A Tory candidate in the European elections tried to persuade me that people were not going to fall into the arms of the smaller political parties because of the Westminster expenses scandal.
Who would vote for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) he asked ? Two of their MEP’s got caught out fiddling their own expenses. Another, he suggested, was a horse whisperer who would communicate with his constituents using extra-sensory perception.
Nutters, he said. If our politician ends up being sent back to Brussels and Strasbourg he may well wonder if his new-found political friends are not just as loony. And, if he does, he will have David Cameron to blame.
The UK Conservative leader wants to take his Euro MPs out of the main Christian Democrat group within the assembly and plonk them in with some more eurosceptic allies.
Except that some of the proposed new friends might not sit so easily with normal right-of-centre politicians from western democracies. Take the case of Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, Poland’s Law and Justice party; a group that headed a coalition government in Poland between 2005 and 2007.
Its elected representatives may not talk to horses or fiddle their expenses but their Prime Minister declared homosexuality “unnatural” and the administration was generally in thrall to the more rabid elements within the Catholic church.
In the Euro election campaign the Law and Justice leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, started foaming at the mouth when German MEP’s suggested it was wrong to have expelled Germans at the end of the Second World War from parts of pre-war Germany that had been ceded to Poland by the victorious powers.
Kaczynski claimed such sentiments were “treating Poland like a rubbish bin.” That’s despite his own historical predecessors fuming just as loudly in 1945 that the ancient German lands that were being handed over to the Polish state weren’t part of Poland and couldn’t ever be considered so.
These people can only be considered hard right, as are some of his other potential European bedfellows, who include the Latvian Party that takes part every March 16th in a parade commemorating those Lavtians who fought for Hitler.
But, hey, you know if it stops the United States of Europe, the invasion of the Euro, and uniformly bendy bananas, then being pals with people who want to ban homosexuality and abortion will be OK. Won’t it ?
Who would vote for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) he asked ? Two of their MEP’s got caught out fiddling their own expenses. Another, he suggested, was a horse whisperer who would communicate with his constituents using extra-sensory perception.
Nutters, he said. If our politician ends up being sent back to Brussels and Strasbourg he may well wonder if his new-found political friends are not just as loony. And, if he does, he will have David Cameron to blame.
The UK Conservative leader wants to take his Euro MPs out of the main Christian Democrat group within the assembly and plonk them in with some more eurosceptic allies.
Except that some of the proposed new friends might not sit so easily with normal right-of-centre politicians from western democracies. Take the case of Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, Poland’s Law and Justice party; a group that headed a coalition government in Poland between 2005 and 2007.
Its elected representatives may not talk to horses or fiddle their expenses but their Prime Minister declared homosexuality “unnatural” and the administration was generally in thrall to the more rabid elements within the Catholic church.
In the Euro election campaign the Law and Justice leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, started foaming at the mouth when German MEP’s suggested it was wrong to have expelled Germans at the end of the Second World War from parts of pre-war Germany that had been ceded to Poland by the victorious powers.
Kaczynski claimed such sentiments were “treating Poland like a rubbish bin.” That’s despite his own historical predecessors fuming just as loudly in 1945 that the ancient German lands that were being handed over to the Polish state weren’t part of Poland and couldn’t ever be considered so.
These people can only be considered hard right, as are some of his other potential European bedfellows, who include the Latvian Party that takes part every March 16th in a parade commemorating those Lavtians who fought for Hitler.
But, hey, you know if it stops the United States of Europe, the invasion of the Euro, and uniformly bendy bananas, then being pals with people who want to ban homosexuality and abortion will be OK. Won’t it ?
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