LABOUR AND THE COUNTRY QUOTA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22723, 8 November 1935, Page 4

LABOUR AND THE COUNTRY QUOTA

TO THE EDITOR. Sib, —Your footnote to my letter in Tuesday’s issue misses the point. Certainly the political programme of the Labour Party is revised at the annual conferences; the constant infusion of new blood would ensure that if nothing else did so. The law of change is the law of God, and no political creed can live that does not change and grow. But the Labour Conference is not responsible to the electors; the Parliamentary Labour Party certainly is, and when that party goes to the people at a general election with a definite programme that programme and no other must be followed during the life of the

ensuing Parliament. If the annual conference meanwhile niakes revisions, those revisions must certainly wait until they can be put before the people at the general election following. When your sub-leader of last Saturday quoted a definite election promise made by Mr Savage on a policy matter, and binding for the life of the first Labour Government, and then went on to warn country electors that he might break that promise if his party secured power; and when I asked you in what school-did the writer of that sub-leader acquire his conception of political ethics, you had no justifiable grounds for replying “ In the school of the Labour Party.” He must have acquired it in some other school.—l am. etc., P. Malthus. Hillgrove, November 6. [lf Mr Malthus bad not been a member of the Labour Party for only a short period he would know that the “ law of change” does not operate in that party merely at thp expiry of each parliamentary term. At the best, he would have the country electors believe that, if tne Labour Party were in power, the abolition of the country Quota would simply be postponed.— Ed.. O.D.T.]