By Bob Seely
I wish the Left would stop lying about history. I also wish conservatives would do a much better job of highlighting the fantasies and misrepresentations of others.
Yet another example came with Labour’s party political broadcast this week. Mid way through, the narrator said that “at one time it seemed impossible to turn the tide of fascism, until good men and women stood in the way,” the good men and women presumably not being Conservative blue rinses but solid working class people and their Fabian masters.
At the heart of the Left's moral posturing is the myth that Socialism was the antidote to Fascism. This is largely, but not entirely, a lie.
The British Union of Fascists was initially Labour splinter group – as was Mussolini’s movement in Italy. And while many Trades’ Union members did oppose fascism in the 1930s, the British intelligentsia - the Guardian-reading classes – were rather less honourable. From the mid-1930s the collective voice of the Left Book Club (approx 50,000 members, the heart of the British Intelligentsia) believed that there was no moral difference between fascism and the British Empire.
After 1939 when the Nazis and Soviets allied to divide up eastern Europe, many Left intellectuals sat on their hands. Only after the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia and the turn of the war did the intelligentsia throw themselves wholeheartedly into our war effort. The working classes were patriotic, Labour MPs defeatist and Left intellectuals sometimes treacherous – and if in doubt read Orwell’s wartime journalism in which he showers the intelligentsia with contempt. In eastern Europe from 1930 through to the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism was generally indistinguishable from fascism.
In our ten plus years out of power I wish some donor had had the foresight to fund a research project on the Left’s favourite lies and those who repeat them (BBC London, the Guardian, etc). We can’t win the cultural arguments unless people stop believing these false claims.
The leaders of the Left have never defended Britain against Fascism.
