History shouldn’t be used against us

Can you feel the fascism yet? You ought to by now, more than a week after Britain leaving the EU. So many people warned us of this moment.

There was the former journalist Paul Mason, who claimed to see crowds of fascists thronging the streets of London. The former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell became so disturbed by our national turn that at one stage he dressed up in a sort of regimental uniform and sang a song about Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.

And then there was the cruelly titled Lord Adonis. The once-sensible former Blairite schools minister spent recent years so apparently worried about the dangers of Brexit that he became not just hysterical but homosexual too. It has been a disturbed few years for these, among other, people.

Still, anyone hoping for some diminution of the fascism sirens will have been disappointed by events over the past week.

On 1 January, the day after Britain left the EU, the New York Times led with a piece by one Peter Gumbel titled ‘Britain has lost itself’. In recent years the NYT has had a strange jihad against Britain. It will haul people off the streets to contribute to its pages so long as they recount a UK riven by modern poverty and fascism. Kicking off the paper’s new year, Gumbel asserted his credentials by stating that his grandparents fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and found sanctuary in Britain. Though he himself resides in France and has now sought citizenship in Germany, he found a political use for his late grandparents. He claimed that they ‘would be heartbroken to see [Britain] today. Inward, polarised and absurdly self-aggrandising’.

Continuing to use his dead relatives as a mouthpiece for his political prejudices, Gumbel said: ‘I mourn the passing of the country that was my family’s salvation.’