Conservative MP and UK’s former Secretary of State for Defence, Dr Liam Fox, while commenting on the present refugee crisis in Europe said that he believed that only 20% of refugees were genuinely from Syria. Many others are “fit, fast and educated single young men from Pakistan, Eritrea, Somalia and Afghanistan with mobile phones. Stories of migrants taking selfies on the train from Budapest to Munich and sending them home tell us they are economic migrants using the situation to get round EU controls,” he told The Sunday Guardian during an exclusive chat. He supported Prime Minister David Cameron’s strategy of accepting only verified refugees from camps, and drew attention to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s initial mistake in accepting an uncontrolled human flood which no doubt contained some of the “wrong sort of people”. He is concerned that at some stage these people, attracted by the UK’s new living wage, will have the right to come here, that is if UK stays in the European Union. He wants a looser, trading EU, and not a political project.
In Syria, he lamented the US absence of foreign policy as inexplicable and self-defeating. He has four criteria before military intervention in Syria: What does a good outcome look like? Can a good outcome be engineered? Does the UK have to be part of the engineering? How much of the aftermath does the UK want to own?
While talking about the EU, the Conservative MP from North Somerset confirmed that Turkey is of enormous geopolitical importance but has been largely ostracised from membership of the EU by xenophobic attitudes. The UK still want Turkey as an ally to act as a moderating influence in the Middle East but presently the battle for the soul of Turkey is on. The Conservative party is pro Turkey’s EU membership for the sake of geopolitical stability and to demonstrate that it’s possible to remain culturally Islamic and to share prosperity.
The MP is also concerned that Pakistan, one of the largest recipients of British aid, outwitted everyone and got 120 nuclear warheads and could feasibly develop 24 each year. The logical lesson learnt from this is to stop countries before they have nuclear capability; and this has led to the Iran nuclear agreement.