PARTY AND STATE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19007, 7 May 1924, Page 4

PARTY AND STATE

In the course of an address at Wellington on Sunday night Mr. H. E. Holland, leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, reviewed the recent railway trouble. Apparently the purport of his utterance was to prove that the Labour Party had been the staunchest supporter of the railwaymen. He asserted that he and his colleagues did their best to secure a settlement without a strike, but when the trouble was precipitated they at once ranged them selves on the side of the workers. Against whom? Mr. Holland would probably answer: “Against the Massey Government.” The Evening Post, which takes no side in party politics, rightly says that such an answer would not be correct. The Post’s independent attitude lends weight to its comments on this important fact: “The strike was not against the Massey Government, but against th* State, of whose authority the Prime Minister and his colleagues are the guardians for the time being. Mr. Holland makes out a good party case, but it is a party case all the time. The railwaymen defied the authority of the State, and the Labour Party immediately went to the help of the railwaymen. The attitude cannot be justified unless it is held that the authority of the State was being abused—that the railwaymen were in the right all the time, even when they struck. But the rights and wrongs had not been determined when the strike was called, and the strike actually interrupted negotiations for a tribunal to secure such a determination. Mr. Holland says that there would have been no strike if a Labour Government had been in office—the bona-fide grievances of the men would have been attended to long before there would have been a threat of stoppage of work. Unless Mr. Holland means that a Labour Government would have given whatever the railwaymen chose to demand (at the public expense) and without arbitration or inquiry, wc cannot be so certain that Labour would have avoided the strike. There have been Labour Governments elsewhere and strikes against Labour Governments. When Mr. Holland says that a Labour Government in New Zealand would stop such strikes, he is either promising rashly or he is prepared to surrender State authority at the hands of the first organised body of workers which calls him to stand and deliver. In the conclusion of his address, Mr. Holland said that every industrial conflict speedily became a political struggle. Careful perusal of the address convinces us that so far as the Labour Party was concerned the railway trouble was political in the beginning, at the crisis, and at the end.”