Ekip
17 July 2018•Update: 17 July 2018
By Muhammad Mussa
LONDON
A key figure in the leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum on Tuesday admitted the campaign should not have stoked fears of Turkish immigration.
In an interview with the Guardian, Michael Gove, the environment secretary, said if he had been the in-charge “the leave campaign would have had a slightly different feel.”
Gove had claimed ahead of the referendum that Turkey and other countries in Europe could join the EU as early as 2020 and that their membership would see an influx of 5.2 million people arriving in the U.K.
“I would have to go back and look at everything I said and think whether that was the right response at the right time. There is a sense at the back of my mind that we didn’t get everything absolutely right. It’s a difficult one,” Gove said.
Turkey’s accession to the EU was a theme regularly used by the leave campaign to stoke fears of increased immigration to the U.K. and to influence the public in voting to leave the EU.
Leave campaigners in 2016, according to local media, had argued that the NHS was already cash-strapped due to the current number of immigrants arriving in the U.K. However, they failed to realize that this was due to increasing government cuts to funding and support.
“With the terrorism threat that we face only growing, it is hard to see how it could possibly be in our security interests to open visa-free travel to 77 million Turkish citizens and to create a border-free zone from Iraq, Iran and Syria to the English Channel,” Gove had said in the 2016 interview with Sky News.
