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  • In what way can Boris Johnson possibly

  • be compared to Joseph Goebbels?

  • Obviously, Boris Johnson is not a Nazi

  • in any way, shape, or form.

  • But the astonishing thing is that Goebbels,

  • in a quite well-known speech in 1933,

  • said that the new German state was

  • one in which the will of the people

  • could be executed by the government

  • without the interference, the unnecessary interference,

  • of parliament.

  • That's what made this new order, in a sense, really democratic.

  • It's a direct expression of the popular will.

  • And extraordinarily, since the referendum,

  • that is the way many have spoken,

  • and now the prime minister himself has spoken in that way.

  • And indeed he's acted on it.

  • He's tried to remove parliament's involvement

  • in the process of resolving Brexit.

  • He has rejected, or at least argued fiercely against,

  • the Supreme Court's intervention in that,

  • and he now plans an election whose campaign,

  • whose theme is the people as expressed in the referendum

  • against parliament.

  • And this is an extraordinary transformation

  • of British political discourse, and in my view very dangerous.

  • Well, it's happened because the referendum

  • has injected a new element into our constitution.

  • Parliament necessarily is involved

  • in implementing the referendum, but it

  • can't agree on how to do so, and there is really

  • no mandate for what is emerging as the fallback position, which

  • is a no-deal Brexit, which is what they're now fighting over.

  • We've unleashed demons here which

  • are likely to be with us for many years.

In what way can Boris Johnson possibly

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