This is a good lesson in how not to debate the European Union
It’s not every morning you see political extremism of a kind the prime minister often warns about plastered on the front of a newspaper.
Yet this morning’s Telegraph manages to serve up a slogan straight from the 1930s in today’s gripping headline:
‘Britain First’ is not only the name of a neo-fascist group of ex-British National Party types currently filling the market hole provided by that party’s implosion.
It also featured in the masthead of The Blackshirt, a newspaper produced by Oswald Mosely’s Nazi-supporting British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.
The slogan was later nabbed by the America First Committee in the United States, whose spokesman Charles Lindbergh famously accused ‘the Jewish’ of trying to drag America into World War II.
It’s worth noting that the phrase ‘Britain first’ or ‘Time to put Britain first again’ does not appear anywhere in the Telegraph’s story – not in the quotes, nor in the related article by Joe Foster, co-founder of Reebok and funder of the ‘Out’ campaign in the coming EU referendum.
Yet there it is in the Telegraph’s front page headline, in quotation marks.
One hopes the paper was not aware of its sordid historic and present associations.
As the prime minister meets with German chancellor Angela Merkel today to discuss EU reforms, campaigners on all sides should take note:
Recycling a fascist slogan, consciously or otherwise, is the worst possible way to debate membership of the European Union.
And if this is the only way to express your argument, perhaps there is something rotten about it.
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Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
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26 Responses to “‘Britain First’: Telegraph recycles fascist slogan with terrible history”
Dark_Heart_of_Toryland
What is it that you’ve got against education? And has it not occurred to you that the readership of the Telegraph is predominantly white and middle class?
Henry Page
The only hysterical nonsense is your comment. May I suggest that you look at the number of conflicts between what are now the EU states from 1800 to 1945 and then look at the period 1946 to 2015. Churchill certainly believed it, even if you don’t (or don’t want to). Go to this web page: http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/astonish.html
CJW111
Corbyn and Mosely, ideological bedfellows.
Serf
It’s time to put people first and this means a total ban on any and all future unaccountable, unfair, undemocratic, secretive and authoritarian agreements in the form of TISA (Trade In Services Agreement), TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), CETA being an agreement between Canada and EU.
TISA, TTIP, TPP and CETA allow multinational corporations, private companies and the rich ruling elite to sue nation states, organisations and people for failing to open up public services to private business and the market as this prevents the private sector from generating immense private profits from the taxpayer and government subsidies. Governments and other public service providers that want to provide and maintain publicly funded and accountable public services such as nationalised industries and transport, postal services and publicly funded healthcare such as NHS and welfare state will be forbidden from keeping these services publicly funded and controlled by TISA, TTIP, TPP and CETA.
Global trade agreements such as TISA, TTIP, TPP and CETA are secret, unaccountable and are permanently binding without any democratic oversight or public participation. TISA, TTIP, TPP and CETA and other agreements of this type are also against the continued provision of basic human rights such as access to clean safe drinking water. The EU parliament fully supports TISA, TTIP, TPP and CETA and therefore the only way for people in the UK to avoid this is to vote to leave the EU (Brexit) and then to elect a government that that will not agree to TISA, TTIP, TPP and CETA.
John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are globalists that fully support the EU, TISA, TTIP, TPP and CETA and have been responsible for 18 of 36 years of the neoliberal policies of Thatcherism, privatisation, deregulation, market forces and reduced welfare state.
https://leftfootforward.org/2015/09/has-the-ceta-free-trade-deal-run-into-more-trouble/
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/if-youre-worried-about-ttip-then-you-need-to-know-about-ceta-a6671886.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/what-is-ttip-and-six-reasons-why-the-answer-should-scare-you-9779688.html
http://www.world-psi.org/en/issue/TISA
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[…] years of uncertainty will only add to its arsenal of blaring headlines urging the populace to put Britain First . In the current context, continuous stable international institution-based economic growth and […]