Thread by @davidjrosenberg

Worrying but curious article in the Independent by Rob Merrick on the current alliances of the Tory Party in Europe, with Johnson's approval, with a range of Far Right/Islamophobic parties. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

Worrying because what has seemed to have gone under the radar since the beginning of March 2020, when the Pandemic moved fully centre stage, is that the European Conservatives and Reformists Group had invited in a new set of groups which includes

for example AfD in Germany and Salvini's far right Italian party as well as Austria's Freedom Party, founded in the '50s by a former Nazi minister and SS officer. Other additions - the far right Danish Peopel's Party, and the openly racist Conservative People's Party of Estonia.

Also there: Vlams Belang in Belgium (a minor rebrand of the older Vlaams Blok which dissolved in 2004 after a trial condemned it for racism). The strongest groups in the alliance remain the UK Tory Party and Poland's Law and Justice Party, followed by Salvini's, then the AFD.

But curious too, since many of the most unsavoury groups represented in it, eg the Bulgarian United Patriots, who every year play a major part in organising a march through Sofia celebrating a pro-Nazi general during the war who was assassinated by a Jewish anti-fascist partisan,

were part of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the Euro Parliament for many years before the link up with additional far right groups. In recent years none of the mainstream papers/TV news were prepared to publicise and condemn these thriving links. Why?

because they were so obsessed with trying to link @jeremycorbyn's Labour with antisemitism on the flimsiest "evidence". They gave the Tories a free pass on their formal ongoing connections with antisemitic, Islamophobic, far right parties. Interested @EHRC? No, didn't think so