Fast forward only a few days and a failed coup sees the country lurch even further towards being another Islamic hell-hole, with a future that at best looks like Iran, but probably more like Syria. And Erdogan, the US ally (So close an ally that the US keep nuclear bombs in Turkey!), leader of a ‘moderate’ Turkey, and future member of the EU, is gleefully using this coup and calling it a ‘Gift from God’ as an excuse to purge the army from its secularists, and if he gets his way, to execute his political opposition, literally.

And the ramifications for Europe are… gargantuan.

Turkey has absorbed a huge number of refugees from Syria and other parts of the middle east and islamic world. Many of those refugees were able to get on with life in Turkey at least to some degree, working jobs or starting businesses and having the opportunity to begin to rebuild. If Turkey suddenly starts to fragment the way Syria has, these people will be very quick to keep moving, given they have no real attachment to their present location, meaning that conflict in Turkey could easily lead to another wave of refugees into Europe, intermingled once again with migrants and opportunists, that could dwarf the waves we’ve seen in the last two years.

Now stop and consider what the consequences of all this might have been if Turkey was a member of the EU? What if anyone in Turkey had free movement throughout all of the EU? Even now you have to wonder what might trigger a wave of people from Turkey to head for Greece, putting their already stretched emergency services, not to mention national budget, under even more pressure, and further bolstering the attitudes and arguments of anti-immigration nationalists.

There’s no good outcome from any of this, and now that Erdogan has started his ‘purge’, don’t expect his lurch to the Islamist right to stop any time soon. The further right he goes, the more fanatical his support will become. This coup was probably calculated by the military to be necessary in order to avoid Turkey becoming the kind of country that Ataturk warned against, an Islamic one.

So if I were a Brit I’d be breathing a sigh of relief, and hoping the government would hurry up with invoking article 50, and getting England the hell out of Dodge as fast as possible. Yes the UK are not part of the free movement zone, but their economic fate is very much tied to the EU, and another shock to the economic and political integrity of the EU right now will be devastating.

I said in my previous post about Brexit that I’d rather be England than the EU right now, that the future prospects for the UK are actually quite good, and for the EU… not so much. The events in Turkey since that post only strengthen my view.

The market seems to share my post Brexit optimism, despite many gloomy headlines and opinion pieces from the largely left media pack:

Where’s the economic disaster? The destroying of the UK economy?

Now it’s true that markets aren’t perfect predictors of the future, but they’re a damn sight better than headlines! But even better than markets or headlines for predicting the future performance of a country, is it’s culture and especially its freedom. More freedom = better future. With mainland Europe heading towards a mixture of cultural suicide and reactionary fascism, depending on where you look, and with Turkey now amping up the pressure in the already fit-to-explode middle east… I’d say that the UK picked the right moment to reassert its sovereignty and right to set its own rules, not to mention untether itself from the fast-sinking future of the EU.

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