LABOUR AND POLITICS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2955, 2 November 1910, Page 29

LABOUR AND POLITICS.

LONDON, October 26. The Labour correspondent of the Manchester Guardian states that the expenses of 78 Labour .candidates at the last election were £50,000, whereof £12,701 went to the returning officers. The annual expenditure is £15,000, whereof half goes in salaries. The unions also are spending £50,000 annually in financing local organi-. sations. The payment now made to members is insufficient to provide expenses. In the course of a letter to The Times Mr Frederic Harrison contends that a reversal of the Osborne judgment by Parliament is out of the question. He argues that if members of ,the House of Commons are compelled to vote according to the will of the executive of a trade union the country will soon be met by members who are equally bound to obey the behests of other corporate bodies, such as banks, railroads, brewers, steel, cptton, shipping, and corn combines. Thus special interests Avould be represented in Parliament and would so publicly and normally act. He adds that doubtless a bill effecting what Mr Keir Bardie asks is possible. It might enact that any combination of workmen applying their common funds for the maintenance of salaried members of the House of Commons should not be deemed a trade union as defined by the Trades Union Act, and its members should not enjoy the privileges and immunity conferred by the real trade union. Mr Harrison scathingly denounces the dishonesty of the Socialist minority in the trade unions, who are seeking to capture, in order to divert to Utopian schemes, the careful savings of trade unions subscribed for the succour of the labourer who is out of work or down with sickness, or incapacitated by old age, or leaves a family at the time of his death October 27. The Labour party, in a manifesto, urges the electors of Walthamstow to abstain from voting or to vote against Sir J. A. Simon in the absence of a Government promise for the reversal of the Osborne judgment. Mr Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., writes to The Times protesting against slanders and false reports that are based on the offensive assumption that the working class party must be morally inferior to one composed of plutocrats and aristocrats. He recalls Mr Frederic Harrison's letter to The Times of September 8, 1906, in which the writer expressed contrary views to those contained' in his recent communication on the Osborne judgment.