To smear your opponents as fascists or Nazis has always been the perennial temptation of those who seek to terminate an argument – or have no argument of their own. It’s the last resort of the callow, the ignorant and the desperate. And it’s an argument that just won’t go away.
They’re doing this – and McDonnell is joining in – because it’s the last thing they’ve got left
Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell deployed it in all tawdry gruesomeness yesterday. Speaking at a fringe event at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference, the MP said: ‘Reform are a protest fascist organisation. We’ve seen it in the Thirties. What they do, they have a demagogue speaking for them, they target a particular group, in the Thirties in Germany it would have been the Jews, here it is asylum seekers.’
You would have thought a veteran MP like McDonnell would have known better than to stoop to this level. But then again, this is the man who in 2015 famously read from Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book in the House of Commons, a gesture more befitting of a students’ union than the Mother of Parliaments.
But McDonnell is not stupid. He knows his audience, particularly a hyper-progressive younger one that has suckled deep from the ‘anti-fascist’ narrative they have imbued from TikTok videos. With every advance made by Reform in this country, the far-left has met this with cries of ‘smash fascism’ and ‘stop the far right’ – as can be witnessed by those ubiquitous Socialist Workers’ Party placards seen at every vaguely leftist demonstration – or general mumbled allusions to the Third Reich as written in the comment pages of the Guardian.
They’re doing this – and McDonnell is joining in – because it’s the last thing they’ve got left. Both the Palestine flag-waving, purple-haired ultra-progressive brigade and McDonnell’s Old Left trades unions are woefully out of step with the mood of the British populace today, especially the working class, on immigration and the right to assert without shame one’s national identity. The detachment of the radical left and traditional left from what they believe should be their constituency has become visibly manifest this year, both with the Operation Raise the Colours campaign and with the rise of Reform. To use Nigel Farage’s favourite adverb, frankly they’re spooked. The ‘fascist’ smear is their last gamble.
It’s an old tactic, of course, particularly favoured by those on the far left. The Second World War was the last episode in modern history which ostensibly stands as a clear morality tale between good and evil. By maligning one’s opponents with comparisons to the Nazis, you hope to cast them as irredeemably evil. The ‘fascist’ smear may be the last resort of the desperate, but it’s often the first resort of the censorious.
It would be unfair to single out McDonnell’s comments. He is with the spirit of the times. Two years ago, Gary Lineker tweeted that the UK government’s language around its asylum policy was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 1930s’. In May this year, Attorney General Lord Hermer compared threats to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights to 1930s Nazi Germany.
And McDonnell is not the only one with an acute case of Second World War Brain. Those afflicted with this disorder crop up most conspicuously whenever it comes to efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war, specifically whenever it’s suggested brokering some sort of peace with Moscow, or a resolution that doesn’t involve prolonging the conflict. This proposal is invariably met with ominous comparisons to Munich 1938, with the word ‘appeasement’ mouthed in the same manner ‘fascist’ is: to act as dark foreboding and magical incantation. The irony here, of course, is that the person today who has the worst case of Second World War Brain – and the deadliest – is Vladimir Putin, the man who has been keen to refashion his war as a crusade against modern-day Nazis in his own backyard.
What makes such efforts to defame opponents through the fascist slander, or by indecently invoking appalling incidents from history, is that it exposes a moral and political vacuum – and cerebral deficiency – at the heart of those who make such pronouncements.
Today, they are unable to say with clarity whether they think the policies of one party will be better or worse for the majority of people in this country, and whether most people coming to this country do deserve a welcome, and if housing them in former army camps is inhumane. Instead of giving us reasoned counter-argument, all McDonnell does is try to scare us with Nazi imitations and bewail: ‘I hide under the duvet sometimes in the morning, I don’t want to turn on the news to hear another Labour announcement that we’re attacking asylum seekers in some way.’
The sad thing is, we’re going to hear a lot more of this wailing in the months to come.
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