I see Joan or enyone else,has failed to explain what lies the media has told about the BNP

Fascism, Dave, has never gone away - why else do you think the German authorities were so quick to demolish the gaol at Spandau where the Nazi deputy leader, Rudolf Hess died? It was, of course, to stop it becoming a shrine to Neo-Nazis of the kind Nick Griffin reportedly spends time with.

As to New Labour and Communism, you reveal a certain political ignorance, if you think the Neo-Thatcherite, pro-free market successor to the Labour Party I first joined in 1973 bears any resemblance to the Communists, led by Joseph Stalin or not.

Some older Labour politicians, Denis Healey, for instance, were Communists in their youth, around the time that Franco's fascists were fighting a elected Communist republican government in Spain. Idealistic young men supported the republicans, but until Hitler foolishly turned Stalin from an ally into an enemy, Healey would no doubt have fought the Russians, as he did, with distinction, the Nazis.

Those who switched allegiance from the Communist Party of their youth to the democratic socialist Labour Party did so, I'm sure, in recognition of the fundamental flaw in revolutionary socialism - that it opens the way to dictators. Why else do you think Hitler led a so-called National Socialist Party?

As to Japanese treatment of captured British and Commonwealth soldiers, one must bear in mind that they were a people raised in a tradition - reinforced by religion - of xenophobic militarism and headed by a supposedly divine emperor. Reading of the excellent book, 'The Knights of Bushido', or any of the many others on the Samurai tradition will realise that Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen were raised in the belief that heroes return only victorious or dead on their shields. If British, kami-kaze pilots might well have collected posthumous VCs.

Naturally, such people regarded with contempt those of their enemies willing to surrender. Happily since becoming the only people to have felt the full force of nuclear war, they are now inclined to pacifism... and their Emperor is no longer a god.

Finally, when writing of the BNP, I do not only mention the Nazis. I also refer to Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists who, before the war, during which he was interned, stomped about the streets of the London borough in which I was born; then predominantly Jewish and now with a substantial black and Asian population.

Mine was one of the few Goy families on our street and my father was an anti-Semite, but he would never have supported Mosley's mob, from which, ultimately, the BNP emerged. Indeed, he volunteered to fight on Day One of the war, but was rejected as too old, being called up into the RAF three years later, when we were running out of 18-year-olds.