Former ‘minister of common sense’ Ester McVey has been told to ‘get a grip’ after posting a Holocaust poem in response to the outdoor smoking ban.
Keir Starmer confirmed yesterday that his government is considering banning outdoor smoking in small parks, pub gardens and areas outside nightclubs, café terraces and hospital courtyards.
McVey posted on X the words of Martin Niemöller’s 1946 poem First They Came later that evening, describing them as: ‘Pertinent words re Starmer’s smoking ban.’
‘Then they came for the Jews. And I did not speak out,’ the poem goes. ‘Then they came for me. And there was no one left. To speak out for me.’
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, a centuries-old Jewish organisation, criticised McVey for quoting the poem to comment on a law on where people can smoke cigarettes.
‘The use of Martin Niemöller’s poem about the horrors of the Nazis to describe a potential smoking ban is an ill-considered and repugnant action,’ it said in a statement.
‘We would strongly encourage the MP for Tatton to delete her tweet and apologise for this breathtakingly thoughtless comparison.’
‘Tasteless. Utterly tasteless. How can you not see that?’ added Rabbi David Mason, the executive director of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, on X.
Wes Streeting, the Labour health secretary, was also among McVey’s other critics.
‘No, I do not think the postwar confessional of Martin Niemöller about the silent complicity of the German intelligentsia and clergy in the Nazi rise to power is pertinent to a Smoking Bill that was in your manifesto and ours to tackle one of the biggest killers,’ he replied over social media.
‘Get a grip.’
Labour Party chair Ellie Reeves called Mcvey’s post ‘grossly offensive from someone who sat at the Tory cabinet table just months ago’.
She urged Tory leader Rishi Sunak and all those running against him to condemn it.
As of this morning, McVey’s post is still on her X profile. She posted a second statement yesterday evening insisting she won’t take down the post anytime soon.
McVey said: ‘Nobody is suggesting that banning smoking outside pubs can be equated with what happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. It is ridiculous for anyone to even suggest that was what I was doing.
‘It is called an analogy – those who restrict freedoms start with easy targets then expand their reach.
‘I am pretty sure everyone understands the point I was making and knows that no offence was ever intended and that no equivalence was being suggested.”
She added: ‘I will not be bullied into removing a tweet by people who are deliberately twisting the meaning of my words and finding offence when they know none was intended.’
The former housing minister insisted on LBC this morning that she used the poem as it’s a ‘parable on the importance of standing up for others’ freedoms’.
Niemöller, a German protestant, led the church’s opposition to Adolf Hitler after initially welcoming him. After years of resisting the Nazi regime, he was thrown into the Sachsenhausen prison camp and later at Dachau concentration camp for eight years.
After American soldiers freed him from captivity in 1945, Niemöller became a powerful voice in describing the collective guilt his country felt for World War II.
He published First They Came to describe the silence of German highbrows and religious figures – including himself – as the Nazis soared to power.
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