David Cameron this morning claimed that people who wish to leave the EU are ‘taking a risk with people’s jobs, taking a risk with families’ finances.’ Well then let us consider an even bigger risk that David Cameron is taking.
In a visit to Turkey in 2010 our own Prime Minister announced that he would do everything he could to ensure Turkey entered the EU. Speaking as a guest of the country’s Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, our own PM said, ‘Turkey deserves its place at the top table of European politics – and that is what I will fight for.’
Since then he has indeed been fighting to get Turkey into the EU. This is despite Turkey doing everything it can to demonstrate that it has no place in the EU. Its government has been arresting opponents, raiding the offices of critical newspapers and locking up journalists who dare to criticise the Islamist direction of the country. Simultaneously it has done everything it can to prolong and inflame the Syrian civil war, making special efforts to bomb our Kurdish allies. And of course it is a country whose security situation has now deteriorated so badly that Turkey increasingly resembles the neighbour it has been doing so much to wreck.
All this while it has also been allowing illegal migrants to flood into Europe from across the Far East and Middle East. And now it is blackmailing the EU by taking billions of Euros off the terrified Europeans to ‘stem’ this flood of people. But they are doing so only on the condition that visa restrictions are relaxed for the 75 million Turks who might then be able to travel freely into Europe. And so at the point of utmost danger, David Cameron will extend the EU’s borders to Iraq and Syria.
Has he changed his mind at all? It would appear not.
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