On March 23, 1933, shortly after becoming Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler surrounded the German parliament (Reichstag) with SS troops and hounded the deputies into voting for a bill called the Enabling Act.

It gave him emergency powers to pass laws without consulting the parliament for four years.

But in practice that turned into 12 years, and I don't need to tell you how it ended.

In the time of the worst economic slump in German history, his message was that Germany needed a strong leader - him - to challenge its international enemies and overthrow the harm done to Germany by the allied powers in the Treaty of Versailles - the 1919 agreement that punished Germany heavily at the end of World War One - and from which it had never really recovered.

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) speaks at the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany, prior to the entry of German troops into the Rhineland, 7th March 1936

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Should Londoners protest against Boris Johnson's move to prorogue parliament?

I am in no way comparing our esteemed Prime Minister Boris Johnson to the wicked German dictator - in any case he openly identifies himself firmly with his idol Churchill rather than Hitler, but his decision announced yesterday to prorogue parliament has nasty echoes of those hideous events in the dark days of 1933.

It's a method that has long been used by Prime Ministers and, before that, Kings and Queens of England, when they want to do something that they know parliament doesn't like.

Queen Elizabeth I used to do it a lot when she wanted to pass religious measures that she knew the Protestants in parliament might not like - such as hanging a lot of them.

It also happened under Charles I in 1628 when he was grappling with a difficult parliament in the run up to a brutal civil war that split the UK for a generation.

It happened again in 1831, during the Great Reform Crisis, and in 1997, when John Major’s government shut down parliament early and called an election instead of facing a debate on the MPs "cash for questions" scandal.

In 1948, the House of Lords was blocking reforms to its power, and the government decided to prorogue parliament so it could pass the laws more quickly in a new session.

Anti-Brexit campaigners with Union and European Union flags outside the House of Commons

But looking ahead it also sets a nasty precedent for the future.

If every time a Prime Minister who doesn't seem to have the backing of parliament decides to shut it down and introduce a raft of new laws without giving them much time for debate, we have to question whether democracy is still alive and well - and since it is the one proven system that seems to offer some stability in politics, we should be worried if it's not.

The long and the short of it is that Boris felt he was lacking support to get a new Brexit deal through parliament so he has got the backing of the Queen to close it.

This is constitutionally legal, since the Prime Minister can temporarily shut (pro-rogue) parliament with the authority of the monarch to start a new official parliamentary session and this has to be done on a regular basis. A parliament can't just continue to sit forever.

What is less common is that the government is doing this at such a crucial time and a time when it knows it's vulnerable to its Brexit solutions being defeated by MPs - whether they be a revised Brexit deal, or trying to force through a no-deal Brexit.

It means parliament would not sit between the second sitting week of September (probably September 13) and October 14, when it reopens following a Queen's speech.

This basically gives MPs very little time to come up with and debate alternatives to a no-deal Brexit, which in turn means it's extremely likely we will crash out of the EU without a deal, or if it doesn't want this, parliament will have no choice but to accept whatever new deal Boris proposes.

In practice, given MPs do not sit on most Fridays, they are only likely to lose between four and six sitting days in parliament, depending on which day parliament is prorogued on the second week of September. MPs would have been due to hold conference recess anyway, from September 12 until October 7.

So it's not a massive amount of time - but as someone once said, a week is a long time in politics.

Perhaps we could forgive Boris more if the original "mandate" for withdrawing from the EU was an overwhelming "yes", but it was just a tiny 52 per cent majority.

In most constitutional democracies the rules are that governments have to seek a two-thirds majority in parliament before changing the fundamental rules of government.

Although leaving the EU isn't strictly speaking a constitutional change, it's so significant, that requiring a two-thirds majority in the referendum would have been the sensible thing to do - but it wasn't done.

And when we look for backing for a no-deal Brexit this was never even mentioned in the referendum itself, so there is absolutely no mandate for it. Boris should therefore go back to the people to ask if we want a no-deal - but he certainly doesn't plan to.

For Boris to take this step at this time, is a mark of his bold ambition to be the strong leader who leads Britain into a newly independent golden age, free of the shackles of the EU, able to clamp down on immigration, put itself in the driving seat for international trade without EU laws getting in the way and set itself up as a revived "Great" Britain - one that people listen to with respect on the world stage.

You can already hear the echoes flowing through history in the rhetoric of Hitler, Mussolini and a hundred other would be dictators.

It's one thing trying to be that strongman who can see Britain through a crisis, but having to shut down parliament in order to do it shows we haven't learnt from 1933, the one year all our school history teachers said we should learn from, and that is dangerous.