Western Goals Institute - Misplaced Pages

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The Western Goals Institute (WGI) was a far-right pressure group in Britain, formed at the beginning of 1989 from Western Goals (UK) (which originated in 1985 as an offshoot of the US Western Goals Foundation). Best known for its anti-communism and for its opposition to non-white immigration into Britain, it aimed to "combat the insidious menace of liberalism and Communism within all sectors of British society", and at the same time to create "a powerful international axis of the right" by forging links with hard right parties around the world. It worked towards these goals within the British Conservative Party, in particular via the rightwing Conservative Monday Club. The organisation folded in 2001 following the death of General Sir Walter Walker, although according to Western Goals director Andrew Smith it closed down in September 1992. Subsequent activities (1993-2001) were relatively limited. The Traditional Britain Group may be considered a successor organisation.

The group published numerous policy papers, as well as a short-lived newspaper called European Dawn (1989). The Institute or its predecessor was affiliated to the World Anti-Communist League (from February 1988 as the UK chapter of the WACL's youth wing, and from 1991 as the UK chapter of the senior World League, until in 1992 the World League declined to be further associated with the Institute) and sent a delegation to the 22nd WACL Conference in Brussels in July 1990.

Its leading patrons were General Sir Walter Walker, KCB, CBE, DSO, former NATO Chief of Staff, Major-General John K. Singlaub of the World Anti-Communist League, US Military Intelligence, and Major Patrick Wall, MC, VRD, RM. In 1989 its list of Vice-Presidents included Professor Antony Flew, Professor Tryggvi McDonald, Rev. Martin Smyth, M.P., The Tory peer Lord Sudeley, Dr. Harvey Ward, former head of the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation (today the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation), Colonel Barry Turner, the Rev. Basil Watson, OBE, MA, RN (Retd), and Gregory Lauder-Frost of the Conservative Monday Club. The Directorate consisted, until the mid-1990s, of Andrew V R Smith, Stuart Notholt, Gideon Sherman, and others.

Like the World Anti-Communist League, which became a leading arms supplier, Western Goals may have supported the anti-communist cause with more than rhetoric. UNHCR (2 July 1993) lists Western Goals Institute as an "impediment" to the elimination of racial discrimination in South Africa, saying of the Institute that it "claims to be devoted to protecting the Western way of life by offering self-defence training to white South Africans".

Conservative Party links

In the late 1980s WGI's predecessor, Western Goals (UK), built up a parliamentary advisory committee of Conservative MPs which included Sir Patrick Wall, Nicholas Winterton, Neil Hamilton, Bill Walker, and Rev Martyn Smyth. According to the Institute's literature, Western Goals campaigned within the Conservative Party to 'combat the insidious menace of liberalism and Communism within all sectors of British society' (Times, October 13 1989). To this effect it engineered what the Observer (February 24 1991) described as a "take over" of the Conservative Party's right-wing Conservative Monday Club in February 1991, with key WGI members taking positions in the club. In September 1992, Sir Norman Fowler, in an attempt to distance the Conservative Party from the Institute, said that "No one in Western Goals is known by Central Office to belong to our party". This followed the Institute's invitation of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Alessandra Mussolini to address a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference (the meeting was subsequently cancelled). The Institute rejected Fowler's remark, saying that by far the majority of those associated with the institute held Conservative Party membership.

In December 1991, after a visit by Le Pen at the request of the Institute, its Director Andrew Smith was quoted as saying "There is scope for a radical right alternative outside the Conservative Party. The Tories have betrayed their principles since Mrs Thatcher fell. With this contact with European leaders we are laying the foundations for a new party." (Observer, December 8 1991). The possibility of founding a new rightwing party, on the model of Le Pen's National Front, appears to have been abandoned after the Conservative Party's win in the April 1992 general election ensured that proportional representation stayed off the political agenda for the foreseeable future. However even at the time, the gradual defection of the parliamentary advisory committee and the decision of the leadership of the Monday Club and associated MPs to stay away from the Le Pen meeting made the prospect unlikely.

The Guardian later accused it of attempting "to infiltrate fascists into the Conservative Party" (Guardian, 18 August 1993). These claims were disputed by the WGI. The Jewish Chronicle reported on 25th September 1992 that Marc Gordon, director of the libertarian International Freedom Foundation urged the Conservative Party to expel members of Western Goals, and in the same newspaper on 2nd October Julian Lewis (now an M.P., then deputy head of Conservative Central Office's Research Department), said he would strongly advise local associations that Western Goals was hostile to Conservative objectives.

In a circular letter to supporters in late 1993, WGI stated that "the WGI remains opposed to a non-traditional Britain, and Europe, and we condemn the slide into general degeneracy visible everywhere. We condemn unacceptable numbers of immigrants, whether born here or not. We object to our economies being run by multi-nationals whose first consideration will never be the national good, but internationalism and profit." This last sentence would seem to set the WGI against the theories of free-market economics promoted by Thatcherism; ironically, most people on the WGI's wing of politics had enthusiastically supported Margaret Thatcher during the 1970s and for much of the 1980s.

Global links

WGI had links to a range of right-wing parties around the world, and invited representatives such as Jean-Marie Le Pen and Alessandra Mussolini to the UK. In February 1988, when Western Goals became the UK chapter of the WACL's youth wing, it helped organise a visit to Britain of the Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, leader of El Salvador's death squads, was President of Western Goals prior to his death in 1992, when he was replaced by Conservative Party of South Africa MP Clive Derby-Lewis.

WGI supported the apartheid regime of South Africa, and hosted a visit to the UK, in June 1989, by the hierarchy of the far-right Conservative Party of South Africa a hard-line breakaway from the National Party of South Africa which, at the time, held a third of the seats in the Republic of South Africa's parliament, including its leader Dr. Andries Treurnicht. A press conference was held for the delegation in a committee room of the House of Lords on 5 June. Conservative Party of South Africa MP Clive Derby-Lewis was made an honourary vice-president of the WGI. Derby-Lewis would later be tried and convicted for his role in the assassination of Chris Hani of the South African Communist Party.

On the 25 September 1989 Baron Sudeley chaired a Western Goals dinner at Simpsons-in-the-Strand for El Salvador's President, Alfredo Cristiani, and his inner cabinet. The guest list included figures such as Sir Alfred Sherman - policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher, Lord Nicholas Hervey, Professor Antony Flew, Andrew V R Smith, Dr.Zigmunt Szkopiak, Colonel Barry Turner,R.E.(Retd)., Sam Swerling, Gregory Lauder-Frost, W.Denis Walker, and Dr.Harvey Ward. .

In Europe, Western Goals gave their open support to the French 'Front National', the political party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. On 12 October 1989 WGI hosted a controversial fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, addressed by Front National MEP, Pierre Ceyrac. Western Goals also examined the possibility of links with the neo-fascist German party The Republicans, which in 1989 had six members in the European Parliament. It was led by Franz Shoenhuber, a TV presenter in Bavaria. On 12th August 1989 a delegation from the Western Goals Institute attended a massive anti-communist demonstration at Moln, near Lübeck, where 20,000 people had gathered. This was widely reported in the local press. It was organized by Die Deutschen Konservativen e.V., which was led by another media personality, Joachim Siegerist, now a parliamentarian in Riga, with whom the WGI had contacts.

Western Goals hosted a dinner for Jean-Marie Le Pen and his team at the Charing Cross Hotel in the Strand, London, at the beginning of December 1991 which was widely reported, with an exclusive appearing in "The Mail on Sunday" on 8 December. There was a large demonstration against the meeting outside the hotel and some damage to property took place, notably the hotel's front doors and surroundings, which were smashed. Western Goals director Andrew Smith later said that "On reflection the Le Pen visit was the zenith and also the beginning of the end."

Other activities

The group hosted social events including an Annual Dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria on 24 November 1989 when the guest of honour was Kenneth Griffith, who spoke out against non-European Third World immigration into Britain and Europe. On the 20 November 1990 they hosted the General Franco Memorial Dinner, commemorating the anniversary of his death. This was also chaired by Baron Sudeley. A WGI notice in The Times argued that the late ruler of Spain was "remembered as a hero against communism". Subsequently an invitation to Alessandra Mussolini to address a fringe meeting of the 1992 Conservative Party conference "caused outrage" and led to calls for a ban on her entering the country (Daily Mail, September 3, 1992).

Activities diminished and lack of finance reduced any subsequent campaigning to occasional policy papers, the glossy newsletter, and letters to editors, such as that by WGI Vice-President, Gregory Lauder-Frost, which appeared in The Scotsman in October 1994, opposing constitutional devolution. Another letter by Lauder-Frost, writing again as Vice-President, appeared in the London Evening Standard on 4 January 1995 which called for "witch-hunts" of traditionalists within the Conservative Party to cease, and for "the party to return to its original philosophies".

Yorkshire-based Anthony Murphy, who had been a prominent local Conservative in Bradford, and Chairman of the Yorkshire branch of the Monday Club, became the Secretary from 1993 - 1996. The group sent representatives to The Right Conference in London on 21 May 1994. In March 1995 the guest-of-honour at the Western Goals Annual Dinner, chaired by Gregory Lauder-Frost and held at the Grosvenor Hotel in Victoria, was Ulster Democratic Unionist Party M.P., Peter Robinson.

In January and February 1996 WGI issued two 'opinion papers' as a Press Statements, headed "The Monarchy in Crisis - Our Opinion", and "Crush the IRA" calling for the army's SAS to be deployed in Ulster, for Sinn Fein to be proscribed, and for a formal declaration by the British government that Ulster will remain an integral part of the United Kingdom in perpetuity.

In July 1997, Western Goals formally complained by letter to the BBC's Director-General that the BBC was "promoting minorities and minority opinion at the expense of the majority population" and that they had an institutionalised left-wing bias. Also in July 1997 Lauder-Frost, writing on behalf of the WGI, made a formal complaint to British Airways opposing the abolition of their traditional logo on plane tails, to be replaced by a logo which, in their response, BA said "represents a willingness to embrace different cultures".

On the 4 February, 1998 Western Goals sent a letter to the Evening Standard over their headline "Britain attacks Iraq Arsenal". The letter asked "what was the United Nations doing when the Soviet Union had all these weapons of mass destruction"? It called for Iraq's sovereignty to be respected. On the 1 March that year several of the 'Old Guard' from Western Goals went on the first Countryside Alliance march through London, followed by a luncheon at the Lansdowne Club.

In January 1999 the group wrote to the Daily Telegraph on two occasions, on the 21st attacking Margaret Beckett's 'instructions' to the hereditary peerage not to obstruct the legislation which would remove them from the House of Lords, and on the 28th, when they commented on the report of that day that Islamic terrorists were now living and training in Britain, and called for a halt to immigration. Their last sentence said "the alternative will be a disaster-in-waiting for all of us."

Their December 1999 mailing carried a personal letter from General Walker on WGI notepaper, calling for vigilance against 'the enemies within' and saluting Western Goals' 15 years of activity in Great Britain.

Notes

^1 The Guardian, April 24, 1993, "Guns, Goons and Western Goals, David Pallister, David Beresford and Angela Johnson report on the international connections of Clive Derby-Lewis, arrested by Chris Hani murder investigators"
^2 The Guardian, April 24, 1993, "Guns, Goons and Western Goals, David Pallister, David Beresford and Angela Johnson report on the international connections of Clive Derby-Lewis, arrested by Chris Hani murder investigators"
^3 The Guardian, April 24, 1993, "Guns, Goons and Western Goals, David Pallister, David Beresford and Angela Johnson report on the international connections of Clive Derby-Lewis, arrested by Chris Hani murder investigators"
^4 The Scotsman, December 1, 1994, "Court turns down appeals by murderers of Chris Hani"
^5 The Guardian, April 24, 1993, "Guns, Goons and Western Goals, David Pallister, David Beresford and Angela Johnson report on the international connections of Clive Derby-Lewis, arrested by Chris Hani murder investigators"

References

The Traditional Britain Group archives, BCM Box 9045, London, WC1N 3XX.
Various newspapers and TV programmes.

Some WGI publications

"European Dawn" short-lived tabloid newspaper on quality paper. July 1989 edition carried headlines on EEC Elections and "Reds to come clean over 1940?" Page 6 carries an article: "outcry grows over Hong Kong sell-out" and on page 7 there is a Tribute to Senator Joseph McCarthy. The September 1989 edition carries the headline "AIDS Crisis Deepens" with quotes by Jean Marie le Pen. Another front-page article states "Drugs Menace Crosses Atlantic". Page 4 carries a full-page article by Gregory Lauder-Frost entitled "Legacy of Betrayal" on supposed Western appeasement to communism. Page 6 carried a picture and article ont he visit to Britain of Dr.Andries Treurnicht, and page 7 carries an article entitled "Communist Tactics in Chile".

"Family Protection Scoreboard" magazine - Special full edition on "Liberation Theology", , editor David W. Balsiger, published by the National Citizens Action Network, Costa Mesa, CA92627, USA.,1989.

"Hit-job on Margaret Thatcher" WGI Viewpoint Paper, by John Wilkes. n/d but probably 1990.

"The Mandela Myth" WGI Viewpoint Paper, by James Gibb Stuart. June 1990.

"The Finance Factor" WGI Viewpoint Paper, by James Gibb-Stuart. n/d, but probably 1991.

"The Conservative Ethic" by James Gibb Stuart, April 1994, .

"Western Goals Political Briefing Papers" - glossy 4-page bi-annual editions. Editor: Gregory Lauder-Frost. Special 1997 General Election edition headlined "Britain: Province or Nation?. September 1998 edition headline: "New Labour and the New Face of Conservatism" with an inside article attacking the unveiling of 'left-wing' statues at Westminster Abbey. February 1999 edition headline states: "NO to Blair, NO to the Euro", with inside articles on "The Death of Free Speech" and "Nationalism". The Winter 1999 edition was headlined "The lies, the shame, the betrayal of Ulster" with an inside editorial attacking the the "Conservative Party", and another "Withdraw from the EU NOW!"