Nigel Farage and Michael Gove say Turkey is about to join Europe.
What they don’t say is that it would first need to prove it is a modern European democracy. That means ticking 35 boxes on everything from human rights to the economy. Even then, we or any of the other 27 members could just say no.
Turkey applied to join nearly 30 years ago, in 1987. Since then, it has ticked just one. At this rate, it will join the EU in 986 years. In the year 3002!
If you want Farage and Gove to stop being chicken over Turkey sign our petition against migration scaremongering. We will deliver the signatures to Vote Leave’s HQ in London.
It is not wise to trivialise concerns about Turkish membership of the EU. They have been expressed in reputable quarters. On 19.04.16 David Lidington gave evidence to the House of Lords EU Select Committee. He is a decent and hard-working Minister in the face of the extra work he has had and I do not wish to traduce him. However, in response to the Liberal Democrat Peer, Baroness Falkner of Margravine, not a known racist and, as far as I know, in favour of Remain, he did not give the kind of assurances she was seeking about moving the borders of the EU to Syria which is what Turkish EU membership would mean.
The triangulation on the question of Turkey is that they are members of NATO and masters of the agreement on blocking migrants which they might use as leverage to advance their position. Having had their boots licked by Angela Merkel, they used their status to visit their depredations on Nagorno Karabakh.
Since making the agreement on migrants they have sacked their Prime Minister. Reservations about them from respectable politicians make it the less likely that they will join the EU soon. However, we must reckon on the basis that they might make it in decades (ie 20 years) as the PM told the Liaison Committee.
One member state of 28 persistently blocking unanimity among the 27 others to allow Turkey to join cannot go on indefinitely whatever the rules say because someone in that eventuality will change them. We should still vote remain because Turkey should be defied to renege on the migrant agreement whereupon we will be better placed to deal with wall-to-wall migrants from within the EU and not outside it as has just been demonstrated with the Albanian boatload in the English Channel.
Furthermore, if we leave the EU and Turkey joins, Turkey will be a member of the EU and NATO and we will only be members of NATO. As they will then take our place among 28 members, 22 EU states will be members of NATO and we will be one of 6 in NATO that is not a member of the EU that can be outvoted.
The other alternative is not to keep Turkey in NATO merely to put their boots on the ground against Daesh because we are too cowardly to call up our own. If we vote remain, we can have some say in the EU about a common policy on the middle east which should not include letting Turkey participate while it murders kurds among its own people.