I can understand the Conservative case for letting Turkey into the European Union. It will destabilise the EU and will lock Turkey in with the West like it locked France in when De Gaulle, er, took France out of NATO. Is the European Union really less powerful than it was when we joined it and there were only twelve members? Maastricht, Lisbon and the Single European Act would argue that it hasn’t.
So letting Turkey in will fail in any geopolitical gambit.
And what about the practical effect on us here? Bridge ward, particularly the Old Stoke part, has been a magnet for Eastern European immigrants. This has clearly put wages down and rents up, and it also has had an effect on school rolls – although its not really affected the doctor’s surgeries.
Turkey will be more of the same. Much more. The rural heart of Turkey is both poorer and more populous than Eastern European countries. And did I mention illiteracy? There is also the issue of an increasingly more militant Islam. We’re assuming that Turkish kids will be immune from this, because the Turkish upper middle class used to be. That’s one massive assumption.
The Conservatives canvassed on the basis that they would listen to people’s concerns on immigration and take them seriously. If the Conservatives simply put a cap on skilled immigration and then drown this out through a far larger increase in the amount of people allowed in through EU accession they will not be forgiven or forgotten. David Cameron’s guff that Turkey was always improving and so there wouldn’t be anything to worry about on immigration sounds a bit like Tony Blair assuring us that there would only be a few thousand people coming in from the EU accession states. We could put Blair’s mistake down to ignorance, Cameron won’t have the same excuse.
The left has sacrificed the interests of the working class to trendy concerns in favour of windmills and against church going, the Conservatives promised to listen. Letting Turkey in to the EU is not listening.
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