The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, SEPT. 2, 1946 MR CHURCHILL ON SOCIALISM

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 19, 2 September 1946, Page 4

The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, SEPT. 2, 1946 MR CHURCHILL ON SOCIALISM

FOR good or ill, Britain is committed to a programme which embraces many of the doctrines of socialism, and since the fortunes of the Mother Country are also those of the members of the far-flung Commonwealth of Nations, the views of a national figurehead and erstwhile hero on the consequences of domestic policy command the attention of a world-wide audience. Mr Churchill is a man of definite opinions and it is his firm belief that socialist interests and doctrines are undermining Britain’s greatness. He said so on the eve of the elections which removed him from his high office and he has just said so again on numerous occasions. Without intruding into the realm of British politics, it can be stated that what he has to say on the subject has a message for New Zealanders for domestic as well as imperial reasons. Mr Churchill has, picked out with unerring directness the most fundamental of all the questions involved in State planning. That is the question of liberty: liberty of the individual, liberty of the masses; and it must come first. To say this is in no way to challenge the need for a “new deal” and a great measure of social justice. Indeed, Mr Churchill, by his splendid leadership in the struggle against the most hideous form of social injustice that tyranny ever attempted to impose upon the world, has undoubtedly earned the right to have his ideas on freedom considered dispassionately; that is to say, as disinterested socialogical thought rather than as special pleading. Controls and regimentation, - as he has pointed out, were cheerfully accepted in wartime; but only as a means of defending liberty against regimentation. To envisage their rigid prolongation in the name of socialism or any other political doctrine would be to encourage “abject worship of the State,” and to aim at a form of society in which the State would be the “arch-employer, arch-planner, arch-administrator, and ruler.” This would be incompatible with the deepest social instincts' of the British people; it could not be anything else than anti-democratic, for whatever the outward forms of “representation,” such a system would entail “an arch-Caucus boss.” A noted historian and philosopher, Mr Leopold Schwarzschild, in a recent article went to the heart of the matter when he pointed out that if there were only one employer, the State, freedom would be utterly lost. There could be no bargaining, no walking out, no seeking of a more congenial job, no criticism; the working rule would be: Conform or perish! “The fight for freedom,” he said, “for human rights and human dignity has always consisted in restricting the power of the State, in balancing and dividing it'. . . All the struggles for freedom in history were struggles against the power of the State.” To abandon the struggle now, after smashing at so heavy a cost the super-State which Germany had attempted to establish, would be sheer decadence, a decay of those instinctive and intuitive urges by which man has remained human; and it was in the name of those indispensable intuitions that Mr Churchill said: “In this glorious island, cradle and citadel of free democracy . . . we do not like to be regimented or ordered about.” To say that regimentation de jure is the intention of the Government of the day in Britain, dr for that matter in New Zealand, is possibly unjust; but nevertheless regimentation de facto is inseparable from the policy of socialisation. The trend is unmistakably plain in this country and it has brought in its wake evils which that same regimentation appears powerless to control, such as the growing lack of freedom in the rank and file of the trade unions, which should count among the strongest bulwarks of our liberty.