Turkey in Europe? Thanks but no thanks
The BBC today reports an exodus of Syrian refugees into Turkey – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13710588 Of course I feel sorry for the refugees – I’d do just as they are doing if I were a Syrian – but this little episode should remind us what an extraordinarily bad idea it would be to admit Turkey into the EU.
If Turkey was an EU member, as David Cameron, Liam Fox, Boris Johnson, Barack Obama and many others advocate, then not only would Turkish problems (which are enormous) become Europe’s problems, but so would the problems of every country which borders Turkey, which include such utopias as Syria, Iran and Iraq. That this obvious fact should need to be pointed out shows the inadequacy of the “debate” on this topic, at least in Britain. And yet this is just one of many excellent reasons for saying thanks but no thanks to Turkey. If you’re interested in some of the arguments, I have written about this here – http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/euro-centric/turkies/
and here
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/a_bridge_too_far_turkey_and_europe/
It’s puzzling that Conservative politicians in the UK (with one or two notable exceptions, like Roger Helmer) have not thought of taking this up as a campaigning issue.
Apart from anything else, it would be a good means of bludgeoning Brussels politicians (again, with notable exceptions, like Frits Bolkestein), who have been angling to admit Turkey for at least two decades, without taking the trouble to consult European electors for their views on whether Europe should change from being 5% to 15% Muslim overnight, or whether they would care to assume the financial burden of securing the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and Georgia, suppressing internal terrorism, subsidizing Turkish imports or improving the Cappadocian road network.
If they don’t do this, either UKIP or even Labour will co-opt Turkey as a populist vote-winner. The latter may sound unlikely, but it has already been advocated by Matt Cavanagh, a former Labour adviser on home affairs, writing in an IPPR booklet of last year called Immigration Under Labour. We should not forget that since taking office, Ed Miliband has been striking regular “man-of-the-people” poses about immigration, and it is would be easy for him to co-opt white working class voters by portraying the Tores as being “out of touch” on this. We shall have to watch and learn! Derek Turner, 9 June 2011
