Captain_Plat_2258 recently in the Independent tried to ‘educate’ me and imply I had been tricked by Nazi propaganda.

The Labour Party have been acting hysterically over social media for the last few days because, shock horror, the third largest party in this country would not sit silently whilst called racist and far-right. First I shall explore the so-called ‘far-right’ in the UK and across Europe, and then I shall tackle the claims raised by Labour on Nazi Germany.

The most famous far-right party in the UK is the BNP. Nick Griffin’s BNP believed in the nationalisation of numerous industries and adopted protectionism into the party platform, thus firmly rejecting economic liberalism. The BNP has also called for the “subordination of the power of the City to the power of the government”. The BNP were heavy opponents of privatisation and used slogans such as “Public service, not corporate profit”. Now these are words you would expect to hear out of the Shadow Chancellors mouth. The BNP were firmly economically interventionist. The BNP, like most fascist parties, were collectivist in nature, and if anyone picks up the BNP manifesto or reads their economic policy, they will find it has far more in common with the Labour Party than the LPUK. The BNP claims “the other parties are enslaved to laissez-faire globalism”. Collectivism,nationalisation and intervention are the antithesis of our beliefs.

Looking over across the pond, Marine Le Penn is often labelled as ‘far-right’, and when you look at her economic platform, you once again see that it is interventionist. During the presidential campaign, Le Pen promised to maintain the 35-hour work week, lower the retirement age to 60, establish a purchasing-power bonus for people earning less than €1,500 per month, nationalise the highways and to reduce the price of gas, electricity and train journeys by 5 percent. She was an economic interventionist in comparison to Macron, who on the whole was an economic liberal. A common trend of far-right parties is to have heavily interventionist economic policies and to deny this fact is to display economic illiteracy.

Now, I will note I never compared the Labour Party to the Nazi party, but their MP’s and members are always looking for a strawman and another political point to score so they can virtue signal and stand on the moral high ground. Recently, a Labour member published a link claiming they were ‘educating’ me on Nazi economics. In short, it argued that the Nazis loved private property and launched a wave of privatisation, and therefore did not have a left wing economic programme.The privatisation was “applied within a framework of increasing control of the state over the whole economy through regulation and political interference,” as laid out in the 1933 Act for the Formation of Compulsory Cartels.The Nazis instituted major public works projects such as the Autobahn, promised full employment, and dramatically increased government spending. Joseph Goebbels in a propaganda leaflet for the Nazis stated:





I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must. Only the annihilation of a system of exploitation carries with it the core of the rebirth of our people. Joseph Goebbels

The Nazis were disdainful of capitalism. The Nazi government did not own the means of production in Germany, but they certainly controlled them. They set up control boards, cartels, and state-sponsored monopolies which they then carefully planned and regulated.

Private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis, the actual ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. It was the German government that decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid. Market exchange did not exist in Nazi Germany.

The idea that the Nazis were some sort of free market cult is nonsense, and the idea that they were right wing economically is laughable.

The Nazis on the whole adopted Keynesian economic policy, with Keynes himself implicitly admiring their programme:





“[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.”

John Maynard Keynes



Proto-Keynesians such as Joan Robinson claimed “Hitler found a cure to employment before Keynes was finished explaining it” Hitler adopted Keynesian economic policy. I would encourage people to read the 25 point plan of the national socialists in 1920 and tell me that they are somehow free market capitalists. Mussolini referred to the economics of John Maynard Keynes as a “useful introduction to fascist economics”, and he argued that fascism entirely agreed with Keynes, a statement clearly proven by the massive interventionist programme in fascist Italy, but for the purpose of time I won’t dive into that in this article.

Friederch Hayek was absolutely right when he described national socialism and socialism as having common routes in central planning and empowering the state over the individual. Labour are now on their high horses over their poorly put together article, which does not understand nuance and conveniently omits many facts and creates strawman arguments.

u/friedmanite19 is the Leader of the Libertarian Party United Kingdom and is the MP for Somerset and Bristol.