Toby on Tuesday

'Train wrecks and Turkeys'

Today, I’d like to talk Turkey.   Rather, I’d like to talk about how Britain can avoid being taken for a turkey or, put another way, how we need some cold turkey to wean us off our addiction to the whole toxic EU project.   I thought of these old sayings recently when reading a sobering report entitled “Is Turkey becoming another Pakistan” by the impressive Mark Almond.   Now, Mark Almond is a former lecturer in Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford and visiting professor at Turkey’s Bilkent University.   He is now writing “Secular Turkey:  A Short History”.   He also has his own blog on markalmondoxford.blogspot.com, which is well worth a visit.   He is someone who knows his subject all too well.

And what his report says is, “...over the last few years a slow-motion train wreck in Turkey has become increasingly apparent...Like his allies in Nato, Erdogan (Turkey’s President) had expected the Assad regime to implode as quickly as other Arab dictatorships in 2011.   But unlike the rest of the West, Erdogan took sides in the sectarian politics of Syria.   Turkey’s sympathy for jihadists there and its blind eye to weapons supplies to Isil have bitterly divided the Turkish public...The Turkish state’s failure to forestall such terrorism and its army’s response to an Isil attack on the Kurdish town of Kobani last year are works of malign indifference.   This fuels suspicions among Erdogan’s opponents that his government is behind terrorist violence that so often has Kurds as victims.   It is all horribly reminiscent of how Pakistan’s Inter-Services Institute intelligence agency played a double game with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan...Intensifying internal divisions while playing politics in a neighbour’s civil war is a recipe for recreating Pakistan’s problems on Europe’s doorstep.   That would be a disaster for us as well as the Turks.”

Now, this is the background against which we need to view the continuing negotiations between the EU, led by Germany, and Turkey’s government over the growing migration crisis.   The Turks are a very tough people who can be relied upon to seek maximum leverage over what they justifiably see as an enfeebled and decaying West.  They will play hardball, using threats of unlimited migration flows as their pawns in this particular game.   The deal now being brokered by Germany on behalf of the EU, is based on fast-track Turkish accession to EU membership and several billions of Euros of subsidy in return for Turkey providing some brake on the migrant flow to Europe.   Britain’s role in these negotiations is precisely zero, but we will bear the consequences in terms of cost and migration whatever the outcome.   And the way in which our own Foreign and Commonwealth Office is continuing to push for Turkish membership of the EU in the face of the evidence of serious academics like Mark Almond represents an astonishing dereliction of duty.

So if you are seeking an allegory for our weakened defences and myopia on the subject of Turkey, then look no further than the Turkish scrapyard Leyal Gemi Sokum.   That is where HMS York has recently followed HMS Southampton, HMS Newcastle, HMS Cardiff, HMS Glasgow, HMS Exeter, HMS Nottingham, HMS Plymouth, HMS Brilliant, HMS Invincible, HMS Ark Royal, HMS Oakleaf, HMS Edinburgh and HMS Gloucester to be scrapped on an open beach.   This is how our new “European Armed Forces” are taking shape.   The bean-counters in Whitehall have found a low-cost alternative to the specialist facility at Swansea Drydocks where just one Royal Navy ship, HMS Cornwall, has gone to be recycled.   No doubt, someone in Whitehall thought that this would help to “create goodwill” with Turkey, but in truth it represents yet another threat to our country on a par with Turkey’s planned EU accession.   In other words, the time has come to stop dancing the Turkey Trot and start protecting our own safety as a nation once more, however much this inconveniences Berlin and Brussels!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby