I wrote about how Reform UK’s rhetoric is being written, theme by theme, in the same key as the speeches my country spent eighty years apologising for. I did not expect to be back this quickly with another instalment — but here we are.
Last Sunday — May 3rd, 2026 — Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf announced a new policy on social media. Read the words slowly. They matter. Every German child has read words like these before, in school, precisely so that no one would ever read words like them again.
Let me put two press announcements side by side.
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK, May 2026:
In order to deport all illegal migrants from Britain, Yusuf said, Reform will need to “detain tens of thousands at a time”. The migrants “will not be able to leave” these detention centres. They will be held there until they are removed. (Source: HuffPost UK and Nation.Cymru reporting Yusuf’s video announcement, May 2026) Huffington PostNation.Cymru
And then Yusuf added the part that froze my blood. The detention centres will be sited politically. Reform-voting areas will not get one. Green-controlled areas will: “if you vote Green, there’s a good chance you will” get a detention centre near you, he said — a “democratic exercise.” Former Conservative Treasury minister Simon Clarke called this what it is: siting detention centres as political punishment of voters who chose the wrong party. (Source: Left Foot Forward and HuffPost UK on the announcement and the cross-party reaction) Left Foot Forward
Heinrich Himmler, SS Police President of Munich, 20 March 1933:
At a press conference held barely a month after the Nazis came to power, and three days before the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, Himmler announced the opening of “the first concentration camp”, at Dachau. Capacity 5,000. The people held there would be Communists, Social Democrats and others designated as threats to “the security of the state.” They could not, Himmler explained, be left in ordinary prisons — too many of them, the system would be overburdened. And they could not be released — they would simply go back to organising. So they had to be concentrated in a camp. (Source: Alpha History archive of Himmler’s 20 March 1933 press release) Alpha History
Now read those two announcements again. Slowly.
🔻 Both are press releases.
🔻 Both announce the construction of new mass-detention infrastructure.
🔻 Both explain that ordinary prisons are not enough — too many people, the numbers are too big.
🔻 Both target a specific designated group: in 1933, “enemies of the state”; in 2026, “illegal migrants.”
🔻 Both make clear that the inmates cannot leave.
🔻 Both are spoken in the calm, bureaucratic tone of an administrator describing a logistics problem.
And in 2026, with eighty years of hindsight available to him, Yusuf has added a refinement Himmler did not openly attempt at his Munich press conference: the detention centres will be deliberately located in the constituencies of political opponents. Sold as “democratic consent.” Acknowledged across party lines as political punishment.
I am, again, not saying Reform UK is the NSDAP. I am not saying Zia Yusuf is Heinrich Himmler.
I am saying this. When a senior politician of a major UK party stands up and announces, in calm administrative tones, that his government will build new mass detention centres for tens of thousands of people, that the inmates will not be permitted to leave, and that the centres will be deliberately sited in areas that voted the wrong way — and when this provokes barely a ripple in the British political conversation….
…then a German woman watching from a quiet lodge in Aberdeenshire is allowed to say: we know this language. We have read these press releases before. Every schoolchild in my country was made to read them, precisely so that nobody would ever again read them without recognising what they were.
I will say this as plainly as I know how, as a German, to my British neighbours.
In 1933, ordinary, decent Germans read announcements very much like Yusuf’s in their morning papers. Most of them did not march. Most of them did not cheer. Most of them simply turned the page and got on with their day, because the language was calm and the numbers were administrative and the politicians wore suits and the targets were a small unpopular group that, frankly, most people were not minded to defend.
That is exactly how it happens. Not with a roar. With a shrug.
So please — I am asking, not preaching — do not turn this page. Do not let “detain tens of thousands” become a sentence the British political class is allowed to say in a press release without the country sitting bolt upright. Do not let “if you vote Green, there’s a good chance” become a normal way for a senior politician to talk to voters. Once that line is crossed quietly, it is very, very hard to walk back. My country knows. We are still walking it back. Eighty years on, and we are still walking it back.
