From weakening democracies to soaring global debt, the parallels with the 1930s are unsettling. Without confronting the true scale of the economic crisis, politics will keep sliding towards the extremes, warns Guy Stenhouse

Time is short.

Is it just me or is rather a lot of today's world looking worryingly like the 1930s? A decade which did not end well.

Politically the centre ground is in retreat . Where once upon a time it was the National Socialists and the Communists fighting it out it is now the National Rally and La France Insoumise or the Greens and Reform. The traditional parties of government flounder.

It is not Austria that the biggest, strongest country fancies this time round it is Canada and it also greedily eyes not Czechoslovakia but Greenland.

In 2026 it's not thugs in brown shirts who beat up their opponents but an officer of the state who shoots an unarmed civilian who posed no threat to him. His masters say his actions were just fine. Watch it on TV and judge for yourself. Meanwhile in the same country the patently decent chairman of the central bank faces trumped up criminal charges.

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In the Middle East, under cover of a media blackout, a nasty and failing regime shoots hundreds of its citizens who dare to protest against it.

In 1938........

© Herald Scotland