Letters: Refugee crisis - which Europe will win?

These letters appear in the 9th March 2016 edition of The Independent

Refugees wait to disembark from a ferry coming from the Greek islands of the north-eastern Aegean sea in the port of Piraeus, near Athens, Greece (EPA)

There are now two Europes on display to the world.

One of them is rotten with racism. It’s a Europe which bribes the Turkish state to stop refugees coming into the continent.

It’s a Europe where fascism is on the rise – both the Alternative for Germany party and Our Slovakia made electoral breakthroughs last week-end.

It’s a Europe in which the debate on staying in or out of the EU is dominated by both sides insisting a vote for them will result in fewer migrants.

The other Europe is one of solidarity. It’s a place where people turned up to stations across Germany to welcome the trains bringing refugees.

It’s a continent where solidarity with refugees has reached heart-breaking levels in Greece. At the week-end, in Athens’ Syntagma Square, more than 10,000 people contributed eight truckloads of clothes and food to help refugees – this from people who have themselves been devastated by the EU’s “austerity” programme.

It’s a Europe where people from across the UK have rejected the racist narrative of the popular media to deliver help to the refugees and migrants rotting in camps in Calais and Dunkirk.

I want nothing to do with the first, racist Europe. I am proud of the second Europe, which has nothing to do with the structures of the EU and exists despite them. I wonder which Europe will prevail.

Sasha Simic

London N16

The UK’s willingness to send warships to assist in efforts to prevent people from reaching Europe represents a disturbing stage in the militarisation of the refugee “crisis”, while the measures being proposed at the EU-Turkey summit represent the very opposite of what a modern response to people’s movement needs to look like.

Europe is trying to offload its international responsibilities on to other countries at this summit. It’s obscene that one of the richest parts of the world, which continues to grow wealthy from the resources of other countries, is contracting out its human rights duties to poorer countries.

Turkey is conducting a brutal war on its Kurdish population and cracking down on any form of dissent. It is unconscionable that we would give billions of pounds to this government to offload our responsibilities.

British and European proposals are inhumane and backward-looking. One of the greatest achievements of the EU is freedom of movement. Many of us in Europe enjoy this right to move around the world with relative ease. This cannot be a right which only applies to the most wealthy people in the world.

Nick Dearden

Director, Global Justice Now, London SW9

I am writing to you to protest, very strongly, about the Dave Brown cartoon printed in today’s edition of The Independent (8 March). It is tasteless, exploitative, and unfair.

Dave Brown has manipulated a tragic incident in the most crass way possible, using the image of a real dead child whose name is known to all of us. Would he have used the image of a British child killed in a car crash, or in a swimming pool, to make his point?

Furthermore, it isn’t Angela Merkel who is responsible for the EU’s rejection of refugees and/or immigrants coming from, predominantly, the Middle East. Each member state is responsible for the chaos that has ensued in this crisis, by appallingly bad foresight and pathetically inadequate organising skills.

So-called EU values and principles appear to have melted like a snowball in hell in the face of this disaster

Susan Byrne

Rugby

How many billions did Britain spend on the military campaign that brought about the fragmentation of Iraq and the rise of Isis? Let’s spend a fraction of that on helping those suffering untold misery as a result.

Hilary Wise

London W5

We might ask why Turkey has not controlled its own borders.

John Whitehead

London EC2

Poor basis for a pension review

The Government’s review of the state pension appears to be based on the belief that people are living longer and so it cannot be afforded. This is dubious.

Longevity is not uniformly going up – those living in Kensington may be living longer, but that is not the case in more socially challenged areas such as Middlesbrough and Solihull. Also, while the baby-boomer generation may be living longer, the same is unlikely to apply to those born after 1964, as society moves to a more sedentary, online-dominated existence. The obesity epidemic is one sign of the health implications of such living.

The question of affordability is also relative. Government figures last year indicated that the National Insurance Fund was £100bn in credit.

So if a review of retirement age takes place, it should not on the basis of rising life expectancy or unaffordability. Some may suspect this to be just another underhand way of further cutting the welfare net of support – this time by removing the right to retire altogether from vast swathes of the population – hardly progress for the fifth biggest economy in the world.

Paul Donovan

London E11

A democracy for the rich

Stories like that of the “millionaire recluse” who plans to fund independent candidates at the next general election make me wonder what kind of democracy we are living in.

Charities and trade unions find themselves under considerable state regulation if they wish to campaign politically, but wealthy individuals with no mandate are free to interfere in the political process on a whim. What price plurality in our democracy?

Jane Carolan

Glasgow

What sovereignty are you restoring?

How will “sovereignty” be given back to the British people, as EU exiters claim, when 54 per cent of British-registered companies are foreign-owned, when multinationals can run rings around HMRC, when we have a record trade deficit, with everything for sale to finance it?

We have a voting system that is not fit for purpose, allowing a party with less than 25 per cent voter support to force through punitive legislation without challenge.

None of this is a consequence of EU membership, so how can any of this be resolved by leaving?

Anthony Davies

Burton on Trent

Second-class citizens under Israeli rule

Stephen Lewis (Letters, 8 March) writes that Israel has “universal suffrage for all citizens” and therefore qualifies as a democracy.

A democracy, surely, is a state for all its citizens. Yet, despite 20 per cent of its population being non-Jewish, Israel calls itself “the Jewish State” and actively discriminates against its non-Jewish, Palestinian population.

In the Negev, in southern Israel, Palestinian Bedouin citizens are seeing their villages razed to the ground by the Israeli state, which is constructing Jewish-only towns in their place. And, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, around 4 million Palestinians live under Israeli control, but without being able to vote for the successive Israeli governments which control every aspect of their lives. However, Israel’s illegal settlers, living on the same land, have full voting rights in Israeli elections.

Not only is Israel not a democracy, it also operates a system of apartheid in the Palestinian territories it holds under occupation.

Amena Saleem

Bromley, Kent

To infinity and beyond

Ben Chu (Economic Review, 7 March) says psychologists have observed a greater reduction in purchases when price moves from zero to 5p than when it moves from 40p to 45p, even though the absolute change is identical. Econometricians and even the layman will not be surprised that an infinite price increase has a greater effect than one of 12.5 per cent.

David Hasell

Thames Ditton, Surrey

Women who fail to be feminists

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s article “Successful women too often turn their backs on their sisters” (7 March) was based on a false premise. It is no more realistic to expect that all women will be feminists than to expect all working-class people to be socialists, or all rich people to be Tories.

Tony Pointon

Portsmouth

Holiday with an exclamation mark

We are taking my grandson to a holiday cottage in Devon this summer. Unfortunately, he may now lose marks in his “What I did in the summer” essay. We are taking him to Westward Ho!

John Sculpher

Wickham Market, Suffolk