"As for young women using contraceptives or, if all goes awry, taking the morning after pill, good."

Nope, I stated 13 year old girls, not young women.

Well, it seems The Daily Mirror was on similar lines:
I can't link to it, as it won't let me, but just google 'Daily Mirror facist links' then go to 'cached' to read it.


"It is one of the choicest pieces of journalistic dinner party general knowledge that the filthy right-wing Daily Mail was officially a fascist newspaper in the 1930s. The paper was burned on the streets after running the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" and backing Oswald Mosley's plan to make himself Britain's equivalent of Adolf Hitler. No surprise then, so the conversational gambit goes, that the Mail is still beating up on asylum seekers today.

What is less well known is that the Mail's former stablemate the Daily Mirror was just as pro-fascist. On Monday, 22 January, 1934 the Mirror ran the headline "Give the Blackshirts a helping hand". The paper went one further than the Mail, urging readers to join Mosley's British Union of Fascists, and giving the address to which to send membership applications.

"As a purely British organisation, the Blackshirts will respect those principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics," the Mirror told readers, complaining that "timid alarmists" had "been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps".

This was nonsense, the Mirror said, the result of ignorance of the reality of "Blackshirt government" in Hitler's Germany: "The notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda from opponents of the party now in power."

The paper added that anyone who had visited Germany or Mussolini's Italy "would find that the mood of the vast majority of their inhabitants was not cowed submission but confident enthusiasm."

The Mirror's Sunday sister paper, then known as The Pictorial, followed up with a Hello!-style picture essay showing uniformed blackshirt paramilitaries playing table tennis and enjoying a sing- song around the piano while off duty inside the Black House, Mosley's barracks-cum-dungeon on London's King's Road.

The Mirror and the Pictorial also planned a photographic beauty contest aimed at finding Britain's prettiest woman fascist - though Mosley personally objected to this, saying the paper was trivialising his movement.

The author of the Mirror's "helping hand" article was Harold Harmsworth, the first Lord Rothermere, great grandfather of the current Daily Mail proprietor. Rothermere had inherited both papers from his older brother Lord Northcliffe, but had slowly sold off shares in the Mirror, enabling him to invest in the more profitable Mail. Surprisingly, perhaps, when the Mirror piece was published, he no longer owned the paper. But he still held considerable sway over the paper's board of directors, which he had appointed, including editorial director Harry Guy "Bart" Bartholomew - the man credited with creating the modern tabloid Mirror - and Rothermere's nephew Cecil King, who was to run the paper in its glory years of the 1950s and 1960s.

The change of ownership did not at first change the paper's pro- fascist editorial stance. And when the change came it had more to do with money than ideology. Rothermere's right-wing propaganda had badly hit the paper's sales. Bartholomew and King's solution was to re-launch the paper as a New York-style tabloid aimed at a working- class audience.

"Our best hope," King later wrote in his memoirs, "was to appeal to young, working-class men and women... If this was the aim, the politics had to be made to match. In the depression of the thirties, there was no future in preaching right-wing politics to young people who were in the lowest income bracket."

When the political shift in the Mirror came it was cautious. The paper backed the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin in the 1935 election, and then gradually adopted an anti-appeasement policy. But politics was far less important in the re-launched, tabloid Mirror. The paper cut its politics coverage by half and vastly increased its sport reporting, shock-horror pictures, lurid crime tales, cartoons, human-interest material and pin- up pictures.

King and Bartholomew's American-style tabloid formula - put into action with enormous panache by legendary Welsh tabloid feature- writer Hugh Cudlipp - doubled the circulation to 1.5 million by 1939.

During the war - in true tabloid style - the Mirror became super- patriotic, and won for itself the reputation of being "the soldiers' paper". Much of the paper's radical reputation rested on its demagogic attacks on the "Colonel Blimp" Conservative politicians and upper-class army officers who made such a mess of the war effort in its early stages.

But the idea of the 1930s Mirror as a great champion of the anti- Nazi cause is largely mythical. And there is no indication that Cecil King ever changed his politics. King remained an admirer of Oswald Mosley, announcing in his memoirs that Mosley had been "the outstanding politician of his generation" and that his only mistake was to have "chosen the wrong side during the war."







Yes, my father fought in the war. And?

But these past few posts show exactly what I'm talking about, when the phrase 'Daily Mail Reader' is thrown around at people who dare to have a moral point of view about something, which disagrees with those of the people who throw the accusations.

I've read some fine pieces of journalism in The Daily Mail, and I've read some pretty bad ones too, BUT, this is true of many other papers as well. The most inspirational paper, for me at least, is The Independent.

I don't belong to one Paper, or one Party. I am Left, I am Right, depending on the subject matter in hand. I am no Class. And I think the BBC were very wrong in many things, concerning this whole business. Inspire Up, stop the Dumbing Down.