Why Reform's critics say they're fascist

To smear your opponents as fascists or Nazis has always been the perennial temptation of those who seek to terminate an argument – or have no argument of their own. It’s the last resort of the callow, the ignorant and the desperate. And it’s an argument that just won’t go away.

They’re doing this – and McDonnell is joining in – because it’s the last thing they’ve got left

Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell deployed it in all tawdry gruesomeness yesterday. Speaking at a fringe event at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference, the MP said: ‘Reform are a protest fascist organisation. We’ve seen it in the Thirties. What they do, they have a demagogue speaking for them, they target a particular group, in the Thirties in Germany it would have been the Jews, here it is asylum seekers.’