Dominion there are only about a dozen constituencies in which Liberal candidates managed to succeed in 1925. The plain fact is, and there is no reason why it should not be plainly stated, that the country .has no use for the Liberal Party under any alias, and has made this increasingly clear at each General Election. The Liberal organisers themselves are quite well aware of this. Mr Forbes is aware of it, and he knows perfectly well that his Party has become nothing but an agency for weakening the opposition that can be offered'to the Socialist challenge. He chose to give an example in support of his assertion that it is the Reformers who are splitting the moderate vote, and the example he selected was Lyttelton. That electorate, he said, had never been represented by a Re-, form member, "but. was represented "by a Liberal for many years," and/ therefore, if a Reform candidate appears, the Reform Party will be blameworthy. Lyttelton was, indeed, represented by a Liberal for many yeare, but it is many years since the Liberals recognised that they had no prospect of recovering the seat. At the las election they did not even venture to put up a candidate, and the Reform candidate was beaten by the narrowest majority, despite the fact that the Labour candidate had the advantage 01 a block !vote mobilised for him by a section of the Prohibitionists. Mr Forbes and his friends have as much right as the Reform Party to contest any seats they please. Nobody would challenge that right, but it is our business to point out—as we have pointed out every three years since 1911, in the face of exactly the same denials by Mr Forbes and his friends, and as the event has always justified—that the Liberal Party can never win more than a small number of seats and can do nothing in politics except help the prospects of the Reds.