18 October 2007
A senior parliamentarian of the ruling British Labour Party has compared the UK government's stance on the new European Union treaty to the appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s, provoking the fury of foreign secretary David Miliband, who is Jewish. European Scrutiny Committee chairman Michael Connarty told Miliband during a two-hour hearing on the EU treaty: "I have visions of peace in our time" – a reference to then prime minister Neville Chamberlain's Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938. Connarty said he was "shocked" that the UK was defending parts of the treaty when it surrendered more powers from the UK to the EU institutions. Miliband said he had been "cut to my absolute quick" by the comparison. "You are saying this is the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain coming back in the late 1930s from Munich claiming to have an agreement with Adolf Hitler. That is not worthy of any of you."
Miliband is from an immigrant family of Polish Jews and his father fled the Holocaust from Belgium in 1940. Connarty said he was sorry if he had offended the secretary’s sensitivities, but added: "They are your sensitivities, not mine." The row came as prime minister Gordon Brown prepares for an EU summit in Lisbon tomorrow which will finalize the text of the controversial replacement for the abandoned constitution. Last week the committee published a report which found it was "substantially equivalent" to the original document which was shed after "no" votes in French and Dutch referendums.