Page 5 Advertisements Column 4

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 21 November 1924, Page 5

A certain political party, says The Times of September 11, was in want of hecklers for the recent electoral campaign. Every political party no doubt welcomed hecklers who can really heckle, though not all the parties will openly say so. There was a meeting at Kensington recently at which a speaker confessed the pleasure it gave him to speak and even to be heckled. He was from Petrograd—an Englishman, formerly a leather-worker there; and he told the Workers’ Liberty and Employment League a few facts on the state of things in Russia. He said that no such freedom of speech as is implied in public meetings and heckling existed in that country. Criticism of Soviet methods was not permitted. He had seen a meeting hall surrounded by Soviet troops and men shot down anil taken prisoners as they left. He had also known men to be dragged off to he shot because they had heckled a vSoyiet speaker. After all, then, something may be said for the old-fashioned methods of England. The worst that happens to a heckler here is first to be heckled himself, then to be turned out.