A follow-up to Wednesday’s post about the Conservative MEPs’ alliance with Valdemar Tomaševski, a homophobic Lithuanian MEP, with Ed Davey now commenting:
This is yet more evidence of the shameful way that Cameron has taken the Tories out of the centre-right mainstream of European politics, and allied them with a lunatic fringe of extreme right wingers and homophobes.
Cameron has been at pains to portray his party as one of modern, ‘liberal Conservatives’. It is hard to see where this fits in with an alliance with parties which support homophobic laws such as this.
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5 Comments
This is something I posted on a similar thread on Left Foot Forward:
Something we often forget on the left is that many of those in Eastern Europe were victims of an oppressive authoritarian communist regime. Thus their history of the left, particularly the Marxist-Leninist left, is not a pleasant one.
Equally, capitalism and the free market has been just as brutal and democracy has proven to be a corruptable system in the ‘new’ democracies of Eastern Europe. It is no surprise therefore that some sections of the population in places such as Lithuvania and other Eastern European countries see authoritarian right-wing populism (and at times fascism) as being an attractive alternative to the failures of both an oppressive communism and a corruptable capitalism.
The left needs to get a better grip of the cultural-political history of Eastern Europe to understand fascist and extreme right-wing tendencies with populist appeals.
“Something we often forget on the left ”
Speak for yourself, chum!
We also need to keep hammering this point home at every opportunity in the runup to the general election – every time Cameron claims to be liberal, someone needs to ask him why he’s in an alliance with homophobes.
sanbikinoaion
And how about some of the nutters in the Lib Dem grouping in Europe?
I think Ed is a busted flush. All the Tories need to do is throw and distort the “Tea with the Taleban” stuff back at him. Personally I think he is right and you have to speak to these people, the same cuts with the case of this Lithuanian dude.