How 1930s-style decline of liberalism puts world on course for war

As former Conservative Cabinet minister Rory Stewart has rightly said, history shows that when politicians abandon liberalism, the collapse of democracy and wars are likely to follow

According to a childhood friend of Nigel Farage, the future leader of the Reform UK party sang “gas ‘em all, gas ‘em all” while at school. Referring to the Nazi Holocaust, it is a sick, far-right parody of a British wartime song.

He also remembered the teenage Farage supporting 1930s fascist leader Oswald Mosley and being proud his initials, NF, were the same as the National Front’s, The Independent reported in 2016. The former friend didn’t believe his fellow Dulwich College FP had fascist views as an adult, but still had concerns.

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After previously dismissing Farage’s behaviour as the “amusing naughtiness” of teenagers, he wrote then: “I now wonder if there is a connection between you at 16 and you at 52. There are things that tell me your views might not have changed that much despite the many years.”

Nigel Farage's Reform UK party has been challenging Labour and the Conservatives for top spot in recent polls (Picture: Carl Court)Nigel Farage's Reform UK party has been challenging Labour and the Conservatives for top spot in recent polls (Picture: Carl Court)
Nigel Farage's Reform UK party has been challenging Labour and the Conservatives for top spot in recent polls (Picture: Carl Court) | Getty Images

‘Going over old ground’

In response, Farage poured scorn on the idea he supported Mosley “as he believed in a United States of Europe”, adding: “Some people need to get over Brexit.” He didn’t directly address the other claims but said: “To say that this is going over old ground is an understatement. The period during which I was at Dulwich was highly politically charged with the rise of Thatcherism to the Brixton riots just down the road. There were many people of that time who were attracted to extreme groups on both sides of the debate.”

I suppose I’m also “going over old ground”. It’s partly because I watched the 1961 film, The Long and the Short and the Tall, over the holiday period and heard the wartime song on which ‘gas ’em all’ is based for the first time. The tune remains stuck in my head.

However, it’s mainly because, thanks to Elon Musk’s interventions in UK politics and Donald Trump’s imminent arrival in the White House, Farage’s fellow travellers are on the march just as Labour starts to look as weak and ineffectual as the Weimar Republic overthrown by Hitler. According to a YouGov poll, Labour is on 26 per cent, Reform on 25 and the Conservatives on 22.

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Tories look like Reform’s junior partners

I can’t imagine Farage wants to gas anyone. But it is deeply concerning that someone who appears to have sung such a song – even as a teenager – is so many people’s pick to be the UK’s next Prime Minister. There’s something seriously wrong with anyone who finds ‘humour’ in the Holocaust.

The decision by Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and co to position the Conservatives as an imitation of Reform already makes them look like junior partners in any future coalition. Farage is the one with ‘star quality’.

According to Jenrick, the actions of paedophiles of Pakistani heritage involved in grooming gangs means the UK was wrong to have allowed “hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women” to move to the UK and there should now be a cap on further immigration from said “alien cultures”.

While a 2020 Home Office report said some studies had “indicated an over-representation of Asian and black offenders in group-based CSE [child sexual exploitation]”, it concluded “most of the same studies show that the majority of offenders are white” and “it is likely that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending”.

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So if there is any cultural effect, it is small and certainly provides no justification to demonise innocent, decent people of Pakistani backgrounds in the UK. To do so is to treat them not as individuals, a central tenet of liberalism, but as members of a group that Jenrick and others are attempting to define by the actions of a tiny minority.

Liberalism ‘is moral’

Speaking on The Rest is Politics podcast about suggestions that liberalism is dying out across the West and the rise of far-right politics in Austria and elsewhere, co-host Rory Stewart, a former Conservative Cabinet minister, said the situation was “so much more dangerous than people think”, with parallels to the 1930s.

He stressed liberal philosophy was not simply about “mushy ideas”. “It is moral. It’s the idea that humans are equal in dignity and the lesson of the Second World War, which is that if you give up on the idea that humans are equal and you start saying ‘there are better people, white Austrians, and less good people, Muslim Austrians,’ so many things follow from that: the collapse of your democracy and, ultimately, war,” he said.

Stewart warned that rhetoric like Jenrick’s was shifting the UK’s ‘Overton window’ of acceptable views and this would mean more and more “slightly dopey people, voters on the right” would begin to think “maybe we can just expel these people peacefully”.

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“People forget what’s going on here,” he said, “which is that the early ideologues for the war in the Balkans initially talked about peaceful separation between Bosnians and Serbs... [and] that Eichmann was working for Hitler to ‘peaceably resettle’ Jews out of Austria, the idea initially was not to kill them.”

Or indeed “gas ’em all”, but that’s what happened.

Liberal democracies tend not to go to war with each other. Illiberal countries, where the slogan is ‘my country first’ and immigrants, ie foreigners, are blamed for everything, are much more likely to. Farage’s ally Trump, who may hand Putin two victories by abandoning Ukraine and withdrawing the US from Nato, has been quick to start demanding territory since his election victory, wanting to take over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada.

So, with overlapping demands by nationalist ‘strongmen’ an age-old cause of war, here’s a suitably old song you may wish to learn:

The long and the short and the tall,

Bless all the Sergeants and WO1s,

Bless all the corp'rals and their bleedin' sons,

'Cos we're sayin' goodbye to 'em all.

As back to their billets they crawl,

You'll get no promotion this side of the ocean, so cheer up my lads, bless 'em all.”

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