TOWARDS DEMOCRACY

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22518, 28 September 1938, Page 15

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY

TO TAB EDITOR OP THE PRESS, Sir,—l should like to thank you for your useful leading article in “The Press” to-day. The article is useful because it puts in form the misleading nature of the anti-Socialist attack on the Labour Government. There is not, nor can be, any wish on the part of the leaders of the Government to hide in any way their humane objective. The attack made on that objective by you and the leaders of the Opposition Party is dishonest, in that it pretends that which it does not believe. It attributes to Government leaders a belief in and desire for catacylsmic change. It professes to believe that the statement of the Labour ideal is not an ideal, giving direction to democratic effort, but an immediate and absolute programme of social reconstruction. Everyone as well read as yourself knows this to be false. It is negatived, too, by the country’s experience of three years of Labour rule with an almost unprecedented government majority in the House. By their works the people may know them. The tenor of the article is foolish, also, because much of our past legislation before the advent of the Labour Government, legislation that we most pride ourselves on, is that which leads in the direction of the Labour objective of socialisation. No one who is interested in .and understands the meanings of words can object to the term, socialisation. We all want to pass on to those succeeding us a social heritage more noble than that we have inherited, and that constitutes socialisation, a bettered world; a world in which men live more socially, more consciously as social beings, than previously: a world in which all the resources available are used more largely for life, not for the suppression of life. I suppose all thinking people believe In the possibility of humane advancement, of an accelerating movement as we increase our opportunities towards an ideal of brotherhood, democracy, and economic equality. The extreme individualism of a hundred years ago, though perhaps pined for by some, is surely not the goal of the leaders of the Opposition, but their propaganda might lead many to think so. Their measures and proclaimed ideals in so far as they have been, and are, consciously pursued, are in tune with this false ideal, and are shaped to prevent the attainment of higher levels of life among the people, those levels where character may develop more freely and fully. . A country, and a world, more completely socialised than at present is the ideal of the Labour Party, and that is the meaning of their splendid and far-seeing objective, the “Socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.”—Yours, etc., H. A. ATKINSON. September 26, 1938.