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

Toby on Tuesday

'The Jellicle Choice'

“Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity
There never was a cat of such deceitfulness and suavity
He always has an alibi and one or two to spare
Whatever time the deed took place, Macavity wasn’t there!”

Anyone who has seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Cats’, his brilliant adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’, will remember Macavity: The Mystery Cat. He was the arch-villain of all cats and, like David Cameron, a “cat of such deceitfulness and suavity” who always slipped away from trouble, leaving others to pick up the pieces. But very soon this particular cat will be found out for his “renegotiation” that’s no renegotiation and his “EU reform” when there’s no reform.
Last week I wrote about Nigel Lawson and his Conservatives for Britain campaign. Since then, Conservatives for Britain, Labour for Britain and Business for Britain have joined forces in a new Vote Leave campaign. And strengthened by the presence of some very determined UKIP luminaries, they have finally dropped the mantra of ‘Reform or Leave’. Wisely, they have recognised that there will be no reform and to leave the EU is the only option now that a European Superstate looms with open borders to some of the most dangerous countries on the planet. In particular our one MP, Douglas Carswell, and our former Treasurer, Stuart Wheeler, have thrown their lot in with the new Vote Leave campaign. You can find out more if you google www.voteleavetakecontrol.org.

Now, in UKIP as a party we have already committed ourselves to the Leave.EU campaign (www.ukip.org/leave_eu_campaign), which has been working away steadily for unconditional withdrawal from the whole toxic EU project. But the truth is that both campaigns have a vital role to play and, in Nigel Farage’s own words, they are “complementary” and not “contradictory”. The Vote Leave campaign is in essence a sophisticated London-based organisation aimed at those vital opinion-formers in the capital, hence the involvement of Douglas Carswell and Stuart Wheeler. By contrast, Leave.EU, like UKIP, is a non-metropolitan campaigning organisation aimed at the countless millions of ordinary voters, some 4 million of whom supported UKIP in May’s General Election. It already claims 175,000 members and Nigel, perceptive as ever, has predicted that in time the two organisations will merge. In his words, “My view is that I will support both. I’m not interested in being partisan about this and I’m really confident that at some point in time they will all come together.” Both campaigns include truly outstanding people who recognise that Macavity, in the form of our Prime Minister, will be sent back empty-handed from Berlin and Brussels, which no amount of “deceitfulness and suavity” will disguise. Farewell to the EU is the only way forward for Britain, so Vote Leave and Leave.EU are far, far better combining their forces. My hope and sincere belief is that Nigel’s wise words will be fulfilled!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Once you pay him the Danegeld'

All members of UKIP know their Anglo-Saxon history and all know about Danegeld. This was the tribute paid in the 10th and 11th centuries to the Viking marauders to save our country from being ravaged. Of course it did no good. Kipling wrote a poem about it in which he declared,

“We never pay anyone Danegeld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of the game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”

Of course the modern equivalent of Danegeld is our £13 billion or so annual contribution to the EU budget, similar in so many ways to our bloated Overseas Aid budget. And our EU tribute is soaring while our influence is as derisory as the Anglo-Saxons’ influence on the Vikings. I thought about all this when reading about the latest “Reform or Leave” campaign, this time from Nigel Lawson’s Conservatives for Britain.

Now, Nigel Lawson was a wonderfully gifted Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1989, determined to reduce the shackles of the state and to energise Britain’s wealth creators. More recently, he has applied his great forensic skills to the global climate change industry. Of course his weakness as Chancellor lay in too great a trust in Germany’s economy, first in his policy of shadowing the Deutschmark and then in his support for the ill-fated European Exchange Rate Mechanism, an absolute disaster which almost obliterated Britain’s economy and drove around a million firms into bankruptcy. So I read his article announcing his presidency of Conservatives for Britain with close interest. What he wrote was,
“…now is the time for David Cameron and George Osborne to set out some red lines. My priorities would be fourfold: the end of the automatic supremacy of EU law over UK law; the ability for the UK to negotiate its own free trade deals with fast-growing countries such as India and China; the ability to control immigration from other EU countries to the UK; and the explicit renunciation by the EU of its absolute commitment to ‘ever closer union’…If we were able to secure those sorts of reforms I would be delighted.”

Now Nigel Lawson is no fool. He must know that these aspirations are in the realms of fantasy, while he makes no mention of our Danegeld, our annual tribute, which must surely concern the Treasury. When Michael Howard was Conservative leader, the party’s policy was to withdraw from the Common Fisheries Policy and to reclaim our coastal waters, with all the connotations of our again becoming a maritime and global trading nation. One of David Cameron’s first acts as Conservative leader was to drop this commitment and, to continue the maritime analogy, he can be relied on to do simply nothing that rocks the Euro-boat. So it just seems a little strange that the clever, experienced, well-intentioned people behind Conservatives for Britain cannot bring themselves to accept that “reform or leave” is not a sustainable position.

No acceptable reform is available and indeed David Cameron is seeking only the most innocuous of changes, as he is psychologically wedded to the whole EU project. Far better for Nigel Lawson and his colleagues to join forces with all those who accept that “leave” is now the only sustainable position, including our friends in Leave.EU, settle any differences and together work for Britain’s independence and prosperity, while the whole doomed EU venture descends swiftly into recrimination and chaos.

Until next Tuesday!
Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Welcome to the house of fun'

Peter Kellner is a former BBC Newsnight reporter who went on to found the YouGov opinion polling organisation of which he is now President. His wife, Cathy Ashton, also known as Baroness Ashton of Upholland, is a Labour politician who from 2009 to 2014 was the EU’s “High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and First Vice-President of the European Commission.” You couldn’t make up a job title like that but in the La-La Land that is the EU it all means something. Indeed Mr. and Mrs. Kellner as they are otherwise known are among the most favoured of the EU’s Nomenklatura, to use an old Soviet expression. And where all this is significant is that for the very first time a YouGov poll last week revealed that more Britons now want to leave the EU (40 per cent.) than to remain (38 per cent.) Despite the best efforts of those who govern us, including the pollsters, the determination that Britain should bid farewell to the whole toxic project has gone mainstream and the “Leave” campaign is about to hot up.

Now, the European Union Referendum Bill is working its way through Parliament. It went through the House of Commons before the recess and is now before the members of the House of Lords, including Baroness Ashton of Upholland. The formal first reading took place last month but this will be the critical month for the legislation. Next Tuesday 13th October the second reading and debate will take place and this is where the fun will start. All those Eurofanatics, with whom the House of Lords has been packed in the years of Blair and Brown, Clegg and Cameron, will do their utmost to rig the Referendum in favour of a “Remain” outcome, irrespective of the wishes of the British people. To start with, they will press for 16 and 17-year olds to be able to vote in the Referendum, even though they cannot do so in Parliamentary elections. Whether or not the voting age should be lowered is a separate matter, but you can just see the swarms of Eurozealots, all funded by the EU, buzzing round our schools agitating that the sky will fall in if Britain were to leave the EU as the majority now want. Students have better things to do than be subjected to this kind of propaganda, which will almost certainly be counter-productive anyway.

There will be all kinds of other shameless attempts, too, to tamper with the Bill in the House of Lords. All of which will of course only increase pressure for wholesale reform of the so-called ‘Upper House’. This is a wider issue, but the reality is that it now speaks only for a redundant political class, with just a few notable exceptions the random leftovers from the past generation who should have long departed the political stage. A reformed and elected House of Lords, drawn from the four nations that constitute the United Kingdom and constituted to reconcile the differences between them, must be the way ahead. But that’s for another day. In this post, all that I can say is “Watch out for fun and games in the House of Lords” – there’ll be plenty of those before the Referendum Bill finally becomes law. The Electoral Commission, which has behaved impeccably so far in ensuring that the Eurozealots from the three old parties do not fix the outcome, will have a busy time ahead, as indeed we all will!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby