Peter Hitchens on Peter Mandelson's Young Communist League past

Peter Hitchens expands on a point I have made previously about the communist backgrounds of so many leading Labour figures.

As I have said before, another angle to this is that if a politician or opinion former is discovered to have been a supporter of a "far right" party during their youth then they are forever tarred with the brush of "racist" or "fascist" and yet those who dallied with the equally vile politics of the extreme left during their formative years are allowed to pretend this dalliance is of no concern. Either mistakes made in one's youth are unforgivable or they are not, but let us at least be consistent. In my mind allying ones self with racists and fascists is wrong, but no worse than allying oneself with the murderous creed that killed more people than fascism, kept on killing them after the Second World War and enslaved & killed many millions after the war had ended. The Marxist creed was responsible for around 20 million deaths in Stalin's Russia, 40 million in Mao's China, and millions more in Cambodia and elsewhere that Marxists decided they could improve their countries by imposing the will of the collective good.

I wonder if the latitude given by the BBC to the "ex"-Communists of the Labour party has any connection with the number of people of a similar background within the BBC; now that would be interesting to find out.