David Lammy compares Conservative Eurosceptics to Nazis
Labour MP’S remarks prompt derision and accusations that he is ‘sowing further division’
THE Labour MP David Lammy has been accused of “losing it” after comparing Tory Eurosceptics to Hitler and the Nazi Party.
The second referendum campaigner said that comparisons with Nazi Germany are “not strong enough” in comments which prompted a backlash from Tory MPS.
Mr Lammy was asked by the BBC’S Andrew Marr whether a comparison he previously made between the European Research Group (ERG) and the Nazi Party and South African racists was unacceptable.
He replied: “Andrew, I would say that wasn’t strong enough. In 1938 there were allies who hatched a plan for Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia, and Churchill said no, and he stood alone.
“We must not appease. We’re in a situation now, and let me just be clear, I’m an ethnic minority. We have, in the ERG, in Jacob Rees-mogg, someone who is happy to put on to his web pages the horrible, racist AFD party, a party that’s Islamophobic and on the far Right.”
Mr Lammy added: “They’re happy to use the phrase ‘grand wizard’. KKK is what it evokes to me when I think of that phrase and the Deep South.
“I’m sorry, but very, very seriously, of course we should not appease that, of course we should not appease that.”
Mr Rees-mogg responded: “I feel sorry for Mr Lammy, comparing a Parliamentary ginger group with an organisation and creed that killed six million Jewish people makes him look foolish and his comments unbalanced. It damages his reputation.”
The AFD was founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party in Germany, and has since campaigned for tougher immigration laws. Mr Rees-mogg has previously denied supporting the party.
Mr Lammy said: “The BBC should not allow this extreme hard-right fascism to flourish. What kind of country are we going to be like if these people are running it?”
When it was put to Mr Lammy that he was saying Mr Rees-mogg and Boris Johnson are equivalent to Nazis, Mr Lammy said: “Ask Boris Johnson why he’s hanging out with Steve Bannon.”
Conor Burns, a Tory MP and ally of Boris Johnson, said: “I used to have regard for David Lammy. But this is bats---. Comparing ERG to Hitler is quite something. Fully lost it.”
Mims Davies, the minister for civil society, added: “Sowing further division costs us greatly – coming together must take precedence.”
Mr Lammy later wrote on Twitter: “I will never back down from calling out links to the extreme Right. We must not appease or concede ground, we must call it out for what it is.”
Iknow it may not feel much like it at the moment, but some day soon we are going to get out. Unless we MPS have taken leave of our senses, we will honour the wishes of the people. Unless the PM has some secret plan to stifle Brexit with a series of ever more ludicrous delays, it seems to me all but inevitable that we will eventually respect the result of the 2016 referendum and leave the European Union.
So don’t despair. Don’t give up. It is going to happen, and at that wonderful moment it will be as though the lights have come on at some raucous party; or as if a turbulent sea has withdrawn to expose the creatures of the shore. We will suddenly see things differently, and in that moment of clarity – when we finally get this thing done – I hope and believe that one of the distortions of Brexit will come to an end.
The argument in the past few years has become so all-consuming that it has introduced a ridiculous polarity into political discussion. By dividing the country into Leavers and Remainers, the debate has tended towards stereotype. It is assumed that your view on Brexit
is a likely guide to your views on almost everything else. So, by a lazy process of association, a composite picture has been built up of the “average Leaver” or the “average Remainer” – when that picture may have little or nothing to do with reality. Leavers are now assumed to be anti-immigrant, reactionary, of advancing years, and they are regularly described as “extreme” or “Right-wing”. Remainers are assumed to be metropolitan, liberal and probably in favour of high and progressive taxation.
Neither stereotype is remotely accurate. I can think of Left-wing members of the Green Party – like my old friend Baroness Jenny Jones – who were firmly in favour of Brexit; and there are lots of hard-nosed, tax-cutting Tories who have been passionately in favour of Remain.
You can decide for or against Brexit and yet occupy almost any position on the Left-right spectrum. Yet the polarising effect means that whole suites of irrelevant opinions are ascribed to one side or another, with bizarre results.
Take yesterday’s peculiar outburst by David Lammy, the Labour MP, on BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show. If I understood him correctly, he said that I was an “extreme hard-right fascist”, on the grounds that I was “with Steve Bannon”, the former Trump aide. I have always liked David Lammy, but I have never seen such a ferocious grip of the wrong end of the stick. Whatever you may think of my time as mayor in London’s City Hall, or as foreign secretary, I don’t think you could say that it amounted to a fascist regime.
It is true that we were tough on crime, and cut the murder rate by 50 per cent, as well as cutting council tax by 20 per cent. But I have also spent my time championing female education around the world, and massively expanding the living wage, and tackling poverty with such determination that when I became mayor in 2008, London had four of the six poorest boroughs in the UK, and when I ceased, after eight years, London had none of the poorest 20. It wasn’t extreme hard-right fascism. It was progressive One-nation Toryism.
As for the so-called association with Steve Bannon, I am afraid this is a Lefty delusion whose spores continue to breed in the Twittersphere. Of course I met Mr Bannon a couple of times when I was foreign secretary and he was Trump’s chief of staff. But not since. So I find Lammy’s suggestion that I am “with Steve Bannon” a bit perplexing.
Lammy and I worked together for years. He knows that I was for a long time just about the only politician willing to stick up for the benefits of immigration. So why does he say this stuff? Why does this conspiracy theory carry credence on the internet? Because of Brexit, and the whole gamut of misplaced associations that go with it.
The sooner we can deliver Brexit, the sooner the nonsense will end, and the current Brexchosis will gently fade from the population. And then – faster than I think we now believe possible – the Tory party will find that the polarising effect has gone.
The distortions will vanish, and suddenly I believe there will be an outbreak of unity, and violent agreement on the way forward. Just as there is a great pent-up tide of cash waiting to flood into this country, as soon as we have got the thing done, so there is a pent-up tide of Tory ideas and energy that for the past three years have been kept out by the Brexit monomania.
Now is the time to focus on the real priorities of this country: fighting crime, and especially tackling the scourge of knives and gangs; investing in our health service and our schools – and driving home the message that you need a dynamic economy to fund them all.
Now is also the time for Tories to rejuvenate our economic thinking, to set out a strategy for growth, for backing entrepreneurs and start-ups, for making the judicious tax cuts that can actually stimulate revenues.
Now is the moment – if we can deliver Brexit – when we will be able to concentrate on fixing the housing market: cutting stamp duty, addressing the planning problems and coming up with inventive mixed tenure schemes to help young people purchase their own homes.
Soon, if we can get Brexit over the line, we will finally be able to begin the positive narrative about Brexit Britain – the world leader in so many fields, set to overtake Germany, by 2050, as the largest and most prosperous economy in Europe. That is the opportunity. We cannot afford to fail.
If my fellow Tories want to understand the political risk we run by refusing to deliver a real Brexit then they should look at the reception accorded the new Brexit Party this weekend in Birmingham. There is a sense of disillusion out there, and we must disprove it now. I believe that we can and we will.
But the only way to cure our Brexchosis is to do what we promised the people – to leave the EU, and do it properly.