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Paul Sagar writing in the Guardian reckons:
David Cameron has pledged that the Conservative party will withdraw from the European People's party grouping at the EU parliament, which includes Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat Union and Nicholas Sarkozy's UMP. Instead, the Tories will sit with entities such as the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom party, several of whose MPs marched in Riga with veterans of the Latvian SS, and the Polish Law and Justice party, one of whose parliamentarians described Barack Obama as the "black messiah of the new left" whose presidency marks the "end of the civilisation of the white man".
This policy of association with racists is nothing new. The Conservative party has long been associated with an organisation which is regularly mired in racist scandal. Indeed, many leading lights of the Tory party are former members of this organisation, and even more have made guest appearances at its functions.
The organisation in question is not a grouping of marginalised eastern European fascists, however. It's much, much closer to home, having been based since 1924 in the Cotswolds: the Oxford University Conservative Association.
The latest racist scandal to engulf OUCA is the revelation that during election hustings for the post of junior officer positions, candidates were asked to tell "the most racist joke they know" and to describe their favourite minority. One candidate answered with a joke about black people hanging in the family tree.
An isolated incident? Not exactly. In 2000, four members of OUCA were kicked out of a meeting of Oxford University Student Union for what the student press described as "a deliberate disruption of proceedings, involving Nazi-style salutes, cries of 'Viva Pinochet' and alleged drunken behaviour". In 2004 OUCA's ex-treasurer was found guilty of bringing the organisation into disrepute after writing an article claiming that "the problem with India is its culture [which is] stained by two main features which hold the country down continually with little sign of change: democracy and Hinduism". In late 2007 OUCA members were exposed in the student press for singing drinking songs that went "Dashing through the Reich/In a black Mercedes Benz/Killing lots of kikes/Ra ta ta ta".
Every time OUCA is exposed, the national Tory party disowns either the individuals implicated or the organisation as a whole. This time around, the national Conservative line is that the racist jokers in question have been suspended from the party. Previously, the Conservative party has claimed that it is not affiliated with OUCA: both Conservative Future and Conservative central office have claimed to be disaffiliated from OUCA for much of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Yet this official excuse of non-affiliation is hard to square with the Conservative party's friendly relations with OUCA. In 2008 five members of the shadow cabinet - including David Cameron and George Osborne - spoke at OUCA meetings. This year alone, John Redwood, Michael Gove, Viscount Monckton, newly re-elected Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, Edward Leigh (chair of the uber-rightwing Cornerstone group) and former Tory leader Michael Howard have all spoken at OUCA.
But then, it's hardly surprising that OUCA and the Conservative party are on such friendly terms. OUCA's alumni include Margaret Thatcher, William Hague, Jonathon Aitken, Lord Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan.
OUCA is a breeding ground for future Tory stars. It is not a fringe organisation trying to jump on the establishment bandwagon, it's the youth wing of the national party. That's why so many top Tory politicians were members, and why so many still attend OUCA events. Yet time and again OUCA members are exposed as racists.
So it should be no surprise that Cameron wants to move his party to be affiliated with racists in Europe - the Conservatives have long been affiliated with them.