If anti-Semitism is the problem, then the Tories shouldn’t sit with the EPP either

Mike

There's a slight difference between a few nutjobs in a broad church and a tiny grouping made up significantly of people with anti-semitic backgrounds.

And let's not forget that the Tories are led by one of these peopl now.

David

There was also a story floating around this morning - I think in the Telgraph - quoting a White House official saying they didn't give two figs about the Tory Euro grouping. Which means Miliband was lying when he said it was worrying the US Administration.

Vulture

I agree. Or 'D'accord', as our friends across the Channel say. And while on the subject of embarrassing political extremism, why has there been a paucity of comment on the Communist/Marxist past of Jack Straw, Peter Madelslime, Charles Clarke and Alistair Darling? If we should know abt Nick Griffin's Nazi past (and we should) we should also be interested that half the Cabinet once subscribed to a doctrine that in the 20th century murdered hundreds of millions of people.

Arthur

Let's look at it another way. Have you done a search to find a grouping in the European Parliament that DOESN'T include a racist/ homophobic/fascist/communist/religious loony, or some other type of unacceptable nutjob? It's the nature of the beast. These people represent the citizens of Europe, not all of whom are really nice people. As long as we're in this club, this is how it's going to be.

Mike

There are those in the Tory cabinet who once called themselves Trots, too.

But come on, handing out newspaper in support of strikes in the 80s is hardly on par with anti-semitism. Capitalism has blood on it's hands just as much as those who called themselves communists- the difference with capitalism being that much of that blood is ingrained, capitalism requires the five year olds dying down the mines in Cambodia. The communists who lasted any amount of time were despicable regimes, sure, but the ones that weren't as ruthless tended to get bombed to bits, or overthrown by CIA backed military coups, or shot down by the army. I'm thinking Republican Spain, Allende, the Paris Commune, Arbenz, etc. etc.

Leninism may have been ruthless, but I guess it had to be- not that it is any excuse mind you, they were still vile dictatorships.

Norman Dee

Vulture, have you forgotten the Milliband family ? and was anybody else as outraged as me by Huhnes comments on the 10 o'clock news (before the actual transmission of the question time prog ) he compared Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, a comparison I hope many sensible people will find disgraceful, and typical of the libdems.

Luke

Horrible argument for Hague and Cameron (pictured) to have to make though:

That they feel comfortable sitting with anti-semites because there are anti-semites in their old coalition partners as well.

It's not just the anti-semitism links that are hurting the tories though. They are taking a real bashing in the gay community because of the alleged homophobia of some of their new partners as well.

The reason your logic on this doesnt really work is because they were in a grouping of more or less all centre-right parties. The parties didnt claim to agree on everything or share all the same policies but they clubbed together as centre-right parties - they shared a broad philosophy.

It was David Cameron who said that a broad philosophy shared with Merkel and Sarkozy wasnt enough. He needed to agree with them on specific policies about european integration. It's therefore pretty reasonable to ask him why he is putting, with his new grouping, a shared view on european integration above shared views on a whole set of wider issues about society and the state.

Peter From Maidstone

The anti-semitism of some members of some coalition partners is not shocking. It is well known that people do not have the same views on all things, and sometimes politics requires difficult partnerships.

Is the anti-semitism of an Hungarian worse than the stalinism of our own government? Should I put aside the constant offence to my principles and opinions which are caused by the policies of this government and be more offended by the views of a minor figure of a minor government in a minor country far away?

Let's deal with the real offence right here which we have put up with for 12 years and which has brought our country to its knees. Let's expose the extremism of those in government before we worry too much about those in government in other places.

JohnAnt

Luke - The answer to your question is surely that MEPs sit in the EU Parliament, and - particularly now, with Lisbon being rushed through prematurely - EU legislation that affects our hitherto independent nation is of much more vital importance than any political theorising about the role of the state or public morality.
In any case, although Merkel and Sarkozy call themselves conservatives, they're they're not: they're corporate statist centrists.
And I really don't see how in our divided polyglot and poly-valued mish-mash of a society we can give self-righteous lecturettes about gay rights or PC language to Hungarians, Poles, Austrians or any other nation about how they should run their own countries.

Ken

@Luke. Pardon me asking but how many votes does this afflicted "gay community" represent and does it matter?

All these minorities and "victims" out to make hay while the sun is not shining, moaning on about EU groupings and imagined persecutions, better start getting used to one certainty.

The next government of whatever stripe, will have no time or money to focus on anything but paying down trillions and trillions of Brown Debt.

The stats released today show the economy in the worst recession since records began and no pickup in the next quarter either. Fraser Nelson probably has dozens of even more appalling figures he could add.

The more astute economists have been warning for months, the Chancellor's budget forecasts are rubbish, public spending cuts will be way above 30% (or more), taxes will rise sharply, jobs will go widely, benefits will be thin on the ground, and all of this just to stand still on Brown Debt for decades.

Any voter/victim minority better wakeup and smell the ersatz, the whole country is going to suffer as no generation has suffered since the war, everyone's a victim now, thanks to the Blair/Brown boom-bust tsunami.

Dean

I've read Freedman's article and, like so much of the rubbish printed by the Guardian, it is based on a false premise, namely the quaint Anglo-American notion that the rest of the world either does or should align itself with our notions of political correctness.

The legacy of the Second World War evokes fierce and complex emotions throughout continental Europe, for the simple reason that these countries were invaded and occupied, which inevitably meant that their populations faced extremely difficult moral choices. Britain and America were never in this position, which is presumably why we now think we are entitled to pontificate about everything that happened under Nazi or Soviet rule from an assumed position of moral superiority.

This is not to excuse racism or anti-semitism. But I wonder whether Jonathan Freedland has ever made any sacrifices for freedom comparable with the ones made by many Poles on behalf of their Jewish neighbours during the Second World War - people whose names don't appear in the history books, and who are no longer in a position to set the record straight about what really happened in those years because they died in Auschwitz along with the Jews, gypsies, disabled and homosexuals.

There is a second type of Holocaust denial -one we rarely hear about - which is the assertion that it affected only one ethnic group.

Countries don't make moral choices; individuals do, so can we please have less sanctimonious posturing from journalists who never lived through the Second World War and who, it would appear, have made little serious effort to study it? Are we to condemn Churchill because he was willing to do business with Stalin to defeat Hitler? Are we to condemn those in the Baltic States who initially saw the German invasion as an opportunity to liberate themselves from communist oppression?

And why should Hitler's crimes NOT be seen as morally equivalent to those committed by Stalin? This is a question no-one on the Left seems able to answer.

Mike

Also, let's not forget that the EPP is a broad church, and you're bound to get a few despicable people like this anti-semite in such a huge organisation.

The Tories are in a tiny group peopled significantly by parties with anti-semitic, racist, homophobic, sexist backgrounds.

Being led by an alleged anti-semite in a tiny group that you made is worse in my opinion than being in the same group as an alleged anti-semite in a huge broad grouping.

And let's not forget that not so long ago it would have been the Tory party's members who'd be the embarassment. Alan "I'm not a Fascist, I'm a Nazi" Clark comes to mind.

Mike

"And why should Hitler's crimes NOT be seen as morally equivalent to those committed by Stalin? This is a question no-one on the Left seems able to answer."

I consider myself of the Left (in an Adam Smith, opposition to Old Tory Protectionism way mostly, but whatever) and I don't think you'd find many on the Left interested in defending Stalin.

Just because Hitler favoured a mixed economy doesn't mean that anyone who favours a mixed economy has to apologise for Hitler's atrocities.

And just because someone favours a communist system that doesn't mean they have to apologise for Stalin's atrocities. Hell, why would they want to defend a regime that had both private property and a state even if still existed?

TGF UKIP

Vulture, hear , hear , hear!

And if Dave hadn't been so pc touchy feely over the last four years he could now be much more dismissive of Guardian gang.

Fergus Pickering

Mike, poetry may soothe the savage breast:

There once was a marxist called Lenin
Did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in,
That grand marxist Stalin did ten in.

Not mine, alas, but Robert Conquest's.

Mike

I guess you didn't to read what I said? I never met Lenin or Stalin, I've never held them as an example to follow. I don't know of many leftists that do either- the history of the Soviet Union is a cautionary tale to learn from rather than a model to follow.

It doesn't make having communists in a large grouping the same as being led by an anti-semite in a tiny one. Anti-semitism is abhorrent in it's self, communism isn't- though individual communists can and have been abhorrent, that's the same with anything.

Verity

Peter from Maidstone - Well said, sir! I am not putting my own country on the back burner in order to worry about a country a long way away and with which I don't share a culture, history or language. We need to save Britain from the fascists who have, during the 12 years they have been in power, leached our ancient freedoms away from us and destroyed our ancient democracy.

Avudale

Mike: "Anti-semitism is abhorrent in it's self, communism isn't- though individual communists can and have been abhorrent, that's the same with anything."

Only someone on the left could state that communism isn't inherently abhorrent.

Judy

Nothing could be more ridiculous than Jonathan Freedland, a senior and longstanding member of the Guardian's editorial staff, getting on his high horse about the Tory Party's supposed tolerance of fellow parties in the EUP who are sympathetic to anti-semitism.

Day after day, the Guardian publishes articles and allows comments on its /cifwatch.com/">"Comment is Free" online section which equate Israel with the Nazis and claim that the Jewish state is one which practises racism, genocide and apartheid. This is something they do with no other state.

I have yet to see Jonathan Freedland work himself up into a moral lather about any of this. For example, the Guardian published an article by the very fashionable neo-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek which inter alia claimed that the designation of Gaza as "the largest concentration camp in the world had come "dangerously close to the truth".

This is the same Jonathan Freedland who wrote an article in the Jewish Chronicle urging the Jewish community of London to vote for Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London, despite his having appalled the community by likening a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard and then refusing to apologise, who claimed that the Board of Deputies was under the control of the government of Israel, and who openly embraced Sheikh Qaradawi, advocate of the execution of gays, and the suicide bombing of Israel as representing the future of Islam.

Freedland is all too obviously running a highly partisan Labour Party campaign. It's shameful that he's so blatantly playing the Jewish card to do so, and playing to the gallery about his sensitivity to Holocaust issues. You can judge the credibility of his stance by the simple process of reading the output of the Guardian and its Comment is Free section on anything to do with Israel.