Mayor of London condemns US president as ‘poster boy for white nationalism’ and Boris Johnson as ‘ever more rightwing’

The lessons of the second world war risk being forgotten because of the rise of “extreme” rightwing leaders such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London has said.

Before events to mark the start of the conflict 80 years ago, when Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Sadiq Khan has branded Trump as “the global poster boy for white nationalism”, whose example is being followed by too many leaders across Europe, including Johnson.

Writing in the Observer, Khan says Johnson and the Brexit party leader Nigel Farage are promoting similar far-right thinking in this country, and showing contempt for the European Union, which was established to prevent another world war after up to 85 million people died between 1939 and 1945.

“The impact can also be seen in the UK, where the outsize influence of Nigel Farage and his Brexit party has pushed the Conservative party under Boris Johnson to become ever more rightwing and intolerant,” he says.

Referring to Johnson’s decision last week to shut down parliament for five weeks before the 31 October Brexit deadline, Khan says: “Just last week we saw the disdain Boris Johnson has for parliament and our democracy.” The London mayor’s intervention is the latest in his extraordinary feud with the US president, whose language he compared to that of a “20th-century fascist” in the run-up to Trump’s state visit to the UK in June.

Trump responded before landing in the UK on Air Force One with a vitriolic counter-tirade, accusing Khan of being a “stone-cold loser” who “by all accounts has done a terrible job as mayor of London [and] has been foolishly ‘nasty’ to the visiting president of the United States”. Trump also said the mayor should concentrate on tackling crime in London, rather than attacking the leader of the United States.

Trump has regularly questioned the value of Nato and voiced strong support for Johnson’s determination that the UK should turn its back on the EU

Khan, who this weekend is visiting Gdansk – where some of the first shots of the war were fired – and the Polish capital, Warsaw, adds: “While I am not saying that we are reliving the 1930s or that another conflict is inevitable, alarm bells should be sounding. However, if we act now we can ensure another path is taken.”

He says Poland faces “similar threats” under the ruling rightwing Law and Justice party, which “has allowed ‘LGBTQ+ free zones’ to be declared in more than 30 towns and cities.” In a “particularly worrying development,” he says, “the Polish government – at a time when antisemitism is on the rise – recently sought to make it a criminal offence, carrying jail time, to accuse the nation of complicity in Nazi war crimes.”

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Trump has regularly questioned the value of Nato and voiced strong support for Johnson’s determination that the UK should turn its back on the EU, saying he believes the new UK leader will be a “great” prime minister who will chart the country on a new course of independence and economic success.

The president had been due to attend an anniversary event in Warsaw this weekend to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the war’s outbreak, but cancelled last week, citing concerns over Hurricane Dorian, a category 4 storm that is barrelling towards Florida. Mike Pence, the vice-president, will attend in his place.