Decision time again

The appeal illustrated above dates from the early 1940s. It is salutory to recall that only a few years earlier there had been even within England voices striking a discordant note. In1938 the Daily Mail had quoted a London magistrate worried about immigration as saying: 

“The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in 

from every port in this country is becoming an outrage.”

Almost eight decades have passed since then, and seven since just after the end of the war Clement Attlee, the Leader of the Labour Party, said “I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum, which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and Fascism. 

The lessons of history have... alas... not been learned.