Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Cameron's European Allies.

This march is supported by the small Fatherland and Freedom party in Latvia, which is significant because this is one of the parties who David Cameron has chosen to align the Conservatives to, rather than the more traditional Tory European allies such as Sarkosi and Merkel.

Around 1,000 people took part in a flower-laying ceremony in Riga today to remember fallen comrades on what is the most-contested date in the Baltic political calendar, as hundreds of police kept ethnic Russian protesters at bay.

Participants in the ceremony, including 200 SS veterans, who are known as Legionnaires, sang patriotic songs under rows of the Latvian national flag, while just 20 metres away, several dozen demonstrating ethnic Russians, whose relatives fought against Nazi Germany, shouted insults and waved posters depicting gruesome scenes from the Holocaust.

Police spokesman Aigars Berzins said the event passed peacefully, though several people were detained. It was not immediately clear how many.

The remembrance ceremonies at Riga's Freedom Monument and the Lutheran cathedral are hugely divisive because they pay tribute to those who fought alongside the Nazis in a vain attempt to halt the Red Army's reconquest of the Baltic state in 1944.

I never thought I'd live to see the day that the British Conservative party would align itself with such bedfellows, but Cameron has recognised that Europe is the subject which most splits his party and so, in an attempt to take it off the table, has aligned his party with right wing European extremists.

David Miliband, whose family lost relatives in the holocaust, called the event "nauseating".

I simply don't understand how Cameron is getting away with forming these alliances without paying a huge price at home. I can only imagine what the press would be saying were Labour to be in bed with such people. After all, they managed to kill Michael Foot's electoral chances because he committed the crime of wearing a donkey jacket to the the cenotaph, so quite what they would do if they found Labour in bed with Nazis is anyone's guess.

But Cameron's flirtation with these right wing extremists apparently isn't a big deal.

Click here for full article.

No comments: