Peer slammed for comparing Brexiters to ‘brownshirts’

The Board of Deputies has warned politicians to steer clear of Nazi comparisons after former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown compared Conservative supporters of Brexit to Hitler’s paramilitaries.

In a tweet, Lord Ashdown said “the Tory Brexit brownshirts are stirring,” alluding to the party’s upcoming conference, and later downplayed the remarks, saying critics were over-reacting to what he termed “brownshirt-gate”.

In response to complaints about his language, which one Tory MP said was “disgusting,” Ashdown wrote: “Even allowing for these over-heated times, do we really have to lose contact with the concept of the metaphor?”

However a spokesperson for the Board of Deputies was not amused, saying: “We call on politicians to exercise extreme caution before making Nazi and Holocaust comparisons.”

It comes after Labour’s own inquiry into anti-Semitism in the Left recommended that “Labour members resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel-Palestine in particula