Originally Posted by Telegraph
One of the many good things about Britain’s membership of the European Union is the chance it offers us, as Brits, to learn from nations more advanced in political life.
Witness, for instance, the latest intervention from Laszlo Andor, the Hungarian EU Employment Commissioner. Following his recent criticism of the UK’s "nasty and hysterical" attitude to foreigners, Andor has also reproved David Cameron for "posturing" on immigration and thereby pandering to xenophobia.
Nor is Andor the first European to give bigoted Brits a ticking off. In December 2013, famous Polish anti-communist Lech Walesa expressed disdain at the way we act irrationally over EU incomers. Likewise, back in October, the foreign minister of Romania made clear his outrage at "xenophobic, populist" politicians in the UK. In the Spring of last year the Bulgarian ambassador to Great Britain, Konstantin Dimitrov, launched a fierce tirade against “certain political quarters and the media” in the UK, for “scape-goating a tiny nation” with our "offensive" attitudes.
With that kind of consensus, there seem little doubt that Britain is firmly on the naughty step of European racial politics – we are the nasty, snarling, insular country, way out on a limb with our xenophobia, our disrespect for human rights, our lack of democratic values.
So I say let’s learn to be better, fairer, non racist Europeans: just like our neighbours.
One country with a lot to teach the ugly Brits about tolerance and human rights is, assuredly, the home of Bulgarian ambassador Mr Dimitrov. After all, Bulgaria has been a democratic country for all of 25 years, before which it was a malignant communist dictatorship. Not that becoming a democracy made so much difference for certain Bulgarians. In the 1980s and 90s 300,000 Turks were forced to leave the country and “return” to Anatolia, or face forced assimilation; in 2006 Bulgaria seriously considered a law aimed at lowering birth rates in minority communities; in 2013 racist and anti-Semitic abuse in Bulgarian sport got so bad that the nation was forced to play international matches in front of empty stadiums.
As for Romania, if only we could live in that land of racial harmony and ethnic enlightenment! This is the same Romania which had an independent Fascist government by 1940, the same Romania which actually conducted its very own Holocaust, in which 400,000 Jews and Roma were slaughtered in grotesque atrocities like the Odessa massacre, the same Romania which then became a communist tyranny in which an estimated two million people were murdered.
Finally, we could definitely gain enlightenment from Hungary, the culturally harmonious homeland of Laszlo “Britain is nasty” Andor.
Yes, you know – Hungary. The Hungary whose quasi Fascist government sought collaboration with Hitler’s Germany before Hitler even asked, the Hungary which allowed 430,000 Hungarian Jews to perish in the gas ovens at Auschwitz, the Hungary which then became a Stalinist dictatorship known for its brutality (though of course there was a heroic attempt to overthrow it), the Hungary which gave the far right Jobbik party third place in its general elections of 2010, the Hungary where, a few months back, Zsolt Bayer, the founder of its ruling conservative party, said: "A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals.”
Really – what have we Brits got to compare to any of that? OK, we may have founded human rights with Magna Carta and the Putney Debates, we may have abolished slavery across the world, yes we stood firm against the Nazis when other countries were defeated or neutral, and we may quietly boast that have never elected a far Right party into our national parliament through four centuries of continuous democracy.
But so what. These are piffling matters when compared to the momentous political achievements of our European neighbours, from Germany to Romania, from Hungary to Poland, who have managed not to conduct a single racist pogrom for well over a decade, and all of which have been democratic since at least lunchtime last Wednesday. So let us be humble – and listen to our new moral arbiters.
