I can hardly believe it but I’m defending Esther McVey over her use of Pastor Martin Niemoller’s “First They Came… ” poem in connection with Keir Starmer’s proposed smoking ban.

Apparently the Board of Deputies of British Jews is up in arms at McVile’s use of part of the poem on social media, to which she added, “Pertinent words re Starmer’s smoking ban.”

According to the BBC,

The Board of Deputies of British Jews called on the former cabinet minister to apologise for the “breathtakingly thoughtless comparison”.

The poem, which is about the silence of some Germans in the face of Nazi crimes, includes the lines: “Then they came for the Jews. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a Jew.”

In response to Ms McVey’s post, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said: “The use of Martin Niemoller’s poem about the horrors of the Nazis to describe a potential smoking ban is an ill-considered and repugnant action.

“We would strongly encourage the MP for Tatton to delete her tweet and apologise for this breathtakingly thoughtless comparison.”

In fact it isn’t.

The poem is not solely about the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany. It is about the fact that the Nazis abused their power to persecute anybody they felt like attacking. Socialists, trade unionists and Niemoller himself are also mentioned as victims in it.

This Writer has used the poem many times to highlight the way the former Tory governments of 2010-24 persecuted – to death – sick and disabled benefit claimants. Nobody criticised me for doing it.

And I find myself sympathising with McVile’s defence of her words: “It is called an analogy – those who restrict freedoms start with easy targets and expand their reach.”

That was exactly the reason I used the poem – the sick and disabled were easy targets, and the Tories soon expanded their activities to include EU citizens working in the UK, asylum-seekers fleeing persecution in their own countries, and protesters against Tory policies.

It could well be argued that Starmer is testing what UK citizens will accept, starting with an attack on people whose habit is almost universally considered to be vile, unhealthy and intrusive. Who will he attack next?

The only level on which McVile can reasonably be criticised is that of hypocrisy – the Tories were planning to ban smoking, limiting the ages at which it is possible to sell tobacco products to people so those born after a certain time would never be able to obtain them legally.

And of course a ban on smoking outside pubs, restaurants, sports grounds and hospitals would be impossible to enforce (I’m told by someone in the hospitality trade who knows how such things work). I may expand on this in another article.

So I find myself siding with my enemy on this – and only this – while at the same time wishing she had shown at least a fraction of this consideration to benefit claimants while she was a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions.

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