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It is time for Cameron to reject the EU nutters

November 24, 2016 20:54

As David Cameron settles more and more comfortably into his alliance with the LibDems, another of the Tory Party's alliances remains anything but comfortable.

The new PM should urgently rethink his party's decision to form a European Parliament grouping with people described by Cameron's new coalition deputy as "nutters, antisemites, people who deny climate change exists and homophobes".

It is indeed an unseemly crew, including as it does Holocaust distorters, and glorifiers of Nazi collaborators. Back in March, I joined the small group of protesters against the (large) Waffen SS march in Riga, Latvia and told the Times reporter David Charter: "This is a glorification of the Third Reich and the Waffen-SS in a state that is part of Nato and the EU. We know that David Cameron is not a fascist but he should have the moral strength to admit he made a mistake".

Cameron may have been merely trying to prove his Eurosceptic credentials when he left the mainstream alliance of Sarkozy and Merkel to join the eastern-led alliance, but his decision was a reckless one that needs to be reconsidered.

The sooner the Tory leader comes to his senses and insists on his party practising the ethical "new politics", the better. For there are still worrying elements within his own Conservative ranks. When David Charter went to Conservative headquarters to get their reply to my objections, he was told: "This is a longstanding event that has been attended by representatives of most Latvian political parties. As the Latvian Government has said, attempts to make cheap political points from Latvia's tragic and complicated history are 'misleading', 'historically illiterate' and 'unacceptable'."

What we had here was something I would have thought inconceivable - the party of Churchill mindlessly repeating the East European neo-fascists' weasel words of rebuttal verbatim. One of the more loaded code-words in the arsenal is "complicated". When it comes to the Holocaust, it is used all the time to make a goulash-blend of the separate - and remarkably simple - concepts of "perpetrators" and "victims".

Anyone who disagrees is called "historically illiterate". Here in Lithuania, parliament even considered two-year prison sentences for denying the "Nazi and Soviet double genocide".

Even so, the chief engineers of the Blame-the-Victims school of Holocaust history here in Lithuania (where prosecutors harass Holocaust survivors, who are alive because they joined the resistance, and where a court last week sanctioned the public display of swastikas) were still savvy enough to avoid the nutters' coalition and opt for the Sarkozy /Merkel mainstream.

This is not about party politics. It was the Tory MEP Edward McMillan-Scott who stood up against the neo-fascists last summer. After being expelled from the Tory Party for this "sin", he has joined the Liberals - clearly ahead of his time in Conservative philosophy.

Well, that time has now come. The tiny, fragile Jewish communities that remain in eastern Europe are seriously undermined by official British approval of their governments' distortion of the memory of the Shoah. In the UK's new political climate, it is easier than ever for David Cameron to withdraw from the dangerous EU grouping and admit: "I made an honest mistake".

Holocaust In The Baltics

November 24, 2016 20:54

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