UNLIKE Albert J Morris (Letters, February 26) and Duncan McVee (February 23), I support the views of D Pearson (February 19) who condemned Pendle's Labour MP Gordon Prentice, for opening a social function in support of the Communist newspaper, the Morning Star.

The following examples will show why Gordon Prentice was wrong.

While Poland was fighting for her life in 1939 against Germany on her western borders, that "great champion of the working class" the Communist Soviet Union, without a declaration of war, stabbed Poland in the back, by invading her from the east.

The Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) reported: "Red Army takes bread to starving peasants." What a little gem!

At the time of the German Nazi-Soviet Communist Pact: "Russia had 40,000 potential spies in Britain in the ranks of the Communist Party." So wrote former Communist journalist on the Daily Worker, Douglas Hyde, in his autobiography "I Believed."

But immediately after Nazi Germany declared war on the Communist Soviet Union, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote: "The British Communists who had hitherto done their worst... in our factories, and had denounced 'the capitalist and imperialist war' turned about again overnight and began to scrawl the slogan 'Second Front Now'."

We should never forget these facts.

BERT HARDWICK, Warner Street, Accrington.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.