With representatives from France, Germany, Italy and Ireland, Ian Dunt will be chairing a panel to leave this shores and look at the UK’s messy breakup with the European Union from beyond our borders – and find out what our neighbours really think of Britain in these turbulent times.

Chair:

Ian Dunt is editor of politics.co.uk. He specialises in issues around immigration, civil liberties, democracy, free speech and social justice and appears regularly on the BBC, Sky and Al-Jazeera as well as a variety of radio stations. He also writes lifestyle columns for other publications and websites.

Speakers:

Stefanie Bolzen is the UK and Ireland Correspondent for German WELT and Sunday edition WELT am Sonntag. Since 2016, a lot of her reporting has focused on Brexit and its economic implications for the European Union. Until 2013, she worked as WELT’s Europe Correspondent in Brussels, covering EU and NATO affairs. Previously, she was a foreign news reporter and editor for Die Welt in Berlin covering issues including EU enlargement, the Balkan conflicts, and energy policy.

Antonello Guerrera is UK & Ireland Correspondent for La Repubblica, a leading Italian newspaper and the most read news website in Italy. He works at La Repubblica since 2012: before becoming Ireland and UK Correspondent, he was journalist on the foreign desk. During his career, he has reported from the United States, England, Ireland, continental Europe, Chile and South Africa, covering everything from the 2017 Manchester attack to the funerals of Winnie Mandela. Before joining La Repubblica, he held positions at Il Post, Internazionale, Il Riformista and La Gazzetta dello Sport, the leading sport newspaper in Italy.

Marion Van Renterghem is a multi-award winning French reporter, very much focused on European countries. Now a free-lance journalist and an author, she worked at the daily Le Monde for some 30 years. She just finished a book on the rise of populism in Europe, to be out on May 6 in France. Her latest book, a profile of Angela Merkel, has won one of the Simone Veil Awards (dedicated to the memory of the former French minister and President of the European Parliament).

photograph courtesy of T Smith, Flickr, via Creative Commons.

  Watch the video stream of Brexit The Outsiders – The Empire’s New Clothes

Chris Wylie is coming tonight to disclose the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica and its massive data breach of 50 million Facebook accounts to manipulate public opinion.

In 2013, 23-year old CHRIS WYLIE, a Canadian analytics guru who had worked on the Obama campaign, was recruited as head of research for SCL Ltd. Within months he met Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer to set up Cambridge Analytica – an election machine designed to win the 2016 US Presidential elections, using Brexit as its ‘petri dish’

The award-winning Observer journalist, CAROLE CADWALLADR persuaded Chris to come forward as the key whistleblower last year. In conversation with Byline’s PETER JUKES both will discuss the story behind one of the biggest political scandals of this century.

Buy your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-most-important-whistleblower-since-snowden-the-mind-behind-cambridge-analytica-tickets-44257837383

Chair

Tom Burridge was the BBC Spain correspondent before recently moving back to London. He has been in Barcelona covering the referendum since the events began. Tom has worked as a correspondent for the BBC across Europe and Africa. Before this he was based in the Ukraine, and covered the war in Donbass in 2014.

Speakers

Professor Paul Preston is the Director of Cañada Blanch Centre at the Department of International History LSE. His main fields of interests are Anglo-Spanish relations; contemporary Spanish politics; defence policy; European fascism; European left; Gibraltar; Spain; Spanish army; Spanish history, the Spanish Civil War, the Franco Regime, the transition to democracy in Spain. Paul Preston studied for his undergraduate degree at the Oriel College, Oxford before moving to the University of Reading where he gained his MA in European Studies. He moved back to Oriel College to work on his PhD.

John Carlin is a journalist and writer who deals with both sports and politics among other things. Carlin began his career writing in Mexico and Central America for publications such as The Times, The Sunday Times and The Toronto Star. From 1995–1998 he was the United States bureau chief for The Independent on Sunday. In August 2008, Carlin published the book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation. Carlin won the 2000 El País Ortega y Gasset Award for journalism. He has won numerous other awards for his writing in Spain and Italy.

Raphael Minder (Skype)  has been based in Madrid as the Spain and Portugal correspondent for The New York Times since April 2010. He has written extensively on the financial crisis’ impact on Spain and Portugal and the resulting political tensions, including the secessionist drive in Catalonia. He has just published a book The Struggle for Catalonia. Rebel Politics in Spain.   Before this, Raphael spent ten years as a staff correspondent for the Financial Times in Paris, Brussels, Sydney and finally Hong Kong, as regional correspondent for Asia.

Professor Mireia Jofre-Bonet is Director of the MSc in Health Economics and the MSc in Economic Evaluation in Healthcare at City, University of London. She is a Senior Associated Researcher at LSE Health (London School of Economics and Political Sciences) and belongs to the London International Development Centre. Prior to joining City, Professor Jofre-Bonet was a Lecturer at LSHTM, a Research Faculty member at the School of Public Health at Yale University, and taught at the Departments of Economics at the London School of Economics and at Yale University.

The documentary reveals the extraordinary scale of people smuggling across sub-saharan Africa – a multi billion pound industry described by some as a new “slave trade”.

As the EU desperately tries to cut the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, reporter Benjamin Zand (Winner of RTS young journalist of the year) and producer Joshua Baker (The Battle For Mosul)  investigate how hundreds of millions of Euros of EU funding is being spent– and asks if EU efforts to tackle the smugglers could be leaving some migrants in an ever more dangerous limbo.

Ben reveals how hard it will be to stop the trade, which employs millions of people  in some of the world’s poorest countries and traces the smuggling route from the shores of Libya, the gateway to Europe and one of the most brutal places on the migrant trail, back through the ghettos in the deserts of Niger, where the local economy is dependent upon human trafficking.

He finishes the investigation in Nigeria, where many begin their journey, and where young girls are committing themselves to years of prostitution to pay their way to Europe. On his journey, Ben hears the tragic stories of the migrants themselves and confronts the smugglers making fortunes from this criminal trade.

The post-screening discussion will be chaired by Gabriel Gatehouse. Gatehouse is Newsnight’s foreign correspondent on BBC2. Currently based in London, he started his career in Russia and the Ukraine, before moving to work in East Africa, Libya and more recently Iraq. In 2016, The British Journalism Awards listed Gatehouse as one of their winners in the category for “Foreign Affairs Journalism”.

Credits

Reporter/Producer: Benjamin Zand

Shooting Producer/Director: Joshua Baker

Assistant Producer: Lucy Osborne

Executive Producer: Diana Martin

Executive Editor: Jim Gray

President Erdogan’s campaign has been driven by anti-European rhetoric and led to stand-offs with Germany, The Netherlands and others. Declining relations between Turkey and the EU raise questions about the stability of Turkish economy, which is largely dependent on trade relations with the EU, and how Turkey will cope with the continuing strains of war, terrorist insurgencies, and the refugee crisis.

Our panel will reflect on President Erdogan’s fraught relationship with the EU in the context of the country’s political future after the April referendum.

Speakers (Full panel announced soon)

Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance journalist and Turkey correspondent for Newsweek, The Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has lived and worked in Istanbul for the past four years.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. She is also a political commentator and an inspirational public speaker. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published 15 books, 10 of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love and her most recent, Three Daughters of Eve.

Andrew Gardner has worked on human rights issues in Turkey for over ten years. Currently he is Researcher on Turkey for Amnesty International. Since joining the organization he has researched and written on issues including freedom of expression and assembly, torture, impunity for human rights abuses and refugee rights. He lives in Istanbul.

Le Pen’s core message promises an end to open borders, multiculturalism and free-trade. She has promised to hold a referendum on France’s membership of the EU and vows to limit immigration to 10,000 people per year.

As centre-right candidate Francois Fillon battles a financial scandal, Le Pen could end up facing liberal former banker, Emmanuel Macron – who is running his first ever election campaign. With the first round of voting approaching in April, we will be discussing the significance of this election for France and the EU, and exploring who could come out on top.

Chaired by Jamie Coomarasamy, presenter on World Tonight on Radio 4, Newshour on the BBC World Service and BBC World News. Coomarasamy was formerly a BBC Correspondent in Paris, Warsaw, Moscow and Washington.

Speakers (full panel announced soon)

Natalie Nougayrède is a columnist, leader writer and foreign affairs commentator for The Guardian. She was previously executive editor and managing editor of Le Monde.

Charles Grant CMG is director of the Centre for European Reform (CER). He works on EU foreign and defence policy, Russia, China, the euro and Britain’s relationship with the EU. His biography of Commission President Jacques Delors (“Delors: Inside the House that Jacques Built”) was published by Nicolas Brealey in 1994. In 2004 he became a chevalier of France’s Ordre Nationale du Mérite, and in 2013 a Companion of St Michael and St George (CMG) “for services to European and wider international policy-making”. In 2015 he was awarded the Bene Merito medal by the Polish government and the Star of Italy medal by the Italian government. Charles is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times International Edition and many other publications. He can be followed on twitter at @CER_Grant.

Philippe Marlière is a professor of French and European politics at University College London. His publications revolve around the French Left, European social democracy, questions of citizenship, integration and racism in France. He is writing a book on the shift to the right of the republican ideology in contemporary France. He contributes opinion articles to the media, notably The Guardian, openDemocracy, Le Monde and has a blog on Mediapart, the main on line publication in France.

The panel discussion ‘Breaking Point: The EU Referendum and its Aftermath’ on 15 November showed that whilst it’s hard to know how exactly what it means, there are clues about the shape it will take.

For example, despite the pivotal role migration played in the referendum rhetoric, migrants are likely to stay, argued Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London. ‘We have no earthly clue who the European citizens in this country are, unless they’ve registered to vote or are getting a benefit,’ Menon said. ‘People are going to be allowed to stay,’ he remarked bluntly, ‘because we can’t do anything about it.’ The notion of ‘taking back control’ of our borders is ‘nonsense’ because the British civil service ‘can’t deal’ with the ‘kind of promises that some people in the Leave campaign have made, and they won’t try to’.

We also know that Brexit lends itself to European food based analogies. A ’kind of Swiss cheese Brexit’, in which different sectors get different deals, is most likely, Macwhirter claimed. However, Menon rebuts, any ‘deals’ at this point are moot; there is no evidence, he argued, that the EU will allow the UK to ‘salami slice the market’. 

But food may not be as important as the analogies would have us believe. It’s simply not true that ‘Bordeaux winemakers’, Bojan Pancevski (The Sunday Times’ European Union Correspondent) warned, or producers of any other foodstuff or product for that matter, will successfully persuade EU governments to be lenient when negotiating with the UK for fear of losing market share. At least in Germany, the trade union bodies representing such individuals, Pancevski remarked, are on a record, saying they ‘completely agree with the government policy’. That government policy, currently, will not be one of doing favours for Britain. To avoid fuelling the rise of their own Eurosceptics, Menon argued, these governments ‘need Brexit to look dreadful’. The German Chancellery’s approach to Brexit and its message to businesses, he suggests, is similar to it’s approach to sanctioning Russia following its invasion of Crimea: ‘the political imperative is more important than economic loss, suck it up.’

Possibly most strikingly, we also know that Europe and the UK are in what Pancevski described as ‘parallel universe[s]’. For example, Britain is the only country in the EU with a political issue about freedom of labour, Menon argued. European countries, Pancevski said, don’t understand the phenomenon as ‘migration’, but rather as ‘internal movement’ within the European Union. 

Furthermore, since the referendum, politicians and commentators have claimed that Europe needs the UK so much that it will change the rules, compromising freedom of movement to keep Britain in the single market. ‘We are very happy in this country to assume that everyone loves us’ Menon deadpanned. But the parallel universe strikes again, and obscures what is really at stake; the EU’s ‘primary objective’ Pancevski argued, ‘is to preserve their own union and above all to preserve the single market’. The EU’s fundamental four freedoms of goods, services, movement, and capital are, Menon claimed, ‘sacrosant’.

]]> http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/breaking-point-the-eu-referendum-and-its-aftermath-2/feed/ 0 http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/violent-borders-border-conflict-security-and-the-refugee-crisis-2/ http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/violent-borders-border-conflict-security-and-the-refugee-crisis-2/#respond Thu, 13 Oct 2016 12:46:55 +0000 http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/?p=59009 “More than three quarters of the walls that exist on borders today were built in the last twenty five years.” 
Reece Jones, Professor at the University of Hawaii

On Wednesday the 12th of October, a panel of five experts in the refugee crisis gathered to discuss the tragedy that often ensues when a refugee attempts to leave their home country.

May Bulman, a journalist with The Independent, chaired the event and asked Reece Jones, a Professor at the University of Hawaii, whether the brutality when crossing borders has worsened, and if so – why?

“Yes. I would say definitely it has gotten worse. I argue it’s for two reasons: one is that the changing perception that border guards’ primary duty is to prevent the movement of terrorists and other violent threats… The second factor is the funnelling of people on the move to much more dangerous places to cross… as the easier places to cross are closed down, they have to take a much more dangerous route.” Reece Jones

The International Rescue Committee’s Elinor Raikes described the ripple effect caused by the poorly coordinated border closures: “We’ve seen a significant impact on people right across the route – families separated, fathers and husbands in Germany waiting for their families that were on their way, families now stranded in Turkey.”

Heaven Crawley discussed the varied and troubling backstories of migrants in Greece

“When we talk to people we found that it’s pretty unusual that people left the place where they lived with an idea they would go to Europe, and that’s where they went… The vast majority of people get out, and then work out where to go next.”

Richard Savage, works for charity Save the Children, and works to move refugees directly from their homeland to a new country. “The risks of going across the mediterranean were less than going home.” He highlighted the benefits of the borders to private military companies: “they’re going to make money, aren’t they? By rolling out barbed wire, producing weapon systems for border guards – does it stem from the perception of terrorism?”

In the absence of legitimate methods of travelling to safer lands, smugglers enjoy a booming trade with a huge supply of refugees willing to pay to escape their home country. Elinor Raikes discussed the irony of a system that refuses entry actually increases risk: “you’re pushing people into these illegal, uncontrolled, unmanaged routes, and actually it’s worse for our security.” She described the “pitiful” EU numbers in rehoming refugees, “the UN considers that 10% of displaced people globally should be resettled because they’re considered the most vulnerable, the EU share of that should be 108,000 a year. And the latest draft that’s making the rounds around the council and Parliament at the moment is talking around 20,000 a year.”

The clubroom will also show coverage to members. To book a table for dinner (recommended) please call us on 0207 479 8950.

The evening is supported by:

Heated discussion on the issue of Europe’s crisis in handling the arrival of refugees took place at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 4 May.

From the disproportionate focus placed on the Mediterranean crossing, to the misconception that migration is negative by default and the idea that lobbying Turkey to allow Syrians to work is the answer, the panel dispelled the myths surrounding the crisis.

Patrick Kingsley, author of The New Odyssey and the Guardian‘s inaugural migration correspondent, began by speaking about his extensive reporting of the crisis. The central stories in his book range from that of a smuggler, to a civil servant, to a pregnant refugee woman. Kingsley writes of how he travelled across the Macedonian border with the pregnant woman, who believes the child she is carrying has died.

Heaven Crawley, a leading researcher of migration, said that Kingsley depicted the movement of people more completely than many correspondents before him. Media coverage often focuses only on the crossing to Greece, and yet, “the European focus on the journey across the Mediterranean is such a small part of it,” said Crawley.

Kingsley’s reporting navigates the different routes to Europe and explores the various driving factors of migration. This is important in a Europe where, Crawley said, “policy is about 15 years behind the dynamics of the movement.”

Hassan Akkad, a teacher and freelance photographer who fled the Assad regime in 2012, illustrated European ignorance on a personal level. When people hear the word refugee they expect to see a Syrian in rags, he said. “I’ve had people questioning me about why I had a cell phone.” And yet, many who have fled the war are middle class with much to contribute; Akkad is fluent in English and has studied Shakespeare.

Akkad went on to detail how he came to be in the UK. His crime, for which he suffered broken bones and solitary confinement, was protesting peacefully against Assad: “Protesting in Syria is like a suicide mission. You say goodbye to your family because you never know where you are going to end up,” he said.

L-R: Patrick Kingsley, Heaven Crawley, Lindsey Hilsum, Hassan Akkad, John Dalhuisen. Photo by Tolly Robinson

On the journey, the Syrians that Akkad travelled with were from all walks of life – and their first encounter with Europe was not a happy one. Greek marine forces launched an attack on their boat: “I felt like Syria was on a dinghy. And we were not welcome,” said Akkad. He told the audience that for now he has put his career as a teacher and photographer on hold in order to tell the story of the Syrian people, jokingly dubbing himself “the professional refugee.”

The chair, Channel 4’s international editor Lindsey Hilsum, turned the discussion towards possible solutions. In order to explain how circumstances had become so grave, John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International said that many European governments were enacting hostile asylum policies and closing their borders to prevent the far right from sweeping to power.

Dalhuisen said that this had intensified the crisis, which is almost unprecedented. “We’re looking at quite a distinct phenomenon,” he asserted.

Kingsley disagreed regarding the relative scale of the problem. “It’s actually quite small numbers,” he said. He argued that Europe, as the world’s wealthiest continent, has more than the capacity and resources to deal with the numbers arriving on its shores.

According to Kingsley, the surge in migration is a result of the poor management of legitimate passage to the UK. People were able to wait a few years in interim countries such as Turkey before being granted visas to Europe, but they could not wait the half-decade that they were forced to. “Resettlement provides a reason for people to stay put,” he said. After so long, with no legal means to achieve more prosperous and safe lives for themselves and their families, “inevitably, people decided to vote with their feet,” Kingsley added.

Crawley agreed: “The problem is at our end, we haven’t adjusted,” she said. She dismissed the arbitrary way in which European governments treat all the countries from which people are migrating as if they are the same. “What we need in policy terms is nuance,” she said. And the whole conversation around the issue needs to shift: “The idea of the end point being to stop people is nonsense,” she said.

An audience member asked about the responsibility of the wealthy neighbouring Gulf states. Akkad responded that despite presenting itself as the “mother of Islam”, Saudi Arabia had offered fleeing Syrians no support. Kingsley added: “We shouldn’t judge our response by the yardstick of the Gulf states… it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing more as well.”

One journalist in the audience asked how it is possible to maintain public interest on such an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Following the surge in media attention in 2015, attention has drifted away. In the beginning, he said, Kingsley’s aim was to humanise the crisis. Now that so many journalists have told the personal and tragic tales of individual refugees, a degree of compassion fatigue has taken over. Kingsley said he had to keep taking different approaches. “In terms of keeping people engaged,” he admitted, “it’s a real struggle.”

Photos by Tolly Robinson

Words by Harriet Agerholm