LABOUR PARTY SEEKS NEW WORLD SYSTEM

Southland Times, Issue 24755, 28 May 1942, Page 5

LABOUR PARTY SEEKS NEW WORLD SYSTEM

LONDON, May 26. On the resumption of the Labour Party’s annual conference the executive moved a resolution urging that there must be no return after the war to an unplanned competitive society and asserting that Government war-time control for the mobilizing of national resources must be continued in peacetime. It added that the socialization of basic industries and services and planned production for community consumption were the only lasting foundation for a just and prosperous economic order.

Professor Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science in the University of London, said it was time the Labour Party left nobody in doubt concerning the principles for which it was fighting. “We seek to end a system in which the many are the slaves of the few and which makes ordinary men and women not ends in themselves, but means to the ends of others,” he said. “We seek after this war no return to the old world, but quite precisely to build a new world. We have done with the mad competitive economic system which spells poverty for all peoples and war as the outcome of that poverty.”

Professor Laski added that Mr Churchill had agreed this was the people’s war. “We mean to win, but we want a pledge from him that a people’s peace will result from the people’s war,” he said. “Mr Churchill has so far evaded that assurance. He has talked of victory in cold terms of the old world that is dying, not of the new world that is struggling to be bom. Mr Churchill must stand by the people of Britain not only in the war against vested interests abroad, but in the war against vested interests at home.” The conference adopted the executive’s resolution.