Wednesday 9th March

I am sorry to appear such a doom monger but the panic-driven ‘deal’ cooked up by the EU with Turkey will only make things worse, if that is even imaginable.  At the moment there are between two and three million Syrian refugees in Turkey, most in camps, but many desperately trying to get to Europe.

The proposed deal is three-fold.  The most radical idea is that there will be a one-for-one deal with Turkey.  That is, for every rejected asylum seeker who arrives in Greece and is returned to Turkey, one ‘legitimate’ refugee will be accepted from Turkey to Europe.  Sounds okay, but there is already chaos in Greece where overwhelmed officials are trying and failing to process the thousands arriving daily.  So, who will decide who is legitimate, and who will transport them back to Turkey, and who in Turkey will decide who will be let in to Europe.  The possibilities for corruption, already rife, are enormous.  And crucially there is no incentive for Turkey to stop people leaving on those perilous journeys; in fact you could say there is an incentive for the opposite.

Secondly the EU is paying Turkey anywhere between 2 and 4 billion euros to ‘help’ them cope with the chaos of all those refugees (to keep them in camps actually), a bribe if ever there was one.  The third part of the deal will be an easing of Visa restrictions for Turkish nationals to come and work in Europe.  As if Turkish immigrants are any better than Syrian ones.  There will likely be an even larger exodus from the Middle East to Europe.  Also Turkey wants its own EU application to be speeded up.  How big do we want Europe to become?  Why not Israel too, after all they are in Eurovision?  And to be frank Turkey does not have a half-decent human rights record, and their government is daily killing Kurds in the East of that vast country.

If anything will push people into voting to leave the EU, then the continued incompetence of the European Union in dealing with this issue may well do it.  The irrational but very real fear of our being ‘swamped’ by firstly Eastern Europeans and now by Turkish and Syrian and beyond Muslims will be played upon by UKIP and the ‘outers’.  We must really deal with this human crisis by using European money to properly assimilate these poor war-torn people and let them work and contribute to our societies rather than keep them penned-up in refugee camps whether in Turkey or Syria itself.  Amazing that we found the money to bail out the banks and yet when people are dying and suffering we can do nothing but wring our hands and say we can do nothing…