Stephen Fry: Tories Should End Alliance With Homophobes

Stephen Fry has suggested the letter he and other celebrities have signed, condemning the Conservative Party’s EU Parliament alliance with the Polish Law and Order Party and Latvia’s Freedom and Fatherland Party, offers David Cameron an opportunity to walk away from them:

Jonathan Freedland describes the anti-semitic and homophobic backgrounds of these parties:

there was a time when no self-respecting British politician would have gone anywhere near such people. Kaminski began his career in the National Rebirth of Poland movement, inspired by a 1930s fascist ideology that dreamed of a racially pure nation. Even today, the PiS slogan is “Poland for Poles”, understood to be a door slammed in the face of non-Catholics. In 2001 he upbraided the president for daring to apologise for a 1941 pogrom in the town of Jedwabne which left hundreds of Jews dead. Kaminski said there was nothing to apologise for – at least not until Jews apologised for what he alleged was the role Jewish partisans and Jewish communists had played alongside the Red Army in Poland.

Incredibly, Kaminski’s Polish party is not the most unsavoury of the Tories’ new partners. That honour goes to the Latvian grouping whose members have played a leading part in the annual parade honouring veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS. Lest we forget, the SS were the crack troops of Nazi genocide; the Latvian Legion included conscripts, but at least a third were volunteers, among them men with the blood of tens of thousands of Jews on their hands. It is in honour of those killers that Cameron’s new buddies march through the streets of Riga.

And Fry went on to make an extremely salient point, given the current economic circumstances:

Fry told Channel 4 News he fears there will be a nationalistic and homophobic reaction to the current recession, unless groups across Europe take action.

He told Channel 4 News: “This is a problem that is not going to get smaller because, as we start to pay for the financial disaster of the last year, a kind of great pimple of nationalism, homophobia and racism is going to erupt around Europe because there is going to be trouble with unemployment.

“The problem with the 30s was not that period. It was the end of the 30s when you start to pay the price – and that’s why it matters now to make a stand because things will get worse.

I couldn’t agree with him more. The letter he signed his name to says:

“It is not just that your new Polish allies oppose gay marriage and adoption but that their vile rhetoric – branding homosexuality as a ‘pathology’, gays as ‘perverts’, and describing ‘the affirmation of homosexuality’ as ‘the downfall of civilisation’ – was used to whip up hate during their election campaign.

“Your party’s decision to host an LGBT event at conference is a good step in the right direction.

“But it will seem empty – a two faced gesture – if in the same week you fawn over allies whose homophobia has no place in modern Manchester, in modern Britain, or in Europe.”

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