BLACKSHIRT LEADER.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20476, 30 November 1934, Page 5

BLACKSHIRT LEADER.

Expense of Protection by Police. PREVENTING RIOTING. The Attorney-General declared recently (writes the “ Manchester Guardian ” in an editorial) that the Government has “ no intention of allowing any class of people to organise themselves under military discipline in order to supplant Parliamentary government.” On the Sunday Sir Oswald Mosley leviewed the lines of his Blackshirts in Hyde Park and took their salute the police were in sufficient force to pievent a serious collision between the Blackshirts and those who do not sympathise with them. On that we may congratulate ourselves. But now that the demonstration is over it is fair to ask whether this kind of thing can be allowed to go on. Every time Sir Oswald holds one of his open-air demonstrations and reviews his uniformed followers the police system will be disorganised, and the public will be put to considerable expense to prevent rioting and disorder. It is no answer for Sir Oswald to say that he does not want police interference and is quite capable of maintaining order himself. The troubie is precisely that he is setting up his own private protective apparatus, and the results of it were seen in the brutality at Olympia If he wants to deal with Sir Oswald the Attorney-General should not find it difficult to decide whether the elaborate organisation of the British Fascists is equivalent to an organisation “ under military discipline.” Nor. if he studies Sir Oswald closely enough, should much doubt remain on the Fascist attitude to Parliamentary government. But perhaps it will be enough if the Attorney-General lets Fascist political theories alone and begins to think whether half the difficulty would not be solved by stopping private military formations and the wearing of uni-