The Battle Cry Of Freedom: Three years after its founding conference, in the general election of 1919, voters were invited to join “Labour’s Liberty Campaign”. Guided by the ghost of Richard John Seddon, the sturdy young Labour Party is depicted rolling up its sleeves to do battle with Massey and his cohorts on behalf of the “Democratic Public”. Labour’s first fight was a fight for freedom.
IN EARLY JULY, 1916, leftists and liberals of every stripe
gathered in Wellington to form a new political party.
New Zealand was at war. In the 23 months since August 1914,
thousands of the Dominion’s young men had been killed, and thousands more
wounded and maimed. The government of William (Bill) Massey appealed for more
recruits.
The Prime Minister’s appeal was powerfully seconded by the
Dominion’s leading newspaper proprietors, who urged the youth that remained to
do their duty by King and Country. Many responded, but nowhere near enough to
refill the depleted ranks of the NZ Expeditionary Force.
In 1915, legislation requiring all single men to register
for possible military service alerted the war’s opponents to the near-certainty
that Massey’s coalition government was preparing to introduce conscription.
In January of 1916, socialists and trade unionists met in
Wellington to debate the ethics of conscripting men – but not wealth. At the
conclusion of their conference a Manifesto
Against Conscription was issued. Arguing that true equality of sacrifice
was impossible to guarantee, the Manifesto
insisted that war service remain voluntary:
“Thousands of our comrades strenuously opposed to compulsion
in any form have gone as volunteers, and while their backs are turned we must
use every effort to preserve intact the civil rights our people have won. There
must be no surrender of principles which have raised British citizenship above
serfdom.”
It wasn’t enough. As predicted, Massey opted for
conscription. His Military Service Bill would become law on 1 August 1916.
Equally predictably, in the first week of July, those responsible for the Manifesto Against Conscription: Peter
Fraser, Bob Semple and Harry Holland; along with just about every other
left-wing leader in New Zealand; began arriving in Wellington. Words had not
been enough: now it was time for deeds.
The creation of the New Zealand Labour Party was largely the
work of trade unionists. Yes – but not exclusively so. What’s more, those early
labour leaders were a far cry from the dour union bosses remembered by Kiwis
who came of age in the 1950s and 60s.
Seventeen months before the New Zealand Left began gathering
in Wellington, the American union song-writer, Ralph Chaplin, had penned the
words to that greatest of union anthems, Solidarity
Forever. Here’s the final verse:
In our hands is placed
a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might
of armies magnified a thousand fold.
We can bring to birth
a new world from the ashes of the old,
For the union makes us
strong.
It was precisely this “new world” of socialism and freedom that
Massey and his mounted constabulary (Massey’s Cossacks!) had fought so hard to
forestall just two years before Chaplin wrote his song. In the “Great Strike”
of 1913, the “Red” Federation of Labour had been crushed. It is easy to imagine
Massey’s fury, three years later, as he watched those indomitable “Red Feds”,
Fraser, Semple and Holland, abandon the path of industrial militancy for the
parliamentary road.
One hundred years on, the reader may wince at a phrase like
“socialism and freedom”. It is, however, used advisedly. The men and women who
formed the New Zealand Labour Party in July 1916 were driven by the conviction
that, without economic justice and social equality, political freedom was forever
being stillborn. We would be much mistaken, however, were we to believe that
they considered freedom to be, somehow, less important than justice and
equality.
Remember the words of the Manifesto Against Conscription: “we must use every effort to
preserve intact the civil rights our people have won”. Labour’s founders knew
that without political freedom, neither economic justice nor social equality
could ever be attained.
Three years after its founding conference, in the general
election of 1919, voters were invited to join “Labour’s Liberty Campaign”.
Guided by the ghost of Richard John Seddon, the sturdy young Labour Party is
depicted rolling up its sleeves to do battle with Massey and his cohorts on
behalf of the “Democratic Public”. Labour’s first fight was a fight for freedom.
Entirely fitting for a party whose leaders had been jailed for sedition and
court-martialled for standing against conscription.
One hundred years later, the attainment of economic justice
and social equality still depends on exercising fearlessly “the civil rights
our people have won.”
Labour and Freedom must march together.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 July 2016.
