Some of you may be familiar with a controversial and increasingly far-right blogger, based in Somerset, and known almost universally as "Stew". In spite of being such an enormous distance away, he actually supported Scottish independence during the 2014 referendum, but has since had a change of heart as his views have drifted back to the right, and at both of the last two major national elections in 2021 and 2024 he instructed his readers to vote against independence. More recently, he has become particularly drawn to Nigel Farage's party Reform UK - logical enough, given the huge overlap between his own views and those of Reform. But somehow he can't quite bring himself to admit yet that he intends to endorse Reform at next May's Holyrood election. Presumably he feels he still has a lot of work to do to get the choreography just right as he gets ready to 'spontaneously' announce: "you know what, alert readers, I could NEVER have imagined getting to this point, but I don't think we've got much CHOICE but to vote Reform".
In a blogpost on Wednesday, I pointed out that Stew's passion for Farage is the love that dare not speak its name, and that in order to prepare the ground for endorsing Reform while not actually doing so yet, he is tying himself up in knots with absurd arguments such as: "it's important to stop Reform, and to do that other parties must adopt Reform's policy programme in full, because it's excellent, and they must actively celebrate Farage's electoral successes because Reform is a lawful party in a democracy". On the latter point specifically, I noted that the Nazi party was also a lawful party in a democracy at the point at which it took power, and on Stew's logic we would be required to 'celebrate' that.
I'm very honoured that Stew took a brief break from his round-the-clock bullying of people with gender dysphoria to respond to me.
Heck of a debate, that one.
— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) October 31, 2025
PROPOSITION 1: Political parties should attempt to offer the electorate something worth voting for.
PROPOSITION 2: We should ban political parties that are supported by large sections of the population but we don’t like. [definition of “we” TBA] pic.twitter.com/MAdFoG8MLG
But, y’know, wow. “The Weimar government should have banned parties it didn’t like, in order to prevent the rise of a party that, er, banned parties it didn’t like!”
— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) October 31, 2025
Become the Nazis to beat the Nazis. Genius.
Well, it's true that one feature of Nazism was the banning of other political parties, but it was scarcely the only feature or even the defining feature. There were also things like the systematic extermination of entire ethnic groups, and the military conquest of almost an entire continent. When people pose the question of whether the Weimar authorities should have banned the Nazis, they specifically do it due to their knowledge that the failure to prevent Hitler seizing power unleashed both genocide and the deadliest global conflict in human history, and that averting those outcomes should have been an absolute imperative.
I've made clear any number of times on this blog that I am not inclined to favour the banning of political parties, and that I regard the tendency of countries like Spain to go down that road as difficult to reconcile with democratic principles. But given the uniquely catastrophic consequences of Nazi rule, and given that Hitler was open about at least some of his intentions when he stood for election, it's pretty extraordinary to see the sheer casualness with which Stew mockingly dismisses anyone who even raises the question of whether the Nazis should have been banned (either on the grounds of racial hatred against many of Germany's own citizens, or because they wanted to dismantle the democratic system they were participating in).
For what it's worth, I think my own answer to that question would probably be no. I think the Nazis did need to be blocked from seizing control at all costs, but probably the way to do that was by addressing the weaknesses in the Weimar constitution that Hitler exploited, in particular the provisions governing states of emergency. Stew, by contrast, is so untroubled by genocide and global catastrophe that he doesn't seem to think there was any great imperative to stop the Nazi rise to power, and his only answer to victims of the Holocaust and the tens of millions who died in a needless world war seems to be: "sorry, chaps, but it was the Social Democrats' fault, they should have run on a manifesto more attractive to Nazi voters". Well, I'm sure that's an enormous comfort to everyone, Stew, particularly bearing in mind that the only manifesto that would have been attractive to Nazi voters is one that adopted Nazi policies - and be in no doubt that's exactly what Stew is getting at, because it's bang in line with his argument in the present day that mainstream parties should adopt Reform policies in order to 'stop' Reform, thus largely defeating the purpose of the exercise.
Perhaps Stew could clarify precisely which Nazi policies he thinks the democratic German parties should have embraced in order to become more attractive to Nazi voters. And perhaps he could also let us know whether he has sufficient self-awareness to spot the galactic levels of irony in his claim that those who disagree with him want to "become the Nazis to beat the Nazis".
Elsewhere, Stew also responded to the comment I made about his fanboy enthusiasm for Farage's policy on the climate emergency, although if anyone can make head or tail of this one, you're doing better than me -
“But if the world was arranged completely differently to how it actually is, my point wouldn’t be total p***!” pic.twitter.com/lnwdi2VHl4
— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) October 31, 2025
Eh? I was talking about the world as it's actually arranged - one in which Scotland as a nation of five million people has to take responsibility for the climate emergency in proportion to its population size, and one in which a failure of countries to take responsibility in proportion to their population size will result in a global failure to tackle the climate emergency at all. But I can hardly put it more eloquently than one of the commenters on Stew's own blog -
"'Scotland’s contribution to climate change is so infinitesimally small that nothing we do can possibly make any difference'
How nearly true. Just like the contribution to society made by me paying taxes is so infinitesimally small that it could not possibly make any difference.
And I’ve recently read a novel set in Yorkshire during WW2, in which the main character’s father 'did his bit', as I understand the saying was. His own contribution was so infinitesimally small that it could not possibly have made any difference.
In fact every such contribution makes a very slight difference. The combination of everyone’s contribution makes a noticeable difference."
* .* .*
