Key European allies of the Tory party have lurched to the far-right in a pact with nationalist elements of Latvian neo-Nazis.
Key European allies of the Tory party have lurched to the far-right in a pact with nationalist elements of Latvian neo-Nazis.
The deal means that the unashamedly neo-fascist “All for Latvia” group is now an official partner with the Tories’ Latvian allies. The group is inspired by Nazi ideology and imagery and its logo echoes the swastika.
The official Latvian section of the Tories’ European Parliament group is made up of the For the Fatherland/LNNK party – TB/LNNK, which has one MEP in the Parliament. The Latvian party has consistently been attacked for closely allying themselves with Waffen SS veterans who fought for Germany in the Second World War.
The British Conservatives have always sat uneasily in their political grouping in the European Parliament, the European Conservatives and Reformists. As well as the Tories, the group is made up of several factions of extreme right-wingers. In a televised election debate in April, then-leader of the Liberal Democrats in opposition Nick Clegg (now Deputy Prime Minister) accused David Cameron of aligning his party with a “nutters, homophobes, anti-Semites and people who deny climate change exists”.
Now Cameron’s Latvian allies have gone one step further and established a formal electoral alliance with the Latvian neo-fascists in the form of an electoral coalition. The All for Latvia party is led by Raivis Dzintars, a populist neo-Nazi who proclaims that the common interests of the state have a higher value that individual civil rights.
Eric Pickles, the Communities Minister, has previously defended the TB/LNNK party’s support for SS war veterans, claiming that they were Latvian patriots. He has accused critics of recycling “old Soviet smears” about the Latvians.
Foreign Secretary William Hague described criticism from his shadow David Miliband of the Latvian for Fatherland’s Nazi sympathies as “unfounded and outrageous”.
The Tories appear powerless to control their far-right allies in the EU, and because of parliamentary arithmetic it seems they cannot afford to break their ties. Financial support for political groups is generous in the EP but if the Tories were to expel their Latvian allies it would jeopardise the viability of the group and risk losing funding.
Tribune Magazine
