Turkey joining the EU? Over my dead dog's body - Jeremy Clarkson
'Back in the summer, Mr Cameron made an impassioned plea for Turkey to be allowed to join the European Union. I'm sure up & down Britain people called Nigel & Annabel nodded sagely at these kind words. Many middle-class couples take boating holidays off Turkey's idyllic coast and come home with ornate birdcages and lovely rugs...
It all sounds fine, then. But I've just spent a bit of time in Turkey and I don't think it's fine at all. And not just because the barmaid at my hotel had only one word of English, which was "no". This made ordering a beer extremely complicated.
First of all, I didn't go to Istanbul or one of those turquoise coves you see in the brochures, because that would be like judging Britain on a brief trip to London and Padstow in Cornwall. No, I went to the eastern part. The region the Foreign Office warns us to avoid. Turkey's Lancashire. And I'm sorry, but the only thing I want less in the EU is rabies. It was absolutely awful.'
'In my view, a country must have certain standards before it can become a member of the EU, and my No 1 line in the sand is dead dogs at the side of the road. Of course, you occasionally see a rotting mongrel in Portugal and it's very sad. But in Turkey they lie there like the forest of single shoes we see by the A1. Thousands of them. Maybe they are used as handy direction pointers when one is having friends over for dinner. "Left at the labrador. Right by the dalmatians' head, and if you see the sausage dog, you've gone too far." The EU is supposed to be a group of civilised countries working as one. And I'm sorry again, but accepting a country that can't be bothered to clear up its dead dogs would be like Boodle's private members' club accepting a man who thinks it acceptable to masturbate in public.'
'Sadly, though, there are other issues that must be addressed. Petrol, for example. I realise, of course, that if you water it down a bit, you can increase your profits dramatically. Furthermore, when your customer breaks down with a ruined engine, he will be many miles away, with no means of coming back to your place of business with a pick axe handle. But it's not on. Even the Spanish have cottoned on to this.'
'It's the same story with plumbing. The idea is that when you pull the chain on a lavatory, the contents of the bowl are taken far away from your nose; not fanned directly into the air-conditioning system, which itself is made from decaying dogs. This sort of thing may be acceptable in Mexico, but not in what should be seen as the world's boutique.'
'We must also address the violence. Yes, we have road rage in Britain and it's not particularly edifying, but in Turkey it seems that if someone carves you up in traffic, you are legally entitled to leap from your car and beat him to death. And then there is the transport infrastructure. A road is a complicated piece of engineering. Foundations must be dug. Many different types of stone and gravel must be laid and compressed and hardened before a top coat of asphalt is laid. Filling a crop dusting aircraft with grey paint and flying over the desert may be cheap, but you end up with something so bumpy that your eyes stop working properly and you fail to see the next military checkpoint.'
Mr. Clarkson ends with:
'And there's the thing. Mr Cameron says it's not reasonable to expect someone to guard the camp and then not be allowed inside the tent. But that's not true, is it? My local policeman guards my house from vagabonds and thieves but that doesn't mean I want him to come and sit by the fire every night.'
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