Those who believe in liberalism must now fight for it
I’m conscious that, just as the easiest way to lose an argument is to mention Hitler, so the easiest way to lose journalistic credibility is to invoke the 1930s. Yet the similarities to our own dismal decade are now too numerous to ignore. There is the same collection of morbid symptoms: the rise of strongmen, the collapse of the political centre, the intellectual organisation of political hatreds. Even more worryingly, there is the same sense of hurtling towards global conflagration. The similarities begin with the disintegration of the international order. In the 1920s and 1930s, order collapsed because Britain no longer had the economic might to continue as the global
