The Labour Party

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 70, 16 December 1937, Page 9

The Labour Party

Sir, —I would have thought that the threatened upheaval in the Labour Party was coming from the lower ranks who are very dissatisfied with their various union officials as well as with the Cabinet Ministers. They complain they are slowly losing all their favourable working conditions and that the Cabinet is playing into the hands of the union bosses. One has only to watch the Hon. Peter Fraser and listen to his utterances to the waterside workers to see the trend. Democracy is fast disappearing under Mr. Fraser’s guidance. We saw a similar movement in the English Labour Party and the late Ramsay MacDonald when he was Prime Minister, and one wonders whether the present tension will result in a split in the ranks and that some of the Cabinet will go over to the Opposition side as a Coalition Government. Of course the cry will be that the Communist is white-anting the Labour Party, but Communism is after all just Left-wing Labour, or militant Labour, and that was what all Cabinet rankers were before they climbed up to the top of the Labour Party. The trouble is that several members of the Cabinet allow their secretaries to do their thinking for them, and consequently the party sees the result and realises that the worker was better off under the Forbes-Coates Government than under the Labour Government; and the women voters know it best of all. Attending funerals ajid writing letters do not cut much ice. The bureau system of the waterside and the Industrial Efficiency Act and such other legislation is now well known among us to be against the welfare of the worker. He is hamstrung by it and will never under the Savage combine get up in the social scale. —I am, etc., WORKER. Wellington, December 14.