"Mr McMillan-Scott has not taken much care to link his attacks to real facts. He accused my Party of taking MEPs from ‘the ultra-Catholic Motherland Party’. Yet there is no ‘Motherland Party’ in Poland, nor has there ever been one. He quotes a well-known Polish left wing paper to back up his claims – hardly likely to give fair comment on a conservative Polish party. He accuses my party – one of Poland’s two major political parties and the party of the President of Poland – of ‘respectable fascism’. Anyone who knows anything about Poland knows that is nonsense. As Britain’s last ambassador to Poland has said, the truth is that Polish Law and Justice has ‘marginalise[d] politically the populist parties in Poland, and so create[d] a much more mainstream political space there’.
When I was born, Poland was a totalitarian Communist dictatorship. You could be imprisoned for speaking out against the Government. You had no say in choosing the Government. Like millions of other young Poles, I longed for freedom. I grew up in the 1980s with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as my political heroes. However controversial at home, east of the Iron Curtain they were loved because they had no hesitation in condemning the evil of Communist tyranny or calling for democracy in our countries. In 1987, when I was 14, I joined an anti-Communist dissident group, National Revival, so I could fight for freedom. It was a typical small dissident movement in those days. When Communism crumbled in 1989 we were at last able to form political parties and have a democracy. I left NOP and helped create one such party as its youngest member. A couple of years later, NOP was taken over by extremists who turned it into what it is now: a very small and very nasty far right party. It is on this that Mr McMillan-Scott has manufactured his smear of fascist links.
Next Mr McMillan-Scott makes the disgusting allegation that I tried to cover up an anti-Jewish atrocity. The facts are these: in 2001 a book came out that raised new questions about the involvement of local Poles in a horrific massacre of Jewish villagers in a place called Jedwabne in 1941, when the Nazis occupied my country. In 2001 I was the MP for the area. I have always said that we could not just blame the pogrom on the Nazis: shamefully, there were local Poles involved. I backed the Government’s establishment of an historians’ inquiry so that everything about this terrible episode in our history could be found out.
Like the Polish Prime Minister of the time, though, I did not think it right that our then President should apologise for the whole Polish nation. I argued that responsibility lay with those Poles who had committed that cruel crime. I thought his apology on Poland’s behalf might diminish the Nazis’ ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust. People may or may not agree, but I think it a legitimate argument to make.
I am proud of my record in combating anti-Semitism. I have used my seat in the European Parliament to highlight how it still festers in parts of Poland. I am active in the European Friends of Israel. I am equally proud of my Party’s record. Our most senior figure, Lech Kaczynski, as mayor of Warsaw, donated city land to help found Poland’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Now President of Poland, he has the privilege of being the first Polish head of state ever to attend a Jewish religious service in a Polish synagogue.
I want a real debate about the politics of the European Union. If people disagree with the European Conservatives and Reformists’ chief principle – that we should aim for a Europe of nation states, not a European superstate – let them make their case. People in the Brussels establishment may disagree, but I think it right that there should be an official alliance in the European Parliament championing the tens of millions across Europe who believe in our vision of Europe’s future. I am honoured to have as my colleague the Yorkshire Conservative MEP Timothy Kirkhope, without whose selflessness and leadership our new alliance to bring change to Europe could never have succeeded."
As someone who cares deeply about anti-Semitism in Europe (a still major and worrying problem), I am horrified that a Conservative MEP would use this type of slander. McMillan-Scott has had the Conservative whip removed from him for this outrage. I am glad of this. However, I think it also shows the kind of people who the Conservatives used to sit with in the European People's Party bloc that McMillan-Scott was rewarded for his slander with one of the vice-presidencies of the European Parliament
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