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Son’s cathartic biography of a Jewish parent turned fascist
John Haylett reviews Fascist in the Family: The Tragedy of John Beckett MP, by Francis Beckett (Routledge, £16.99)

“SELF-HATING Jew” is a concept misused in recent decades to slur Jews critical of Israel’s deeds or the entire zionist project. But here it is entirely apposite.

Francis Beckett grew up knowing that his father John Beckett had been a left-wing Labour MP who threw in his lot with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF)before setting up the National Socialist League with William Joyce.

While Joyce, under his Lord Haw-Haw guise, broadcast nazi propaganda from Berlin during WWII — he was hanged at its denouement as a traitor — Beckett was interned in Holloway jail alongside Mosley.

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