That was the date in 1932 on which the last free interbella elections were held in Germany. It was also the last chance to stop the Nazis, who had lost much of their earlier support.
The NASDP was still on course to score heavily, but a bloc of the Socialists and the Communists could have it outvoted. The Nazis knew it, and their diary entries at the time were suicidal – they were bankrupt and, if they lost, they would never be able to launch another electoral bid. Time for a bottle of schnapps, a revolver and a farewell note to the liebschen.
The forecasts were accurate. Conservatives led by Hindenburg came in first, but the old man was on his last legs, and everyone knew it. The SPD and the KPD together did receive 1.5 million more votes than the Nazis. Yet the Nazis were still ahead because the two Left parties weren’t together.
The socialists, by far the larger party, had sought a bloc with the communists. Had they succeeded, it’s almost certain that the Second World War would have been prevented.
Alas, while the SPD was an independent party, the KPD wasn’t. It was Stalin’s puppet, and Stalin’s plans didn’t include a peaceful Germany. He wanted the Nazis to take over the country and use her as what Lenin had called “the icebreaker of the revolution”.
He knew a Nazi Germany would attack the West sooner or later, with the war exhausting both sides whatever the outcome. Stalin would then ride in on his white steed and take over a ruined Europe. What was Lenin’s fantasy could become Stalin’s reality, and he wasn’t about to throw it away.
So the KPD was told to forget any blocs. Its leader, Ernst Thälmann, obeyed the order, thereby eventually buying himself a one-way ticket to Buchenwald, where he was killed in 1944. The Nazis seized power in 1933 and, well, you know the rest.
Far be it from me to compare Britain circa 2024 with Germany circa 1932: the differences are too obvious to mention. No British party, whatever its parliamentary majority, is likely to create anything near the catastrophe that befell Germany and the rest of the world back in the 1930s. However, there also exist some similarities, and these aren’t too obvious to mention.
Our ruling party, Labour, is enjoying a vast parliamentary majority delivered to it by Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system conspiring with the mind-numbing incompetence of the Conservative Party.
Fundamentally, the latter springs from the Conservatives’ disavowal of conservative policies, abandonment of conservative principles and, as a result, forfeiture of conservative competence in matters economic. Essentially, the Tory Party had become Labour Lite, and there was always the danger that the public would opt for Labour Full Strength.
When in the previous general election, Labour fielded a rank communist, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Tories countered with charismatic Boris Johnson, that outcome was deferred for a few years. However, it couldn’t be prevented.
The Tories ditched Johnson, who really didn’t have much except charisma going for himself. They eventually replaced him with Sunak who was much less appealing without being much more conservative. Labour, on the other hand, came to its senses, replaced Corbyn with Starmer, who knew how to make bogus moderate noises, and won by a landslide.
Having done so, they took the support of about 20 per cent of the electorate for a ringing mandate and immediately began to drive the country on the road to destruction. The mighty Tory Party has been reduced to a rump faction unable to provide genuine opposition.
It owes some of its misfortune to the emergence of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party that cost the Tories some 100 parliamentary seats. Had they kept those 100 seats, they still would have lost, but by a smaller margin. That would have enabled them to put some brakes on Labour’s drive to the precipice and also to harbour some hopes of resurgence.
Like the German Left in the 1930s, the British Right (if the Tories qualify as such) was split and ready for plucking. However, whatever mess Labour will create over the next five years, it’s far from certain that either the Tories or Reform will be able to oust Starmer on their own.
The Reform Party is trying to appeal to the conservative spirit of the British people, but that spirit has largely evaporated. Nigel Farage’s key message is immigration, which he wants to reduce to a barely noticeable minimum. That strikes a chord with much of the electorate, but single-issue parties hardly ever form governments.
Farage knows it too, which is why he harmonises his main theme with secondary subjects, lower taxes and defence. These traditional Tory policies also appeal to many voters, and they sound good to most.
However, once the echoes of the sound have died out, scrutiny will start. To get to the target of three percent of GDP, our defence budget will have to grow by about £30 billion. Lowering tax revenue even by a modest 10 per cent would shave some £82 billion off the Exchequer’s receipts. We are looking at what Labour politicians call a budget hole, to the tune of at least £112 billion. How will Farage fill it?
I hope he has a plan, but somehow I doubt it. But even if he does, sound economics dictates a sweeping reduction in spending across the board, starting with social projects and proceeding to blaspheme against the sainted NHS.
In other words, the only proven way of achieving the targets of Reform’s rhetoric would be to pursue the whole raft of conservative policies, trying to boost economic growth and hence tax revenue. However, I’m not convinced the British public has an appetite for going conservative to that extent. Decades of rabid socialist propaganda have produced the intended corrupting effect.
Thus one would think that a merger, or at least an electoral bloc, of Reform and Labour Lite, aka the Tories, would dilute conservatism to a point where our brainwashed and dumbed-down electorate would find it palatable. However, just like the Left parties of Germany’s past, I can’t see any rapprochement between the two Right-ish parties of Britain’s present.
Farage has already declared he’d never agree to any bloc with the Tories, and I think he means it. After many years of trying, he has finally gained a seat in the Commons, as a leader of a small but up-and-coming party. Reform will never become king, but it could well become king maker, thus gaining power beyond its numbers.
At the same time, Mr Farage barely conceals his contempt for the wishy-washy Tories, who have delivered the country to raving Lefties in moderate clothing. That feeling is enthusiastically reciprocated, what with the Tory mandarins, federasts almost to a man, hating Farage for the role he played in Brexit.
The last time we had an electoral bloc was in 2010, when Cameron and Clegg brought together the Tories and the LibDems. However, the two parties were much closer together: politically, Cameron and Clegg were dizygotic if not quite identical twins. Even so, the alliance was short-lived.
Whoever is elected to lead the Tories in the on-going free for all will still be Labour Lite and hence opposed to everything Farage stands for. Then again, either leader would rather be the big man in a small pond, even if the pond ends up the size of a puddle. The leader’s chair would be too small to accommodate two egos.
I do hope the two parties will find some arrangement they could live with, for without it the harrowing prospect looms of Labour running unopposed for a generation, to devastating effect.
Study late-Weimar German history, chaps, would be my advice. You may learn that, unless you hang together… well, you won’t hang separately, like Thälmann. But neither will you win, and all of us will end up losers.