Jobbik Centre

Fiona Hamilton writes:

Jobbik, a far-right Hungarian party accused of anti-Semitism and racism, is setting up a branch in London. The nationalist party, which has its own uniformed paramilitary wing, will stoke fears about the extending reach of the far Right into Britain.

It comes just weeks after Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party and one of its two MEPs, secured an alliance in the European Parliament with nationalist parties including the French National Front.

Jobbik will become the first European party to try to gain a significant foothold in Britain on Sunday when it holds the first meeting of the British Jobbik Society.

It already has links with Mr Griffin, who has previously met its representatives. Jobbik has also joined Mr Griffin’s European alliance, which is seeking the support of seven EU parties to create a pan-European group and claim about £360,000 a year in taxpayer funding.

Jobbik, a far-right Hungarian party accused of anti-Semitism and racism, is setting up a branch in London. The nationalist party, which has its own uniformed paramilitary wing, will stoke fears about the extending reach of the far Right into Britain.

It comes just weeks after Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party and one of its two MEPs, secured an alliance in the European Parliament with nationalist parties including the French National Front.

Jobbik will become the first European party to try to gain a significant foothold in Britain on Sunday when it holds the first meeting of the British Jobbik Society.
It already has links with Mr Griffin, who has previously met its representatives.

Jobbik has also joined Mr Griffin’s European alliance, which is seeking the support of seven EU parties to create a pan-European group and claim about £360,000 a year in taxpayer funding.

Welcome to “the centre ground”, where elections are said to be won and lost. Wherever it is, its inhabitants are allegedly delighted to be at the very heart of the European federalist project. Not only is it supposedly moderate, mainstream and centrist to wish to be subject to a legislative body, the Council of Ministers, that meets in secret and publishes no Official Report. But is also to wish to be subject to the legislative will of the sorts of people that turn up in the coalitions represented in that Council. And, indeed, in the European Parliament. Stalinists and Trotskyists. Neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis. Members of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura. Neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany. Before long, the ruling Islamists of Turkey, and their opponents, variously extreme secular ultra-nationalists and Marxist Kurdish separatists.

When Jörg Haider’s party was in government in Austria, the totally unreconstructed Communist Party was in government in France. In the Council of Ministers, we were being legislated for by both of them. In the European Parliament, we still are, because we always are. People who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland may not take their seats at Westminster. But they do at Strasbourg. And so on, and on, and on. Jobbik already legislates for us, so it may as well have a branch here.

Speaking of people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, that view, backed up by arms, does not preclude their governing Northern Ireland, to the delight of “centrist” opinion, in coalition with a bizarre fundamentalist sect unconnected to mainstream Ulster Protestantism and with no Unionism beyond the view that the British taxpayer should foot the bill for its statelet. It does at least present that as Unionism. Its coalition partner presents having all the bills paid from Westminster as somehow Irish Republicanism.

“Centrists” do sometimes wish to exclude “foreign-born preachers of hate” from this country. Quite right, too. And yes, that does mean the Islamists whom they have in mind. But what about a great many more? The signatories to the Project for the New American Century, and the Patrons of the Henry Jackson Society. Those American and other ecclesiastics who have expressed racist views about Africans and others who do not share their liberal sexual morality. Hans Küng, whose disparagement of the late Pope John Paul II’s Polishness made and make them the authentic voice of the age-old Teutonic racism against the Slavs; Küng only gets away with it because he is Swiss. Let these and a whole host of others, including Jobbik and indeed Geert Wilders, be excluded from the United Kingdom. Their presence most certainly would not be, and periodically is not, conducive to the public good. Nor is being subject to their legislative will.

What say the “centrists”, who have never recanted their 1970s Stalinism or Trotskyism (yes, New Labour and the Euston Manifesto Group, that means you), or their 1980s support for Pinochet and apartheid (yes, the Henry Jackson Society and at least those Cameroons who are not New Labour, that means you)? And how can they complain, as we all should, about preachers of hate from the Islamic world when they positively rejoice that Northern Ireland has been carved up among its own preachers of hate, while all of these islands have been handed over to the preachers of hate from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to within the former Soviet Union? Including Jobbik.