I won’t be mean-spirited. The leader of the opposition is on a good run, but the deserved plaudits will end next month when he leads his party into the swamp of reactionary politics.
After the European elections, British Conservatives will leave the company of Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Fredrik Reinfeldt and the other moderate centre-right leaders who gather under the banner of European People’s party. Although they share reasonable conservative desires for lower taxes and sound finance, Cameron cannot stick with them because they also believe in a federal Europe. The Tories will ally instead with the proudly ignorant parties of eastern Europe. Know-nothing chauvinism, sexual and religious prejudices, and conspiracy theories from Europe’s dark heart motivate them, but they are against federalism and that is all that matters to Cameron.
Already, we have had the spectacle of the “decontaminated” Conservative party courting the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom party, several of whose MPs marched on 16 March in Riga with veterans of the Latvian SS. In Warsaw, the Tories are as keen to woo the Polish Law and Justice party whose leading figures have variously opined that Obama was the “black messiah of the new left” whose victory marked the “end of the civilisation of the white man” and that “homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilisation”.
In an effort to hold on to its thankfully falling vote, Law and Justice is backing candidates who once stood for the League of Polish Families, an ultra-religious party which combines authoritarianism and Catholicism and announces its admiration for the efforts General Franco made to “thwart communism” and preserve “traditional values”.
At least Cameron’s Czech allies in the Civic Democrats avoid the old hatreds of Jews, gays and blacks,
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Nick Cohen
