PURPOSE OF HOME GUARD

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 44, 15 November 1940, Page 12

PURPOSE OF HOME GUARD

Defence Of Country MR. SEMPLE REPLIES TO CRITICS (By Telegraph—Press Association, i DUNEDIN, Nov. 14. “In the first place there should be no strikes at a time when the enemy is at our gates, and anyone who does strike is playing the enemy’s game." said the .Minister of National Service. Mr. Semple, when replying in an interview tonight to suggestions that the Home Guard might be used for strike breaking and in support of Fascist activities. If there were strikes. Mr. Semple added, the Government had other means to deal with them without adopting the tactics of the enemies of Britain. “It is ridiculously absurd to suggest that the Home Guard would be used for anything in the nature of strike breaking.” the Minister said. “If workers got into the movement they could soon deal with that side of the, question in the extremely unlikely event of its arising. “'rhe organization is created for the purpose of preventing Fascism or Nazism coming to our shores, and those are the very systems that have set themselves out. in other countries, to destroy the trades union movement. They would do the same here if they ever came to our shores. Any person, therefore, who makes a statement like that to which I have referred is either a Fascist himself, or a fool, or is looking for an excuse to shirk his responsibilities to the nation." To Protect Country. The same suggestion had been made in various parts of the Dominion, Mr. Semple said, and he had replied in the same way. The Home Guard was being organized for one purpose only, to protect this country and to safeguard the rights of trade unionists, along with those of other sections of democracy, and to light for liberty. He had spent most of his life in the trade union movement when the going was hard, and it was not likely that he, or any of his colleagues in Cabinet, who had also spent their lives in it, would take away one vestige of the rights of trade union members of this country.

“The suggestion has also been made,’’ Mr. Semple added, “that the Home Guard is a political stunt of the Labour Party. That is just as absurd and ridiculous, just as poisonous and harmful, as the other statement. There should be no politics in this business at all. The man who can’t forget his politics when his country is in jeopardy is either a fool, or a humbug, or both. We want no division when the enemy is at our gates. We want to remember ail the time that we are members of rhe great British family, with all its great traditions, that Hitler and Mussolini are trying to destroy. Our object should be to hang together, if not we will hang separately.”