TV news show's newly-hired economics correspondent says he once had sympathy with ideas expounded by Oswald MosleyNewsnight's new economics correspondent has admitted to a "brief and misguided flirtation" with the far right just days after his appointment was seized upon as evidence of left-wing bias at the BBC.Duncan Weldon, a former adviser to Harriet Harman and a former economist at the TUC, has revealed he once dabbled with the ideas expounded by Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists."An unusually geeky, politically-interested 16-year-old, I had a brief and misguided flirtation with the ideas of the far right. It began when I read Robert Skidelsky's biography of Oswald Mosley and found myself feeling some sympathy with the 'early Mosley', the idea of a politician who seemed to grasp the need to tackle unemployment where other politicians did not," he said.In a blog published on Friday afternoon entitled "My teenage mistakes", Weldon said his year-long flirtation would have remained the embarrassing stuff of his youth had he not a few years later done what he described as a "dumb thing" and boasted about his past in an Oxford student newspaper.The story "I was a fascist" appeared under a pseudonym in Cherwell as what Weldon describes now as a "cringe-making headline".He said on Friday that he had written how he had believed as a teenager that it was "possible to hold extreme right-wing views, such as a commitment to destroying the trade union... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2014-03-21 00:00:00 UTC ]