TWO ENGLISH JOURNALISTS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23688, 21 December 1938, Page 12

TWO ENGLISH JOURNALISTS

ELECTED TO PARLIAMENT ONE RECENTLY IN NEW ZEALAND (From Our Own Correspondent) (By Air Mail) LONDON, Nov. 18. Two English journalists entered Parliament this week. Mr John Morgan (John Sussex), agriculture correspondent of the Labour Daily Herald, who was recently in New Zealand, increased the Labour Party majority at the Doncaster by-election by 3700 to 11,708, and Mr Vernon Bartlett, correspondent for international affairs to the News Chronicle, standing as an Independent Progressive, turned a Government majority of 10,569 into a defeat by 2332 at the Bridgwater byelection. “ I won,” said Mr Morgan, “ because the mass of industrial workers in the town and district are on their guard, lest the Government should once again try to get themselves out of their muddle at the workers’ expense. My vote is a warning that any attempt to ‘repeat the cuts of 1931 will be widely resisted. My vote also registers a deep resentment at the shameful perpetuation of the family means test and inadequate old age pensions. “Above all, my victory indicates profound misgiving about Mr Chamberlain’s evident intentions towards, and undeclared commitments to, Herr Hitter’s aims and methods. Electors would prefer to see a more * correct ’ attitude taken up towards that gentleman and all his work.?, and they want this supplemented by sustained efforts to regain the confidence of all their one-time friends abroad, especially Soviet Russia and the U.S.A.” DANGEROUS FOREIGN POLICY

Mr Bartlett said that he considered the result ample proof that the nation as a whole realised the dangers of the Government’s foreign policy. “ This is quite definitely a defeat for the Chamberlain policy and a victory for the Eden policy,” he said. “ I quite deliberately accepted the offer to fight in an agricultural constituency, where I was told the chances were practically nil.

“ I have been most encouraged by the way in which, even in the remotest villages, audiences have listened to and discussed questions of foreign policy. There has been unusual enthusiasm in the campaign, because the members of the two Progressive Parties had become tired of fighting elections with little or no hope of victory, and they have united magnificently and forgotten their normal differences of opinion in order to put the Progressive candidate into Parliament.”