POLITICS AND E.P.S.

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 114, 16 May 1941, Page 9

POLITICS AND E.P.S.

"I DID MY JOB"

REPLY TO MR. M CKEEN

When Mr. McKeen was nominated for the Mayoralty, said Mr Hislop at Brooklyn last night, he thought he was in for the stillest light—a mere amateur against a statesman—he had ever had, but he had been greatly disappointed. He had several good fights against Mr. Semple and Mr Chapman, good straight-out fights on straight-out issues of local politics; never had he .lad to .vaste so much time in contradicting misstatements as he had to do in this campaign with Mr. McKeen on the other side

He referred to Mr. McKeen's statement of some of the facts, and not all the facts, about city housing and the demolition of old houses. He had made a big fuss about 240 houses having been pulled down, but said nothing of the 3000 dwelling units that had gone up in the same period. Yesterday Mr. McKeen had, at an open-air meeting at the Market Reserve, where, incidentally, nobody at all was supposed to address public meetings, made personal remarks about him (Mr. Hislop), which he doubted whether he would repeat to his face. At the meeting of the City Council Mr. McKeen had asked a question whether he nad read a statement by the Minister of National Service in which the Minister strongb deprecated any attempt to use the Home Guard and the E.P.S for political purposes. Mr. McKeen asked whether he (Mr. Hislop) considered the fact that he had addressed a group of members of the E.P.S. in the library lecture hall was consistent with keeping politics and local affairs out of that organisation. • .'■■•;•■*•■•; Mr. Hislop said he was in complete agreement with the general principle of the Minister's statement. "Whether anybody has made any suggestion that I have endeavoured to influence members of either organisation in a political way, I do not know," Mr. Hislop said. "But if anybody has made thrit suggestion, he has made one that is completely and utterly untrue. "In addressing that meeting 1 was doing my job," said Mr. Hislop. From the very inception of the E.P.S. movement in Wellington and of the formation of the Home Guard, which later passed from the hands of the local authorities, he had taken a keen and active part in encouraging and guiding its development.

Could Mr. McKeen say the same of his part in the E.P.S. and the Home Guard?

"I defy anybody to say that there was any possibility of suspicion of the introduction of local politics into the E.P.S. meeting I addressed on Friday last. I am hot going to stop doing this job because some twopenny-ha'penny fellow objects to my doirit? it.'"