Toby on Tuesday 

‘A complete collapse of intelligence’

Here in Yorkshire, we are exceptionally lucky in having two outstanding UKIP MEP’s in Jane Collins and Mike Hookem. They complement each other and both have brought practical experience of the real world to their new lives in the European Parliament. Mike’s background is in the Armed Forces, where you would have thought that he had seen something of the murky side of life. But our Armed Forces, still the finest on the planet, live according to their own strict code which could not be more removed from that of the EU. So even Mike was astonished by the scale of sheer criminality when the other day he was threatened with a handgun by an illegal immigrant in a camp outside Dunkirk. These migrant camps in Northern France, driven as they are by people-traffickers and other villains, are now the most potent images of our EU membership, images that no amount of hand-wringing by powerless ministers, desperate not to offend our so-called “partners”, can eradicate.

But today I want to write not about illegal immigration through Calais but rather through Istanbul in Turkey, which has received literally billions in “pre-accession funding” as it presses on with its application for full EU membership. Now, in order to seek influence across Africa and the Middle East, Turkey has created an e-visa entry regime. This is open to 89 countries including Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan. It requires just the completion of a simple e-form, a fee payable online and a flight into Istanbul using either Turkish Airlines or Turkey’s Pegasus Airlines. For its part, Turkish Airlines flies to virtually the whole Islamic world, including Somalia. And it is calculated that there are now some 100,000 temporary migrants in Istanbul, preparing for the next leg of their journeys into Greece and then on to Northern Europe, not least to Britain. For them, the Istanbul route is a fair bit more expensive than the boat across the Mediterranean, but a good deal more straightforward. It is also highly profitable for Turkey.

Even Frontex, the EU’s borders agency, has finally acknowledged that Turkey’s e-visa regime is open to “countries of origin for irregular migration to the EU…an increasing number of people arriving in the EU from Turkey…are using forged and fraudulent travel documents.” The truth is that the whole EU dream is turning into an unqualified nightmare and we will only regain control of our borders when we bid farewell to this terminal disaster. And it seems well-nigh incredible that our own weak Government, urged on by the U.S. State Department, is still seeking Turkish accession to the EU, despite the ongoing war against the Kurds. Now, as Mike Hookem knows better than most, this year sees the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War. Peter Weir’s 1981 film “Gallipoli”, starring Mel Gibson, still resonates after more than 30 years. As the film showed, the principal cause of the disaster of Gallipoli, the Turkish peninsula at the tip of the Dardanelles straits, was a complete collapse of intelligence. As we seek to stem the tide of illegal immigration from Turkey and elsewhere a century later, an equal collapse of intelligence, albeit of another kind, is again the dominating feature!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby