EUROPE: Campaign has echoes of Nazis

The Leave campaign, for me, has echoes of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Then, suffering under massive austerity, the German government sought to deflect people’s anger onto a vulnerable minority – people who were escaping persecution. This policy led directly to the Holocaust.

Now we find that as a result of the Government’s austerity programme, more and more people are disaffected and being driven into poverty as the gap between rich and poor becomes greater and greater.

By concentrating on immigration, the Leave campaign has tapped into the anger and alienation felt by those affected and directed them to another vulnerable minority – migrants.

They are people who come over and ‘take our jobs and get our houses’. I believe that the Government’s obsession with the wrong deficit has led directly to the Leave vote.

I am told that the number of pensioners in this country already exceeds the number of people in work and we desperately need young working people, ie migrants, to redress the balance.

This situation can only get worse as the lives of pensioners are continually being extended and it is becoming clear that future governments will not be able to afford the costs of their pensions, especially if there is only a small working population.

Hence the Government’s current policy on making people work longer (and longer) before they can claim their pension.

We are told that in a few decades, people will simply not have the option of retiring and yet we are doing our best to prevent younger potential workers from entering this country.

George Osborne has already announced that a Leave vote will lead to even more austerity and we know that as a result of this the divide between the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have-nots’ will be even greater. Still, we can always blame it on the immigrants!

So, as a result of this Government’s obsession with austerity, Cameron and his supporters have been ‘Hoist with their own petard’.

But, of course, every cloud has a silver lining. It looks as though many of the senior bankers (the architects of our financial misfortunes) will now be re-located to other European cities as London slowly loses its eminence in the financial world.

MJ Tuckwell

Farriers Rise

Shilbottle