Socred leader attacks ‘smears’

Press, 27 August 1980, Page 10

Socred leader attacks ‘smears’

PA Palmerston North The leader of the Social credit Political League (Mr B. C. Beetham) has condemned what he called Labour Party “smears” against the league. He was responding to a challenge from the president of the Labour Party (Mr J.. P. Anderton) who last week called on the league to dissociate itself from what he said was the “anti-semitic and fascist” views of the founder of Social Credit, Major C. H. Douglas. “If Social Credit is expected to wear everything that C. H. Douglas wrote,

which it doesn’t,” said Mr Beetham, then the Labour Party should logically have to wear everything that Karl Marx and Lenin ever wrote, including the overthrow of the Government by force. “As Mr Anderton well knows, I have clearly dissociated the Social Credit League from the antisemitic view which C. H. Douglas developed in some of his writings.” Mr Beetham said that Social Credit stood “foursquare for democracy, including • the right of Jewish people everywhere to freedom from persecution and to a homeland.” Mr Anderton had sajd that in September last year a Social Credit newspaper had.,- published a “two-page extraordinarily laudatory article about their revered founder, Major Douglas.” Labour Jias distributed in the East Coast Bays electorate a pamphlet which asserts that the founder of Social Credit

i was anti-Jewish and talked 1 of a world-wide Jewish monetary conspiracy at a time cwhen Jews were [ being persecuted by Nazi > Germany. “The whole idea of t Social Credit was in fact based on this international i conspiracy theory that > money was in the hands > of groups of Jews some- • where or other and that i this group had to be broken up,” said Mr Anderton. He said the Labour Party would make sure the leaflet was distributed to every house in East Coast Bays. . ■