By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982
Adding to the opprobrium, there’s another article in the papers today strongly criticising the Conservatives’ new group in Europe. After the piece in the Economist last week, pressure on Cameron to come up with a new policy on Lisbon quickly from influential grassroots website ConservativeHome and criticism of other aspects of Cameron’s European policy on Tory Bear, Europe is once again proving to be the Tories’ most troublesome achilles’ heel.
Aaronovitch’s article, which can be read in full here, says:
“Now Tory columnists, bloggers and activists are devoting their time to nitpicking sophistry about the nature of collective guilt, and to attacking non-existent “smears” that they say have been attached to the unlovely person of Mr Kaminski. Why?
It is true, as embattled Conservatives have argued, that many of the grand European coalitions contain people whose history is problematic. There are odds and sods in the big conservative grouping, the EPP, and in the socialist group. But these personalities are far outweighed by the parties of the Merkels and Sarkozys. The Polish member of the EPP, for example, is the ruling free-market, non-nationalist conservative party of Donald Tusk – almost certainly the party that Mr Cameron would join if he were a Pole. The new Tory grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists, by contrast, is all about odds and sods whom a continental Cameron would certainly shun, bar one organisation – the British Conservatives.
So why get yourself into a position where you have to explain that the Latvian SS wasn’t so bad really, and that Mr Kaminski has an understandable position on collective guilt? And the answer seems to be that Mr Cameron promised his Europhobes in his leadership campaign back in 2005 that he would leave the “federalist” EPP, and that the logical outcome of this move has been the weird alliance that he now finds himself defending.
Was it all necessary? No. Was it in Britain’s interests? Absolutely not. Is it in the interests of progressive Conservatism? You must be joking. So has this happened because Mr Cameron doesn’t really care enough about Europe to think through the consequences of his own lightly given promises, or because he’s just as much a Euro-nutter as those sects, the Hannanites, the Cashists and the Redwoodians?”
More from LabourList
‘In the face of Reform, Fabians offer a pathway to success’
‘Labour needs a new story about power, selling sovereignty, security and stability’
‘Labour needs ideology – and that’s why we are relaunching Renewal’