THE CAPTAIN RAMSAY CASE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 127, 28 November 1941, Page 4

THE CAPTAIN RAMSAY CASE

Sir--In’ your admirable leader of October 31, you quote from the astonishingly sound article from The Economist the statement that the lamentable Ramsay is a Member of Parliament because "he came of the right sort of family, married a peer’s daughter and the widow of a very rich man, went to the right school, and joined the right regiment." You did not add, as the Economist article does, that "the selection of trade unionists by seniority also filled the scanty benches opposite with mediocrities." Happily, we do not in New Zealand, to any great extent, select candidates because of their

families or their schools, nor, probably, does our Labour Party select candidates by seniority. But always some one or two officials from the Whips’ office will, in effect, make the selections, and personal considerations may weigh more or less strongly according to the strength of character of these officials. Is it too much to hope that in the democratic millennium to which we are looking forward, when the Hitlers cease from troubling and the Ramsays are, we hope, at rest (permanently, if possible), some definite qualifications will be expected of candidates for Parliament? The State insists on qualifications for doctors, lawyers, dentists, teachers, and even for some very humble civil servants, but we are content to place the health, wealth, and happiness of our whole population, and the educational and political future of our country, in the hands of men and women of whom no educational qualification whatever is demanded. No one can listen to the broadcast

debates from Parliament without the feeling that there are a good many members on both sides of the House who are very ill-equipped for their immensely serious task. Might not the franchise itself be open only to those who have been certified as attending satisfactorily a course — either at a secondary school or at night classes-in, say, elementary economics and the science of government and democratic principles? And should not a more advanced course on similar lines be a prerequisite for candidature for parliament? The Spectator recently had some correspondence on a proposal of the Master of Rugby that promising boys from the ordinary primary schools should be dumped, at State expense, in the English "old tie" schools, because only so could they be fitted for leadership. You will remember, perhaps, that our men who returned from the last war held a very different view of the leadership of English Public School men? Our blacksmiths, tally clerks, dentists, and sheep-farmers proved at least the equals of the de Veres, the Cholmondeleys, and the Majoribanks, Happily, English common sense is not likely to allow these poor little devils of no family to be the victims of snobbish snubbing by the scions of our old — and new — rich — aristocracy in their scholastic preserves. But in this country, we ought to see to it that our children have some education for leadership, and our legislators some qualifications for making our laws, other than their personal acceptability to those who run the party

machines,

F.A.

C.

(Mapua).

(As ihe £conomist article was printed in full on another page of the same issue, we quoted no more than was necessary for our purposes.’ But it is misleading to put The Economist on record as saying that the selection of trade unionists by seniority has filled the Labour benches with mediocrities. What The Economist really said was that the mediocrities on the Labour benches did not justify the presence of so many fools facing them.-Ed.).