Lib Dem Voice has covered before the growing embarrassment to the Tories of David Cameron’s decision to withdraw his party from the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, the EPP, and to establish a new right-wing grouping with an eccentric, ragbag group of Euro MPs.
This came to a head last month, when Edward McMillan-Scott, a former leader of the Tory party in the European Parliament, was expelled for standing against a Polish MEP, Michal Kaminski, for the post of Vice-President of the European Parliament – Mr Kaminski was subsequently elected leader of the Tories’ new Euro grouping. And now Mr McMillan-Scott has gone on the record in the Yorskshire Post to reveal precisely why he decided to make a stand against the Tory party’s latest descent into Euro lunacy:
Although Kaminski was nominated by the new Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) created by David Cameron, I decided to take the issue head on, even at the discomfiture of my own party. I did this at great personal and political risk – I could have lost everything and have now lost the whip – but I did it on principle.
It was not my principle – it was a higher one. To oppose a menacing political movement at a key moment in Europe’s politics. … my Yorkshire colleague, Timothy Kirkhope – leader of the Conservative MEPs – who that day had been elected leader of the ECR, was simply replaced by Kaminski. …
It has now been disclosed, as Kaminski should have done to the Conservative Party when nominated for Vice-President, that he has had fascist links – he was a member of Poland’s notorious fascist National Revival (NOP) – and he tried, as its MP, to cover up one of the worst anti-Jewish atrocities in wartime Europe.