Tory MP apologises in JC for linking vaccine passport move to Nazis

A TORY MP has apologised for comparing the UK’s move to impose vaccine passports in some settings in England to Nazi Germany.

Writing for the JC this week, Marcus Fysh said he was “sorry that during debate about the current Covid impositions [which came into effect on Wednesday]

I put forward my argument about what right a majority of people might have — in my view in a state of fear — to limit the fundamental rights of others, by saying that we are not Nazi Germany.”

The MP for Yeovil had sparked outrage with the comments he made on BBC 5 Live before a vote was brought to Parliament on Tuesday.

Mr Fysh had told the broadcaster: “We are not a ‘papers please’ society. This is not Nazi Germany, OK.”

His host Rachel Burden denied a direct comparison could be made and said there was a “long, long way between what people are being asked to do and Nazi Germany”. But Mr Fysh then replied it was “the thin end of an authoritarian wedge and that’s why we will resist it”.

Board of Deputies president Marie van der Zyl said the comparison was “completely unacceptable”. She urged those “in positions of authority to avoid these highly inappropriate comparisons”.

In his JC article, Mr Fysh said he’d never visited a Nazi concentration camp but wished to do so in a bid “to understand the true enormity of what occurred”. The MP wrote: “The Holocaust was one of the most horrible things to have happened in human history and we can and never should forget it.”

He also maintained: “While the present decisions over Covid are not in the same league as difficulties to which others have been brough [sic] — and I am sorry that there has been any perception that I think it might be — snowballs start small, gather pace and can go in strange directions.”