LABOUR IN POLITICS.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 66, 11 December 1907, Page 6

LABOUR IN POLITICS.

The Labour party has been politically quiescent for many months. It is long since we heard news of the " organising " campaigns that used to furnish political food for the public (luring the recess. The spell was broken on Monday night, when the Parliamentary Labour Representation Committee formally, resolved to take steps to contest the Wellington city and suburban seats on "a strictly Labour basis," with candidates "pledged to the Labour party." We may accept the resolution as fairly representative of a general desire amongst the trades unions of the Dominion to place no faith in any political party that admits anybody but the worker into the circle of its interests. To the enthusiastic Labour leader nothing appears more simple than that an election can be fought •upon a " strictly Labour basis." A morbid conviction that Society is divided into the working class and the tyrannous capitalists, who prey upon the toiler, makes it impossible for him to realise that politics can be something other than a clash of the classes. Yet the average voter—including the average worker —does not go to the ballot box with his mind running upon class distinctions, and his heart full of class envy and bitterness. Wo have assumed that to contest a. seat 011 a "strictly Labour basis" means to appeal for election on the single issue of wages and hours of work, and tjo treat as irrelevant every political issue that does not involve the immediate interests .of the worker. The trades

unions, that is to say, hope to make ''labour" an issue at the polls. It hardly needs pointing out that election issues cannot be created by resolution or manifesto: they create themselves out of real conflicts in the body of public opinion. Upon the Labour question there is no real public agitation. There is certainly a growing public distrust of the Government's rapid .adoption of larger and larger sections of the Socialists' creed, but the issue Socialism v. Sanity, is not the one that the trades unions desire to raise. To some extent, of course, w<f have to guess at the programme to which the Labour League's candidates will he pledged. High wages; short hours, freedom to strike, or, at any rate, immunity from punishment, a lessening of the cost of. living—these may be taken for granted as articles in the programme. But the public is left in the dark respecting tli6 sum total of Labour's " prospectus." It would be interesting to have the full Labour programme, in order that we may discover the points upon which Labour is dissatisfied with the existing political parties, and the extent of the ambitions which underlie what amounts to an attempt to establish the three-party system in New Zealand.