Economist: Tory group is shoddy and shaming…what sort of party does Cameron lead?

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

There’s been a lot of attack and defence this week about the Conservatives’ new group in the European Parliament.

First, Iain Dale published what he termed the “real views” of Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, after James Macintyre published a piece in the New Statesman earlier in the year in which the Rabbi had said leader of the group Michal Kaminksi had been involved in “openly far-right and neo-Nazi” activity.

Rabbi Schudrich has apparently now said:

“There is no doubt that Kaminski is a strong friend of the State of Israel. He himself has spoken out against anti-Semitism on several occasions during the past decade. It is a grotesque distortion that people are quoting me to prove that Kaminski is an anti-Semite.“

James Macintyre then re-published Rabbi Schudrich’s email to him detailing his earlier position in full. Will Straw over on Left Foot Forward, meanwhile, still has questions as to why Rabbi Schudrich has amended his comments – namely whether any member of the Tory party, Kaminski’s Polish Law and Justice Party or the Policy Exhange think tank had put pressure on him to release the new statement.

Now, the Economist magazine’s Bagehot column has a blistering attack on the Tories in this week’s edition:

“The Tories have renounced the parties of Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel in favour of a marginal, weak and incoherent new caucus. Their prospects of influencing European deliberations, on matters that they care about such as hedge-fund regulation, have dwindled. They have alienated and baffled other European conservatives. By abdicating the centre of European politics for the fringe, the Tories have convinced many in Europe that they can legitimately be ignored.

There is, however, one explanation for the manoeuvre, offered in private by some close to Mr Cameron, that makes a bit of sense. Unfortunately, while it helps to rationalise his approach to the European Parliament, it also suggests a much bigger worry.

Mr Cameron made his pledge to pull out of the EPP during his bid for the Tory leadership in 2005. He needed to placate the wing of his party that still sees Europe as a Franco-German federalist conspiracy, and the EPP as part of it.

In other words, this one Eurosceptic policy enabled him to pursue others that are liberal and sensible. It allowed him to mould the party into the one that, in a way that would once have seemed improbable, stood to applaud the attack on poverty in his conference speech.

Seeing the move as a ransom paid to his party may be the best excuse for the moral compromises and apparent political myopia it involved. The switch and the credit it earned may even make it easier for Mr Cameron to take a relatively sane position on the Lisbon treaty if, as expected, it goes into force soon. But if this interpretation-charitable but plausible-mitigates the foolishness of Mr Cameron’s past decisions, it also raises an awkward question about his future.

It is this: if this shoddy, shaming alliance is the price he was obliged to pay his party for the changes needed to make it seem modern and compassionate, what sort of party is it that Mr Cameron leads? What else will its members demand, and what else-when his popularity and authority wane-will he be obliged to give them, after he becomes prime minister?”

As we’ve said on LabourList before, this is an argument that has legs and is not going to go away.