By David Mitchell

What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.

Those were the words of Stanley Baldwin, quoting his cousin Rudyard Kipling in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Nothing much has changed in certain parts of the press and Humanists and other visitors to this website will have read about the furore caused by the scurrilous article in the Daily Mail on 20th March by James Chapman making wild and inaccurate accusations against the BHA. Whilst the article has now been removed from the Daily Mail website there has been no attempt to correct the contents or to apologise for the article. The biggest selling daily paper in Britain has got away with it once again. Hundreds of thousands of readers now probably equate Humanism with Al Qaeda. The damage is done. I cant hope to reach that sort of readership and undo the damage but it might be helpful for visitors to our site to learn a few things about the Daily Mail of which they might have been unaware.

Im pleased to say that the authors Steve Lowe and Alan McArthurof the 2006 best seller, Is it Just me, Or Is Everything Shit, together with the books publishers Little Brown, have given us permission to reproduce the article about the Daily Mail from that book on this website. You might be surprised, but probably not too much!

The Mail is very keen on tradition, heritage and never forgetting all sorts of heroic British endeavours. Unfortunately, the great publishing institution appears to have accidentally forgotten one particularly heroic aspect of its own heritageviz. their wholehearted support for the fascism of Hitler, Mussolini and Oswald Mosley. How terribly absent minded of them.

Acclaim for Oswald Mosleys British Union of Fascists kicked off on 8th January 1934 with the unequivocal headline; Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Some Mail staff even wore black shirts to work. Lord Rothe