'We have the values to know that what matters
is relationships with each other, whether you're in
Slovakia or in Serbia or if you're here in Brighton.'
– Caroline Lucas
'There's not a soul in sight, and then you open the
door, and all of you are in here, being this
burning light of hope in Brighton.' –
Caroline Lucas on coming to Club Europ Express at the
Rose Hill.
A moving and inspiring night with our guests Caroline
Lucas MP, Juliet Riddell, who made the
film 'Hard
Border', featuring Stephen Rea, Jakob
Sonnenholzner, who came from Paris to talk to us
about the Volt
Europa pan-European progressive political
movement, his colleague Spencer, Martin
Pairet and his colleague Clara of European Alternatives,
speaking from Berlin about EA's Transeuropa
Caravans and European
May projects, photographer-artist Tereza
Červeňová, telling us about why she was
travelling back to Slovakia to vote for pro-European,
liberal presidential candidate Zuzana Čaputova, and Duncan
McKellar, inviting us to take part in his EU SOS
project, shining mirrors to send a signal across the
Channel.
There were two big questions running throught the
night.
One, of course, was 'what on earth is going on with
Brexit?'
The other was the question that underlies what we're
doing with Club Europ Express: 'whatever happens with
Brexit, how do we make connections and collaborate with
people, here and in other European countries, who share
our vision of an open, inclusive Europe?'
Four of our guests represented projects tackling that
second question on a transnational scale. They talked to
us about the challenges of organising across countries
and connecting with citizens ahead of the European
parliamentary elections in May.
As Volt Europa organisers, Jakob and Spencer are
involved in supporting Volt candidates for the European
Parliament. But Jakob emphasised that Volt has a
presence in 32 European countries – including the UK,
where Spencer is the London organiser – so it isn't
confined to the EU.
'We want to transform the European democracy into
something very useful, working and functioning.' –
Jakob Sonnenholzner (left) speaks; host William Shaw
listens.
European Alternatives isn't running candidates in the
elections, but is sending out Transeuropa Caravans on
different routes across Europe to engage citizens and
reinvigorate grass-roots democracy. It's also organising
a series of actions under the banner of European May –
two words that, as our host William Shaw pointed out, we
find difficult to put together in this country.
One of these actions is planned for the Irish border on
4 May, which is to be Free Movement Day.
'European Alternatives is a transnational network of
activists trying to promote democracy, equality and
culture beyond the nation state.' – Martin Pairet
Tereza Červeňová spoke passionately and movingly about
why she and many other young Slovaks were travelling
from around Europe to vote for Zuzana Čaputova – who won
the Slovak presidency two days later. Many of them were
shocked into action by the murder last year of the
journalist Ján Kuciak. One of Tereza's photographic
responses to the demonstrations shows a bunch of keys
being shaken. She explained that the gesture of
key-jangling dates from thirty years ago, when her
parents took part in protests demanding freedom of
movement – open borders – from the communist regime. Now
she and her peers were demonstrating in the same
Bratislava square, demanding freedom of speech.
Caroline Lucas explained as best as she or anybody else
could what was going on with Brexit. She also spoke
about her 'Dear Leavers' project to hold conversations
with people in majority-Leave parts of the country.
William asked her about how we in Brighton can be
better connected to the rest of Europe. She pointed out
that for an outward-looking city, Brighton & Hove is
remarkably lacking in twin towns. 'We ought have one
with at least 27 countries,' she said. 'And then get
them all together for a drink here. It would be a lot of
fun.'
1 november 2018: 'flood the
debate with hope'
'We've got to flood the debate with hope' -
Zoe Williams, Guardian columnist, Another Europe
Is Possible campaigner, and our special guest on
1.11.18.
It was a fantastic night, thanks to Zoe, our video
guests Michał Iwanowski and Niccolo Milanese, host
William Shaw and the CEE team, the Rose Hill crew, and
everybody who came along and packed the place out.
From Cardiff, Michał talked to us about 'Go
Home, Polish', his photo story of how he walked
1900 km from his home in Wales to his home in Poland
earlier this year. He had seen the hostile message
scrawled on a wall in his Cardiff neighbourhood, but
the journey stripped the venom from it: 'I own it
now. This is my project, which is about kindness,
gentleness, empathy.'
‘I learned that landscape is my home, and it doesn’t
matter if it’s Germany, Belgium or France, I understand
this landscape before I understand nationality.’'
– Michał Iwanowski
From Paris, Niccolo talked about gettting back the utopian
vision of Europe, the threat from the nationalist right
who want to remake Europe in their image, and why it's
wrong to say that the EU is just a neoliberal project.
'We are European whether we like it or not,
and that gives us a responsibility to try and create
the politics we want for Europe.' – Niccolo
Milanese
On the Rose Hill stage, Zoe also talked about
rediscovering the virtues of Europe and reforming the
other parts. She underlined that the big three
challenges that we face - fascism, climate change, and
workplace exploitation - need to be met by transnational
co-operation, and that there's a set of institutions in
the EU to help us achieve that.
Zoe argued that we need to be ready for a People's
Vote, because there's definitely going to be one, and
that the case for Remain has to be made from the left,
because last time it was made from the centre and it
failed. ‘If you see the EU as the set of
institutions through which you could use your citizenly
power in concord, then you begin to be able to make a
case for Remain.’
Some highlights from our conversations with Zoe, Michał
and Niccolo:
24 MAY 2018: REFERENDUM EVE
On the eve of the referendum in Ireland about repealing
the 8th amendment to the constitution, which effectively
banned abortion, our theme for the night was Women and
Politics in Europe.
As it turned out, we were on the eve of history being
made. Speaking from Dublin, campaigner and journalist Una Mullally
didn’t dare to expect a landslide in Ireland’s
referendum – but the vote was two to one in favour of
repealing the amendment.
The Irish government has promised a bill to liberalise
Ireland's abortion laws, and Una foresees that the
campaign will have still more far-reaching effects. Over
the past year, she said, the campaigners have ‘unpacked
a lot of things around gender equality in this country,
and once people see that unmasked, it’s very hard to
unsee. So I think that that energy, and that feminist
revolution, will have a profound impact on things that
we perhaps can’t even conceive of yet.’
In the west, that is. By demonstrating their
increasingly liberal view of society, Irish voters
highlighted the growing contrast between attitudes in
western and eastern European countries. Up till Friday,
Ireland and Poland stood out (along with Northern
Ireland and Malta) as the countries with the most
restrictive abortion laws in Europe. Two years ago, a
move to ban abortion in Poland altogether was countered
by a mass women’s
movement, which has mobilised again to oppose a new
initiative to restrict abortion rights still
further. Activist Marta
Lempart, of Strajk Kobiet (Women’s Strike),
emphasised that 90 per cent of their protests took place
in small or medium-sized towns. It’s more than a
metropolitan movement.
‘The law doesn’t work anyway,’ said Marta, speaking from
Wrocław in south-western Poland. Even when the law does
permit abortions, such as in cases of rape or risk to
the mother’s health, they are increasingly hard to get –
medical staff can refuse on grounds of conscience.
From the Rose Hill stage, our star host Viv Groskop asked
her what she would most like to change. ‘We would like
to change the government!’ Marta shot back. ‘We wouldn’t
have this big wave of feminism, and we wouldn’t have
feminism mainstreamed in the media and in the democratic
movement if we didn’t have this crazy government that
was trying to kill us! But this is not just about the
abortion ban threat. This is about all human rights in
danger; this is about personal freedoms being in
danger.’ Marta spoke about government moves
against opponents, as did Aleksandra Knapik of Dziewuchy
Dziewuchom ('Gals4Gals') in Łódź,
part of a network that sprang up in response to the 2016
abortion ban initiative.
Both Una Mullally and Marta Lempart feel that their
campaigns are about more than abortion rights. But the
distance across Europe was highlighted when Viv asked
Marta the Polish for #MeToo, and Marta told her that the
movement had not got off the ground there. Yet Marta
also suggested that, as in Ireland, people are becoming
readier to distinguish between their religion and the
Church. ‘There are a lot of people now who see that the
Church has too much influence, too much power.’
Later, Viv looked still further east, talking about
Ksenia Sobchak, presidential candidate and ‘Russia’s
answer to Davina McCall’, whom she interviewed
recently. ‘I think she represents something really
fascinating about what can happen in Russia in the next
years,’ she said, explaining that Sobchak is one of the
insiders pressing for a liberal (in Russian terms)
successor to Putin.
26 APRIL
2018: 1ST ANNIVERSARY
Our host was #EUSupergirl
Madeleina Kay, who came down from Sheffield to join us. As
well as singing, she spoke via video with Ligia
Mahalean of the Anticorruption
Umbrella group in Cluj, Romania, part of a movement
that protested in Bucharest on 12 May under the slogan 'We
want Europe, not dictatorship'.
She also chatted with Steve Bullock of CakeWatch in
Brussels.
Sir Michael Arthur, who worked for the UK government on
negotiations for the Maastricht Treaty and the EU single
market, joined her on stage.
Author Linda
Grant talked to Jane McMorrow about the novel she's
working on, which reflects her experiences living in
London since the Brexit referendum: 'The theme of it is
home: what is your home, what is the nature of home?'
15 MARCH 2018: CEE #10
Vanessa Grotti joined us from Florence to talk about EU Border Care, a
study of migrants 'giving birth on Europe's remote
borderlands'.
15 FEBRUARY 2018: CEE #9
Attila the Stockbroker broke new ground in CEE live
links by speaking with Carsten Witt in German. Carsten,
the founder of Go! Europe,
is walking 5000km from Lisbon to Tallinn. At this point
he had reached Burgos: the Make Europe Greater Tour will
take a year, finishing in October 2018. You can follow
his progress on Instagram.
14 DECEMBER 2017: CLUB EUROP XMAS
Live from Lapland, Bibbi Good told Sophie Cook what
Santa's really like.
23 NOVEMBER 2017: CEE #7
19 OCTOBER 2017: CEE #6
Joseph Young aka Giuseppe Marinetti, backed by Kassia Zermon
of the Rose Hill. You'll just have to imagine what it
sounded like. It's still ringing in the ears of those who
were there.
