Westminster blog

The Board of Deputies of British Jews last night wrote to the Tories raising new questions about their allies in Poland and Latvia. But the letter was angrily dismissed by the Conservatives, who claimed the board had been swayed by “politically motivated allegations”.

The Latvian controversy (which was inflamed last week by David Miliband) centres around an annual memorial event for fallen soldiers from World War 2 – when many Latvians were conscripted by the Germans. Enemies of the Tories have spun this as some kind of Nazi-glorifying event and criticised Roberts Zile – leader of their Latvian allies – for attending it.

But we asked our Scandinavian correspondent, Andrew Ward, to give a more balanced view. This is what he wrote:

“Britain’s foreign secretary portrayed Latvia’s LNNK — the Fatherland and Freedom party — as right-wing extremists who honoured the Nazi SS.
In fact, the party, while right-wing and nationalistic, is firmly within Latvia’s political mainstream and a member of the five-party coalition government currently battling to pull the country out of economic crisis.
It has its roots in the anti-Soviet independence movement of the late 1980s and is the only Latvian party to have been represented in every parliament since the first post-cold war elections in 1993.

Britain’s Labour party has sought to embarrass the Conservative opposition, an ally of the LNNK in the European parliament, by highlighting the LNNK’s involvement in annual marches to commemorate the SS.
Daunis Auers, political scientist at the University of Latvia, said members of other parties had also taken part, although the marches had fizzled in recent years.
The event was a focal point for the Latvian nationalist movement to celebrate resistance against the Soviet Union rather than to honour Nazism, he added.
Latvian society is sharply divided between ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians. “They each have their own interpretations of history,” said Mr Auers.
The dispute has received relatively little attention in the Latvian media – in part because the country is preoccupied with its own political drama this week as the government struggles to keep its IMF rescue programme on track. But Mr Auers said it had sparked debate in the blogosphere, with nationalists accusing Britons of slurring Latvia and misunderstanding the country’s history.”

There is also a very fair piece with more detail in today’s Guardian.