ROYALIST sycophants seeking to divert embarrassment over images of the current queen as a child, her mother and her uncle delivering fascist salutes can’t agree on an excuse.

Take your pick from it’s a wave not a salute, they were only larking around and, amazingly, that no-one could have predicted how the Hitler regime in Germany would turn out.

Perhaps no-one predicted that the nazis would set up an industrialised extermination programme to rid Europe of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Freemasons and other “subhumans.”

But Hitler didn’t set the Holocaust in train immediately after he took power.

As Pastor Niemoller recounted in his verse, “First they came for the Communists,” the organised working class had first to be smashed.

Hitler said on May 2 1933: “We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers’ salaries and take away their right to strike.”

His regime’s brutal assault on working people followed Mussolini’s imposition of fascist dictatorship on the Italian working class and was supported by German big business and British finance capital.

It is no secret that Edward VIII, the queen’s uncle, was a dyed-in-the-wool nazi suspected of leaking secrets to Germany and sent into diplomatic exile in Bermuda.

But Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the queen’s mother, despite later efforts to confect an image of her as a wartime symbol of national unity, was also ensconced in the pre-war “peace party” camp that sought accommodation with nazi Germany.

She was closely involved with fellow appeaser Lord Halifax, whom she wished to see appointed prime minister rather than Winston Churchill, preferring a humiliating peace that would preserve the monarchy rather than Churchill’s vision of resistance until victory.

Buckingham Palace is reportedly upset at this short piece of film coming to light and has hinted at legal action.

Considerations of ownership and copyright are a smokescreen to cover up discomfort over evidence of the scale of royal family involvement with the peace party.

Evidence exists in papers held by Oxford University’s Bodleian Library that should be published now, not held until 2037 as the palace insists.

Clear contrast

FRONT-RUNNER Andy Burnham was apparently “joking” when he said that he “might be open to listening” to suggestions to include Jeremy Corbyn in his shadow cabinet.

That puts all three non-Corbyn hopefuls on message after weekend calls to isolate the socialist candidate, but opposition to Corbyn by Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall is not all they have in common.

Blairite factional group Progress, which backs Kendall, admits that it was “spoilt for choice” in making its decision, since Burnham is its former vice-chair, Kendall its current vice-chair and Cooper a former patron.

There is concern, according to the Torygraph, among MPs who nominated the Islington North MP to facilitate discussion but won’t vote for him, that Corbyn’s anti-austerity message is putting the party on the “wrong side of the public.”

They mean that the three Progress candidates are indeed on the wrong side of the public and that Corbyn’s clear pro-working class stance proves this every day.

If only Labour voters had been given a non-choice of three austerity candidates, to a background chorus of Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt instructing the electorate to stop having a tantrum and do as you’re told, all would be well, they argue.

Nothing illustrates better the political bankruptcy of the Progress/New Labourites, confirming the importance of having a real socialist alternative in this campaign.