THE LABOUR PARTY AND SOCIALISM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22610, 29 June 1935, Page 24

THE LABOUR PARTY AND SOCIALISM

TO THE EDITOR

Sir,—To use the words of " Plain Bill," " Hoity Toity! What a hubbub! " What a.useful man I should be to the Tory Party if only I ran against a Labour candidate and split the Labour vote! What praise would he lavished upon mc as an upholder of the people's liberties! But I prefer "Plain Bill's" truculent denunciations of my weakness to permitting myself to be used as a dirty tool

to be flung away as all dirty tools are after the dirty work is completed; and I shall never descend to an act of treachery, spleen, and weakness which might exhaust and waste Labour's strength and split its vote. I must reI mind Mr Moss that in 1913 I moved at the Labour Party's Unity Conference the present objective—the socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange—which was carried. That objective placed the humanitarian interests of the whole of society before the predatory profit-mongering interests of the few and was the guide by which legislative proposals were to be examined. Mr Moss ! now laments that the Labour Party is not a Socialistic Party. I can hardly reconcile his complaints of want of socialism with his actions the last time he stood as an endorsed Labour candidate. If I may explain by an example j the reason that led to one Socialistic 1 plank being placed on its platform the following is a case taken among many I could quote:—A returned soldier with 111 acres of land classed as third-class land by the Lands Department paid £SOO of a deposit and had a mortgage of £llsO on it in addition. This land value of £IOSO was grossly inflated —so much so that II years ago the land was sold for £420 to its present occupier', who, on account of the previous inflation, could not then get the value for rating purposes reduced below £560. A few years ago an adjoining •piece of land containing about 145 acres had, by the terms of a will, to be sold by auction, and it brought £7O, depression price. To stop private speculators from thus imposing on returned soldiers who knew little about the quality of land, and less about the value of it. the Dunedin branch of the Labour Party sent a remit to the annual conference "that no land should be sold or transferred except through the State," the object being to give returned soldiers the benefit of the Valuation Department of the Crown, thus protecting them from valuations of private profiteers of land. The annual conference altered this to read: "No land shall be sold or transferred except to the State." This, though crude, was the finest of gestures that will for all time prove that the Labour Party disclaimed any connection with land speculation. When seeking selection, then, as a Labour candidate Mr Moss knew that plank was in the platform, and was as loud in his advocacy of Socialism as he is now. But when he was contesting the election and in the heat of the campaign, when 10,000 land agents, all New Zealand lawyers and the patriotic land sellers united in putting up a political barrage against it, Mr Moss got political shell shock. Any man who has been at the front in France and witnessed cases of shell shock knows the victim has not sense enough to stay under cover of his own trenches, but in a confused way rushes out in the open, where he is either shot or taken prisoner by the enemy, in which latter case he has to do the enemy's bidding. That is what happened to Mr Moss, and the result of his Mayoral candidature two years ago and last municipal elections proves that those who used him did not vote for him, and, in the interests of Labour solidarity, the Labourites could not. That plank of the Labour Party's platform was designed to meet conditions as they then existed. Changing conditions require new plans, and because of the new laud proposals, designed to meet conditions as they exist to-day, the old Socialistic plank is out of date. The same applies to planks dealing with other altered conditions. If the members of the Labour Party want the right to permit any man who, like myself, was once in the approved list and has never acted against the party, again to be placed on the approved list there is a constitutional way of going about it. It is not the first time in the interests of fair play that a further ballot was taken. Just as at the general election a candidate wrongly excluded can get legal redress by constitutional means, so can a Labour candidate for selection within the party if the members wish it. -I am, etc., J- E. MacManus. Chain Hills.