LABOUR AND STRIKES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19320, 6 May 1926, Page 8

LABOUR AND STRIKES.

The Labour organisations in New Zealand are, of course, entitled to express their opinions on the industrial conflict that has developed in Britain, and it is perhaps more natural that they should hasten to express sympathy with British workers than that they Bhould attempt to form a judgment of the issues by dispassionate consideration of all the circumstances. But have not the signatories to the cable despatched to the British Trades Union. Congress been a little impetuous in committing the New Zealand Labour movement to "solid support" of those who are engaged in tho struggle 1 ! A week ago, the whole of the Labour movement may have been in cordial sympathy with the claims of the British miners. Today it is pledged to solid support of the general strike, a vastly different matter. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a very large proportion of those for whom the four Labour organisations have spoken would prefer the greater measure of the caution displayed by the American Federation of Labour and the Mine Workers of America, whose leaders have declined to commit themselves until they know whether the conflict is , industrial or political, whether it is a protest by British workers or an upheaval engineered by Communists. The Labour organisations in New Zealand have officially repudiated communism and other revolutionary doctrines ; they have not openly sanctioned the general strike, which many trades unionists condemn for many reasons, including its utter futility. Yet an assurance of "solid support" implies approval of the resort to a general strike. It even implies sanction of the violent suspension of British newspapers, an action that will prevent any widespread circulation of the Labour message of encouragement among British workers. The Parliamentary Labour Party has made so many vigorous protests against any restrictions upon freedom of speech that its representatives at least might have hesitated to cable their party's "best wishes" for victory for campaigners whose first weapon was a censorship by intimidation and violence.