Is the Third Reich living rent-free in David Lammy’s head? Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister has accused Donald Trump of being a ‘neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’, likened the Tory European Research Group to Hitler’s National Socialists – and now he has claimed that Reform leader Nigel Farage ‘flirted’ with the Hitler Youth as a youngster. ‘I will leave it for the public to come to their own judgements about someone who once flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger,’ Lammy said of Farage. Who knew Reform’s leader – born in 1964 – had been around in 1930s Germany?
In response to Lammy’s latest Nazi sighting, a Reform source told the BBC: ‘It’s disgusting and libellous. Beneath contempt.’
It turned out that Lammy was referencing a claim made in 2013; namely that while he was a pupil at Dulwich College in the early 1980s, Farage and friends marched – or should that be goosestepped – through a ‘quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler Youth songs’. Farage has always denied the accusations.
Lammy isn’t the only leftie who sees a Nazi on every street corner. Earlier this year the attorney general, Lord Hermer, compared Tories and Reform MPs wishing to leave the European convention of human rights to lawmakers in Nazi Germany. Back in 2020, Bill Esterson, then Labour’s shadow international trade minister, charged Boris Johnson’s Premiership with ‘recreating Nazi Germany’.
It isn’t only politicians: Gary Lineker, football pundit turned European historian, accused Suella Braverman of running an asylum policy that was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’.
In response to Lammy’s latest Nazi sighting, a Reform source told the BBC: ‘It’s disgusting and libellous. Beneath contempt.’ Lammy has also rowed back from the comments made at Labour party conference.
Even so, what Lammy said was brainless and counter-productive. If the Labour party are in any doubt they should look across the Channel to France. For over a decade, Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party have been smeared with the Nazi trope. In 2020, for example, when she launched her new slogan, ‘France, Wake Up!’, her critics said she had been inspired by Hitler’s ‘Germany Awake!’ motto of the 1930s.
The left in France are spoilt for choice when it comes to fascist bogeyman: if it’s not Hitler that Le Pen is hankering after, then it’s Marshal Petain, the head of the wartime Vichy government (for which that Socialist hero Francois Mitterrand worked).
In 2023, the then French prime minister Élisabeth Borne described the National Rally as the ‘heir to Pétain’. Emmanuel Macron admonished the lazy jibe, telling Borne that ‘you won’t be able to make millions of French people who voted for the far right believe that they are fascists’.
Wise words from the president, but remarks that continue to be ignored. The left persists with smearing its enemies; in doing so they contribute to the increasing popularity of these so-called ‘populist’ parties.
A poll on Monday revealed the National Rally’s lead over its rivals is growing ever bigger. Were a presidential election held this week, Le Pen or her deputy Jordan Bardella would win between 33 and 35 per cent of the vote; the next best is the centrist Édouard Philippe on 16 per cent. Le Pen and Bardella are the only politicians whose approval rating hasn’t dipped in the chaos of the last eighteen months.
Among Le Pen’s supporters is a large tranche of French Jews. A generation ago, no Jew voted for a Le Pen. Jean-Marie, the co-founder of the National Front (as the National Rally was known before its rebrand in 2018) was an anti-Semite who counted among his [political friends a Frenchman who had fought with the Nazis. Marine Le Pen has purged her party of the world’s oldest hatred.
Now – as Macron conceded last month – there is a ‘new form’ of anti-Semitism in France. It is not far-fight skinheads burning down synagogues and beating up Jews: it is Islamists and far-left extremists.
Jews in France are afraid, and the vast majority regard the far-left la France Insoumise as the party most responsible for the resurgence in anti-Semitism.
This is the sickening irony of left-wing politicians in Britain and France. They bandy about words such as ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ while turning a blind eye to the real reason why anti-Semitism is once more on the rise.
The electorates aren’t so dishonest. They see what is going on and they vote for the parties who promise to push back against Europe’s new anti-Semites.
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