A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
CONFUSED as the situation is internationally, it is hardly less so at home. The treatment of friendly aliens is one obvious case in point. The Home Office is urged on one side to intern the lot, and on the other (as in a convincing letter in last week's Spectator) to exercise justice and discrimination and not deprive the country of the services of able men and women who hate Nazism as much as Mr. Churchill does. Then there are accounts that reach me, on the one hand again, of the grossly unfair and arbitrary dismissals from Government departments, on the ground, for example, that an official has expressed in private life political opinions every detail of which Ministers like Mr. Herbert Morrison have habitually voiced on public platforms. On the other hand, there are so-called Fifth-Columnists about the place who deserve less rope than most of them are getting. I mean mainly those who accept the Mosley label. From a well-known authority who has had unusual opportunities of studying this phenomenon I have got a partial answer to the hitherto unanswered question, what motives turn normal Englishmen into traitors. First there are young.. men who have become thoroughly anti-social through unemployment ; they are given a place and a sense of, at any rate, minor importance in the Mosley movement and count on getting posts "when Fascism is established in Britain." A second class consists of older and more or less established people who profess alarm at the advance of Judaistically-directed Socialism. A small third class is definitely anti-national for pay —wherever the pay comes from. And over and above all there are the dangerous fools who ask, "How should I be any worse off under Hitler?"
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