FINANCIAL POLICY.

Evening Star, Issue 23685, 19 September 1940, Page 5

FINANCIAL POLICY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —The wonderful wizard of words, Dr M’Millau, will deliver an address next Tuesday, which is a good thing, as he is the Hist Cabinet Munster to be elected by the rank and file of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Ml J. A. Lee, when speaking in the Town Hull, explained tne financial platform on which all Labour members of Parliament secured election. He charged the Government with failing to carry out this financial policy of using the national credit, resorting instead to the Tory borrowing policy it was elected to abandon. The result of this extra interest payment was extra taxation. Instead of conscription of wealth as promised, the poorer section of the people are called upon to suffer more taxation, to pay extra interest to the private bondholder. This extra burden of taxation was imposed on the low-paid workers by reducing the amount of income on which the income tax is paid to £2OO per annum ; by increasing the wage tax another 5 per cent.; by increasing the Customs on essentials and goods habit makes essentials. This extra taxation was not taken into account when the Arbitration Court adjusted workers’ wages. All the court was empowered to do was to increase wages according to the cost of living. Mr Monteith made it clear, as workers’ representative of the Arbitration Court, that the 5 per cent, increase in wages was not enough to pay for the 10.7 per cent, increase in the cost of living. During the last war the Labour Party roundly condemned the Tory parties for what it called their cold storage policy, which then filled the cool stores with produce they could not ship rather than seli it to the workers at reasonable rates, yet it not only adopts the same “ stupid ” policy, 'but, in addition, and at a time when meat is selling in our butchers' shops at peak prices, actually empowers the butchers to increase the price a further penny in the £. Coal has gone up out of all proportion! to wage increases, in spite of the fact that the mine owners have been empowered to reduce the size of the screen, thus forcing coal consumers to buy more slack than ever with the coal. These are but a few of the complaints by Mr Lee or his party of the way Labour has abandoned its policy. Many of us who believe that Labour can only retain power by unity have faith in the Labour principles we devoted a life’s service to advance. If that unity is to be preserved, Dr M'Millan has some explaining to do of things unknown to those of us who have faith in the progressive Labour principles. I have been one of the many who for years have written to yonr paper in an effort to propagate Labour's financial principle of using the' national credit to make production costs equate consumption costs. Old-time Labourites of the last war in Dunedin, like Mr L. F. Evans, the late Mr 11. Breen, and Mr W. Pattison, to say nothing of Mr M. M'Allan, agitated in favour of rehabilitation of soldiers so successfully that they paved the way for the introduction of the economic pension, that made the country share some of the burden of war disability. Mr Leo recently introduced a Soldiers’ Rehabilitation Bill containing the main Labour principles such as Mr Evans and Mr M‘Allan agitated for. In addition, Mr Lee’s Bill provided for deferred credits to guarantee the soldier’s war pay being made up to what a navvy working for the City Council now receives for staying at home. Some of us want to know what the Government proposes to do about it, especially as some last war veterans could not prove tbeir disability due to war, and postmortem examinations later revealed that such men’s death was due to war service. Surely Labour’s Cabinet does not now stand for ‘ what Mr H. G. Wells describes as “ the meanwhile inolioy ” of the Tories.—l am, etc.. 1 J. E. MacMaxvs. September 17.