Distorted claims about Turkey

My eye’s recently been caught by a string of stories from Vote Leave, blatantly scaremongering about Turkey. Yet Boris Johnson and Douglas Carswell were both founder-members of Conservative Friends of Turkey, whose aims include to “Lobby in favour of Turkish membership of the EU”: have they had a politically-convenient change of heart?

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, which has been a church, a mosque, and is now a museum

The messaging has been blunt. The front page of Vote Leave’s web site currently (29 May 2016) leads with “Turkey joining the EU means even more stress on our country”. There have been posters from them saying Turkey is joining the EU, and an infographic on facebook showing a map of Europe with showing the population of Turkey as 77 Million, and an arrow from there to the UK, as if the entire population of Turkey is coming here. That makes UKIP’s wildly exaggerated claims about migration from Romania and Bulgaria a few years back seem moderate.

This is scaremongering, and grossly irresponsible.
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The fishing industry and the EU

Resentment at EU restrictions on fishing is leading many in the fishing industry to want to vote out. Their resentment is real, but their conclusion is wrong…

A Newlyn trawler
A Newlyn trawler

It is a sadly familiar story. The once-thriving British fishing industry now greatly reduced owing to EU fishing quotas, and, adding insult to injury, there are even regulations that require some fish to be thrown back into the sea. A news spot on Radio 4 recently showed Newlyn fishermen firmly behind Brexit. But this is the wrong conclusion: it attacks the EU at the time when the EU is acting to help the situation.

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European and local

A querk of the timing of EU referendum is that, now in late April 2016, I am campaigning both for election to Cambridge City Council and for a vote for the UK to remain in the EU. My election literature is clear that I am campaigning for both. How do they link?

Members of the Committee of the Regions standing in tribute to victims of the Brussels attacks
Members of the Committee of the Regions standing in tribute to victims of the Brussels attacks

My Independent opponent made a comment in a recent leaflet that we should keep Cambridge City Council elections local and that he was not going to talk publicly about his views in the EU. That set me thinking. I can see his point, but things are much more interconnected than that. At the very least, the stability brought by the EU means local councils don’t have to think about “the war effort” (or the war memorial) as they did in the twentieth century.

On the doorsteps we are a week away from the local elections and the EU referendum is two months away. Support for the Liberal Democrats and for EU membership are (mostly) going together, and there is a phalanx who clearly say they are voting “Independent and out”.

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Immigration and low pay

At first sight it can seem obvious that immigration undermines wages, at least in low-paid work. One of the rallying cries of the Eurosceptic right is about “foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs”. But is this true?

Migrant workers in East Anglia
Migrant workers in East Anglia

In an earlier post, I commented that “people at the bottom of the pile, resentful at the opportunities they feel they don’t have, are the ones who would lose most if these migrants stopped coming (or ‘went home’)”. I’d like to unpack this.

At first sight, challenging this seems counter-intuitive. In 2013, UKIP were spreading stories of 350,000-400,000 likely migrants from Romania and Bulgaria when restrictions on emigration were lifted. In reality, the number of EU migrants employed in the UK actually fell in the subsequent few months.

It’s hard to measure the effect of immigrants on wages, Continue reading “Immigration and low pay”