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Speaking as a German.
I grew up in a country where every history lesson, every memorial, every awkward family dinner eventually circles back to the same uncomfortable question: how did ordinary, decent people let it happen? How did a respectable European democracy slide, in barely a decade, into something that ended with six million Jewish lives extinguished, millions of others murdered alongside them, and a continent in ruins?
The answers are never simple. But the rhetoric — the rhetoric was never subtle. And it is the rhetoric I want to talk about, because I have heard this song before. 🚩
A certain Austrian gentleman (you know the one) and his party told their country a very specific story. Listen now to what is coming out of Reform UK and Nigel Farage. Not the policies. Not the personalities. Just the language.
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1. “The country is broken. The country has lost itself.”
Hitler, in his first radio address as Chancellor on 1 February 1933, told Germans they had been blinded by promises, had forgotten the highest values of their past, and — his exact words — that “the misery of our people is terrible”. (Source: Facing History archive, Hitler’s first radio address) Facing History
Nigel Farage on Twitter, December 2022: “Britain is broken.” In Blackpool, June 2024, he expanded: nothing works any more, the country is in cultural decline, “we’ve begun to forget who we are”. (Source: ITN/Reuters reporting of Farage’s Blackpool speech) Xonenewspage
Same key. Different decade.
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2. “We are being invaded by foreigners.”
Hitler, addressing the Reichstag in January 1939, declared “Germany to the Germans” and said the nation must prevent the settlement on its soil of a strange people. (Source: Yad Vashem, transcript of Hitler’s Reichstag speech, 30 January 1939) Yad Vashem
Reform UK, August 2025, Oxford Airport: Farage said Britain was undergoing “an invasion” and described asylum seekers as a national security threat. April 2026, Reform’s own home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf: a Reform government will “reverse the invasion of Britain”. (Source: World Socialist Web Site reporting Farage’s Oxford Airport speech; GB News on Reform’s deportation plan) World Socialist Web SiteGB News
Same key. Different decade.
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3. “The establishment has betrayed you.”
Hitler, at his 1924 trial, called the surrender of 1918 “a stab in the back of the German nation” — Germany, he said, had not really lost; the army had been betrayed by Jews, leftists and the Weimar elites. This single myth, repeated and repeated, did more than perhaps any other to bring him to power. (Source: Alpha History, transcript of Hitler’s 1924 trial speech) Alpha History
Farage, August 2025, on the grooming gangs scandal: “The establishment has failed”. The drumbeat is constant: ordinary Britons have been sold out by Westminster, by the courts, by the police, by an entire metropolitan class. (Source: Wikipedia, “Political positions of Nigel Farage”) Wikipedia
Same key. Different decade.
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4. “The country must awaken. We are taking it back.”
Hitler at the Berlin Sportspalast, addressing the SA and SS: “Germany has now awakened”. The nation, he told them, was the master of its own destiny again. (Source: USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia film archive) Holocaust Encyclopedia
Farage at the Reform conference, 2024 — his line which has since been painted across every Reform rally and bus: “Britain is broken… Britain needs reform”. Take our country back. (Source: The Spectator’s report on Farage’s Reform conference speech) spectator
Same key. Different decade.
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I am not saying these men are the same. I am not saying Reform UK is the NSDAP. I am saying — and I cannot be quiet about this, because my country knows what comes next — the speeches are written in the same key.
And we know how that key ends.
🇩🇪 Germans know it in our bones. We have spent eighty years apologising. Every schoolchild visits a camp. Every family, sooner or later, has the conversation. Every public building has a plaque. There is no statute of limitations on what our grandparents allowed, and there will not be one in eighty years’ time either.
So I have to ask, neighbour to neighbour:
Have we really learned nothing? 😞
Do British voters truly want to spend the next eighty years apologising the way Germany has had to? Because that is the road. It always starts politely. It starts with “just asking questions” and “concerns about immigration” and a respectable suit and a friendly smile. It never announces itself with jackboots. By the time it does, it is too late.
It is much, much easier to say no to this rhetoric now — while it still wears the suit and the smile — than to spend a lifetime explaining it to your grandchildren. 🇩🇪🇬🇧Apologies for the cut and paste. The lady that wrote this was born in Germany and now lives in Scotland.
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I crawled on six crooked highwaysPurwell that just made me cry.
I’m currently reeading If This Is A Man – Primo Levi – and again, I’m not by any means saying it will be like this here, but I have deep worries anyway.
Purwell, you have every reason to be concerned. In the 1950’s when I was young I asked my father how any population could support someone as evil as Hitler. My father replied saying, “it could easily happen here son.”
The only part of the country that has fallen for Farage’s nonsense is those who are under privileged and poor. This statement is based on May’s election results. Any sensible government could squash Reform by introducing a fair taxation system. After all when Income tax was introduced it was based on ability to pay
“The only part of the country that has fallen for Farage’s nonsense is those who are under privileged and poor.”
This simply isn’t true. While the majority of Reform’s supporters are from less affluent areas, there are plenty of wealthy individuals who back them for their “Thatcherism on steroids” approach to deregulation and taxation.
Billionaires aren’t bankrolling Farage in order to help the working man.
My Reform voting friend is rich. Very. From a very affluent area. And my father in law is more than comfortable, again from an affluent area.
Reform voters spread far and wide, across society.
You have to look at the variety of council seats they won last week.Looking at the political map across the UK it’s stark how there’s no uniform spread of party preference like ‘the old days’, which made polling easy.
Now, it’s quite likely Reform could grab 300 seats with no more than 28% of the popular vote. Add in 30 or 40 Right-wing Tories, plus a few Ulster Unionists and there’s your next government.
“Reform voters spread far and wide, across society.”
Indeed. Racism isn’t limited to any particular socioeconomic group. Nor is stupidity.
The only part of the country that has fallen for Farage’s nonsense is those who are under privileged and poor.
The 6 County Councils that voted – Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hampshire, West Sussex and East Sussex – all broadly in the well-to-do southeast were all lost by the Conservatives thanks to large gains by Reform: sufficiently large in Suffolk and Essex for Reform to gain control, and the others to NOC.
Which rather puts paid to the idea that Reform only figured in areas that are ‘under privileged and poor’
My Reform voting friend is rich. Very. From a very affluent area.
And every single one of them is far closer to lying in a shop doorway using a cardboard box as a pillow than they are to being one of the billionaires who are the only people Farage and chums care about.
“Farage and chums”
Farage and funding friends is both more alliterative and accurate.
As predicted, Reform councillors dropping like flies already, mostly due to racism. All that public money that could be used to care for your grandparents or educating your child with additional needs now being spent on entirely avoidable council by-elections. I thought Reform were going to cut the waste?
As an outsider looking in……..
Why has Reform gained so much traction?
Please don’t give me the ‘people are stupid, uneducated, poor, underprivileged’ reasoning, because it must run far deeper and broader than that.
Just finished reading If This Is A Man. Could only bear to read 2 chapters per day.
In my humble opinion, this should be compulsory reading for everyone. Everyone.
If dithering about where to place your vote, read this book.So Farage wasn’t there for the state opening of parliament because he went to a Republican convention in America. Why isn’t this on the front page of every newspaper? What do his ‘patriotic’ supporters think of that?
There is doubt about that Moehat,
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I crawled on six crooked highways
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