Mr Logue and Kazim Abbas sum up the History and Govenment & Politics trip to the House of Lords
The annual LBC A level politics trip to the House of Lords came early this year, falling on a cold night in early November. We left the college just after 5 and arrived in Westminster just after six. Security was tight, as usual and it was nearly seven by the time we took our seats in the chamber. This year’s topic of debate concerned the history of Germany across three distinct periods: the period following the unification of the German states from 1870 until the outbreak of World War One in 1914; the years of the Weimar Republic from 1919 until 1933 and the subsequent rise and fall of the Nazi Third Reich from 1933 until the end of World War Two. The three periods are representative of three distinct factions of Nationalism within the one country. The period from unification to World War One can be characterised as conservative nationalism, the Weimar Republic as Liberal Nationalism and that of the Third Reich as particularly repugnant variant of Expansionist Racialist nationalism. The speakers gave short introduction on the three periods and then the debate began in earnest. A number of respondents drew parallels between some of the rhetoric being deployed in the Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns and that of the early Nazi period and the need to be vigilant against these populist and intellectually vacuous sentiments. Others saw similarities between the effects of the Great Depression on the Weimar Republic and the crash of 2008 and its effects in the Anglo-American world.
