The Timaru Herald MONDAY, APRIL 12, 1943. BRITISH POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

Timaru Herald, Volume CLIII, Issue 22554, 12 April 1943, Page 4

The Timaru Herald MONDAY, APRIL 12, 1943. BRITISH POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

'J’HE British Commonwealth movement has won its first concrete political success in having one of its members. Warrant Officer John Loverseed, returned at a by-election. This event is considered of sufficient importance to be commented upon bv The Times, which said: “A policy with a positive appeal won the day. Warrant Officer Loverseed’s victory is not a vote of hostility to the Prime Minister, who is completely identified with the active prosecution of the war, but rather a call which cannot safely be neglected for prompt and unequivocal measures to give effect to the great programme of social reform embodied in the series of reports to the Government and Mr Churchill’s broadcast.” The Common Wealth movement was formed last July, following a merger of the “1941 Committee” and an organisation named “Forward March.” Its attitude towards the Prime Minister was stated in the following terms in one of the movement’s publications last year: “We, putting up or supporting candidates opposed to those w'ho receive Mr Churchill’s blessing, also at the present moment support Churchill; but we support Churchill the leader of the nation, not Churchill the leader of the Conservative Party. We do not desire to see the destruction of Churchill’s political position; we do desire to see swept out of power the party that rejected Churchill for many years, until disaster taught ♦hem that they could only hide from ♦he anger of the people under the protection of his prestige.” “A policy with a positive appeal won the day.” Warrant Officer Loverseed’s policy has not been detailed in the brief cable messages, but his election slogan, one of extreme simplicity, was that every vote for him was a vote for the Beveridge Report. That was a good slogan to use at a time when the Bex eridge Report is before the public as a concrete embodiment of the hopes of a large mass of the people. The majority of British people are looking for plain signposts showing the way into a happier future. The Beveridge Report was such a signpost and no political aspirant could go wrong in supporting Sir William Beveridge’s social security proposals. The Common Wealth movement allows freedom of thought and action to its candidates. “When candidates whom we have supported are elected to Parliament,” states a Common Wealth pamphlet, “we will never seek to insist that they shall vote for ‘Us’ in defiance of their own sincere convictions. Such freedom of action is useful for an election candidate, especially for one operating within the gener-ously-proportioned framework of the Common Wealth movement’s policy. It is against the Conservative Party. Many people in Great Britain will support it there. A pamphlet on its attitude towards the existing political parties says: “We emphatically invite all who now call themselves Conservative but share our views to dissociate themselves from the Conservative Party and join in our work; for the prosecution of the war will be impeded, and reconstruction in peace will be impossible unless and until the selfish and partial interests that party defends are destroyed or deprived of effective power over policy.” Of the Labour Partv it says: “If we express the view that Labour leadership over the last 10 vears has been indecisive and inadequate to inspire the enthusiasm of the people as a whole, or even of the workers as a whole, we are saving no more than what is said by every sincere and enthusiastic member of the Labour Party itself.” Then a bait is cast out for the discontended Liberals. “There are strong tendencies within the Liberal Party for the breaking of the electoral truce,” says the pamphlet, “and there are many men and women in the ranks who, while not prepared fullv to endorse our own statement of aims, none the less understand the war as part of the world revolution for developing democracy. We should welcome and work with these Liberals, and any section of the party in which they have an ascendancy, particularly on issues on which we have like minds.” Finally, the Communist Party is assailed on the ground that it is not a British political party in the same sense as is the Labour Party. It is held to be a branch of an international organisation. With every existing political party dismissed as a safe refuge for the majority of the British people, the Common Wealth movement then states its own aims as follows: “We are the allies of all who are working now, and the inheritors of all who have worked in the past, for the People’s Revolution and the coming centuries of the common wan. . . We are not a tiny group of people working in isolation; we are part of a world-wide movement. In Russia, in America, in China, in India and on the Continent of Europe there are millions who aim as we do at a Common Wealth of the Peoples.” The return of Warrant Officer Loverseed, like those of the Independent candidates last year, is evidence of political restlessness in the United Kingdom. Writing in the Spectator last July, Miss Jennie Lee. a former Labour member of the House of Commons, said: “The people I meet may be unrepresentative, but 1 would say that most of them don’t wish to be Conservatives, but they have no faith in the Labour Party and don’t know where to look for leadership. The Liberal Party they regard as a historial hangover, the Communist Party as solely the instrument of Soviet foreign policy, the Independent Labour Party as cancelled out of reality by its war stand. Where is this restive, unanchored, leftward tending public opinion to come to rest?” That question cannot yet be answered. But it is clear that some new political organisation, of a kind with the

Common Wealth movement, will afford a haven for those who are hovering uncertainly in a mist of political doubt. This wayward flock will be courted assiduously in Great Britain, but the fact cannot be ignored that people thinking similarly are to be found in other countries, perhaps even in New Zealand.