The questions over the Tories’ sinister European alliance just won’t go away. William Hague and David Miliband’s tête-à-tête on the Today programme this morning has placed the party’s relationship with the Polish MEP Michal Kaminski under new scrutiny.
At the centre of the debate are the comments first made about Kaminski by the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, to my colleague James Macintyre. In his original email, which can be read in full here, he said:
[I]t is clear that Mr Kaminski was a member of NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi. Anyone who would want to align himself with a person who was an active member of NOP and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne (which was established to deny historical facts of the massacre at Jedwabne) needs to understand with what and by whom he is being represented.
Today has now published an email sent by Schudrich to Policy Exchange in which he appears to perform a U-turn:
It is a grotesque distortion that people are quoting me to prove that Kaminski is an anti-Semite. Portraying Kaminski as a neo-Nazi plays into the painful and false stereotype that all Poles are anti-Semitic.
The Tories are now citing this email as evidence that Jewish concerns about Kaminski were exaggerated and even fabricated. Yet the fact remains that Schudrich has never retracted his original comments to James. The Observer’s Toby Helm recently emailed the Chief Rabbi, who confirmed that he had no plans to disown his initial statement.
But more significantly, he reveals: “What I understand is that Schudrich has been under the most enormous pressure from the highest authorities in Poland to retract the remarks, but has refused to do so.”
At the very least Schudrich’s original email raised profound concerns over the Conservatives’ political morality.
One point that cannot be made often enough is that Kaminski is not a lone maverick or an obscure backbencher; he is the leader of the Conservatives’ European coalition. Right-wingers who highlight the odd cranky figure in the Party of European Socialists are not engaging in a like-for-like comparison.
Content from our partners
Related
