CLAIMS that Tory policies are undesirable to "our people" somehow cements the view that those on the left are somehow morally superior.

In the interest of free speech and independent journalism I might recount the fact that Josef Goebbels never doubted he was a socialist and that you can't airbrush from history the statist nature of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

This is not to suggest that modern day lefties are feigning their dislike of Hitler, but an attempt to dispel the clear untruth that Nazism was a form of extreme conservatism.

Reminding people of the socialist nature of the Nazis might not be welcome by some but it was Hitler himself who said: “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish, we shall be in a position to achieve.”

Perhaps when the left hold up the mirror and accept that Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism and any other form of Socialism were competing ideologies using different roads to the same end, they might know how Conservatives feel when the right is incorrectly linked to Nazism.

J Tague, Bishop Auckland.