Many thanks to the ever-prescient, always-eloquent ToryBear for drawing the attention of bloggers to this piece I posted on CentreRight back at the end of July. Since then, Labour and their Liberal Democrat chums have intensified their attacks on the Conservative Party's new allies in the European Parliament.
Allow me then, purely in the interests of fairness, to introduce you to several more of Labour's rather, well, "risqué" international allies inside the pan-national Party of European Socialists.
The first is the Social Democratic Party of Croatia, a party which enthusiastically endorsed the Presidential campaign of Stjepan "Stipe" Mesic - a man who in many former eastern-blok EU member states would be constitutionally banned from holding office as a result of the positions he held during Yugoslavia's communist dictatorship. A former Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement of the United Nations, Mesic's predecessors in this role include Fidel Castro, Josip Broz Tito, Robert Mugabe and General Suharto.
Secondly, the Labour Party enjoys formal links with the Social Democratic Parties of Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both parties were formed in 1991 from the remnants of the two country's Communist Leagues which ruled with an iron-fist under the centralised leadership of Yugoslav "President for life" Josip Broz Tito from 1936 to 1980. At one point, Tito's favourite method of suppressing political enemies (there were, at one point, some 7,000 of them) was to exile them to the island of Goli Otok. Nobody will ever know how many thousands of malnutritioned and exhausted political prisoners died on Goli Otok, battered by the island's chilling winter winds and summer temperatures of more than forty degrees.
Inside the Party of the European Socialists, Labour is also tied to the Socialist Party of Albania. The party was formed in 1991 following the establishment of democracy in the country, yet is viewed as the successor party to Enver Halil Hoxha's Party of Labour. As First Secretary of the party, Hoxha presided over one of the bloodiest regimes in modern history and enforced the closure of each of Albania's 2,000 places of worship. On a lighter note, Hoxha also appeared to share eccentric former Turkmen dictator Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov's irrational hatred of beards, banning them outright.
Last but not least, we come to the Viktor Yanukovych's Party of the Regions (yes, he of vote-rigging, pro-Krelmin, anti-Orange Revolution fame). I do not need to remind ConHome readers that the tactics of Yanukovych's party during the disputed Presidential election were widely criticised by the British government with then Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw heaping criticism on their attempts to subvert the "democratic will of the Ukrainian people".
It appears Labour has form in cooperating with parties with questionable stances on democracy, also being linked through the PES with the Turkish Democratic Society Party which is operates as the political wing of Abdullah Öcalan's Kurdistan Workers' Party (KPP) - a proscribed terrorist organisation by the Home Office and US State Department.
Let's be serious now.
Does the Labour Party possess a hidden admiration for the governing style of Enver Hoxha? No. Does Labour have a sinister agenda to support Viktor Yanukovych's efforts to derail Ukraine's transition to democracy? To claim that would be nonsense. Do Labour ministers raise a glass of Rakija and tuck into a spicy Serbian Goulash each 25th of May to celebrate Tito's birthday? Of course not.
When it comes to attacks on a party's international allies, however, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
These ridiculous - and unfounded - attacks on the European Conservatives and Reformists Group have to stop.
