How can Cameron be fit to be PM with such dubious allies in Europe?

By Rachel Reeves / @_RachelReeves_

Two weeks ago I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Despite having visited Auschwitz a few years ago, nothing could prepare me for the harrowing stories of people and families who became the victims of hatred, ignorance and contempt during the Second World War. While Hitler and the Nazi Party are responsible for the massacre of six million Jews and around eleven million Holocaust deaths overall, we must also be honest that the Holocaust would not have had the results it did without collaboration in other countries, both those allied to Germany and those under German occupation.

Last week at Labour Party conference David Miliband used his speech to condemn the British Conservative Party for allying themselves with the Latvian ‘For Fatherland and Freedom’ Party, which each year commemorates Latvian-SS Legion veterans in a march through Riga. Miliband particularly condemned the fact that “no one in the Tory party batted an eyelid”.

Without the actions of volunteers and conscripts in Latvia, and elsewhere, the Holocaust would not have had so many victims. We must be careful about what we commemorate, celebrate and who we align ourselves with.

Conservative Party Chairman, Eric Pickles, in an interview with Radio Four’s Today Programme on 22nd September, claimed that the soldiers were conscripts, just following orders, and that the volunteers were nationalists, not Nazis – fighting to end the Soviet occupation of their country. But, if this is the version of history that the Tories finds fits their need to find allies to form their new European Conservatives and Reformists group, it misses out some important facts. As the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which tracks down Nazi war criminals, points out, one third of Latvian-SS soldiers were volunteers, not conscripts, and “many of its men were active participants in the mass murder of Jews before the Legion was established in early 1943”.

Using a different line of argument, William Hague claims that the commemoration is an official event. In a letter to the Foreign Secretary on 2nd October Hague wrote:

“You must know that the majority of Latvia’s political parties, the majority of parties forming Latvia’s current Government including the Prime Minister’s party, have attended the commemoration of Latvians who fought in the Second World War”.

But that is not the whole truth. This is not a state recognised celebration in Latvia and is in fact such a source of controversy that the Head of the Latvian armed forces was forced, by Parliament, to resign when he took part.

The people the Tories have partnered up with, and that’s before considering the homophobic, racist, sexist and nationalist views of Michal Kaminski and his Polish ‘Law and Justice’ Party, are not the types a centrist, modernising, caring Conservative Party should be associating with.

While neither David Miliband, nor any other right-thinking person, would claim that David Cameron, Eric Pickles or their party support the actions of the Latvian-SS, let’s be clear – as Miliband put it:

“All you need for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent”.

If we tolerate these excuses for evil deeds we do a huge injustice to the memories of those who died at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, and we lower the bar on the sort of behaviour is morally acceptable.

That Cameron is willing to associate himself with ‘For Fatherland and Freedom’ tells us something loud and clear: The Tories are anti-European more than they are anti anything else. They pulled out of the right-of-centre EPP because of their differences over the Lisbon Treaty and European integration. But do Cameron’s Conservatives really have less in common with the parties of Merkel and Sarkozy than they do with Latvia’s For Fatherland and Freedom and Poland’s Law and Justice? I think the answer is no.

But, Cameron has, under pressure from the right in his party been forced into these alliances. So while Cameron may be the leader of the Tory Party, others are pulling the strings. If Cameron has had to compromise his moral integrity so much to appease the right-wing Europhobes in his party, what other sacrifices will be needed to secure their continued backing?

I will repeat – I don’t for a moment believe Cameron or Pickles share the ideology of the SS. But after being reminded of the horrors of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem, I cannot accept the callous crassness of the Tory positioning which forces a decent man like Eric Pickles to imply that it’s ok to commit acts of evil if you obey orders.

By joining an alliance with “For Fatherland and Freedom” the Conservative Party demonstrate that being anti-Europe is a stronger bond for them than the conservatism they share with Sarkozy and Merkel.

How can Cameron be fit to be Prime Minister of Great Britain – the country that defeated the Nazis and helped save Europe from fanatics, hatred and monsters – when he has such dubious allies?