THE LABOUR CABINET

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 21, 25 January 1924, Page 8

THE LABOUR CABINET

STATEMENT BY THE NEW ZEALAND LEADER

MR, MACDONALD EULOGISED

(BY TELEGRAPH—PRESS ASSOCIATION.) WESTPORT, This Day. Mr. H. Holland, M.P., was loudly cheered yesterday when, in speaking at. the local watersiders' picnic, he referred to the British Labour Party's accession to office as one of the greatest events in the.history of the British Empire. In the war atmosphere election of 1918, he said, Messrs. Macdonald, Snowden, Tre- .. velyan, and Jo'wett had suffered defeat. The whole fury of the storm of slander then directed against them was mot ( with confidence. To-day the man most slandered of all was the Prime Minister of Briton, who, with the others for his trusted colleagues, was leader of the only party with a policy capable of-extricat-ing the Empire from the economic slough into which post-war conditions had plunged it. Mr. Macdonald had some time ago declared that the principal portfolios in a Labour Cabinet would be those.of Agriculture and Foreign Affairs, arid, consistent with that declaration, he himself had taken the portfolio of Foreign Affairs. The Labour Party's manifesto, issued just pviqr to the December elections, provided for dealing with the problem of unemployment on a basis of national Bchemes of productivity work, the adequate maintenance where workwas not provided for development of agriculture, land reform,' international relationship making for peace, capital levy to reduce the national debt, thus making possible abolition!of food dnties, . amusement tax, corporations' profit tax, as well as to provide money for necessary social services, public ownership and control of mines, railway service, and electrical power stations, education, care and protection of children, provisions for widowed mothers, the aged, the' invalided, etc: It remained to bo Be,en whether the present Parliament would permit these great changes to be made, but one thing was certain, especially if it should be found possible to achieve adult suffrage in the meantime, that at the next election the British people would give the Labour Party a majority over the other two parties.