2 APRIL 2005, Page 21

Catholic support for Mosley

From Rodney Atkinson

Sir: Congratulations to Charles Moore for defending Conservative candidate Adrian Hilton against the obnoxious attack from the Catholic Herald and the spinelessness of Michael Howard, who has dismissed Hilton as a Conservative candidate (The Spectator’s Notes, 26 March). Democrats should remember that the Catholic Herald was a leading supporter of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The Herald wrote on 19 June 1938 that the policy of the British Union of Fascists ‘is the nearest approach to the social theory of the encycli cals that we have yet been offered by any prominent political party’.

The Catholic Herald also strenuously opposed war against fascism even in 1939 — after Hitler’s rise to power, after concentration camps, after the march into the Rheinland, after the Nuremberg race laws and after the Kristallnacht attacks on the Jews.

Rodney Atkinson

Stocksfield, Northumberland