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YOUR FESTIVAL NOTES

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Now in its sixth year, Curious is a festival like no other. It is dreamy, eccentric, fun and, ultimately, irresistible. It’s very English on the one hand – expect fabulous novelists, exceptional historians, poet laureates, dogs on leads, gin and tonics. You are just as likely to � nd yourself on a secret midnight bat-walk, betting your life savings on the snail-racing, happening upon a secret choral performance or listening to some of the UK’s most exciting musicians.

Byline aims to strengthen independent journalism and free speech. Originally a crowd-funded platform for independent journalism, this year we launched Byline Times, a national daily news site and monthly newspaper.

We founded Byline Festival in 2017, after the election of Trump and the Brexit Referendum when truth and justice seemed to be under threat.

The aim of the festival is to encourage more people to appreciate and support great journalism as well as enjoy the best music, comedy and spoken word. That is why we are pleased to partner with Frontline Club and their journalists.

At Byline, we believe in changing the world as well as just reporting it. That is why we are keen to invite organisations and people who can make a di� erence and to encourage our festival-goers to support their activism.

It is great to be back in the forest at Pippingford Park for our third Festival.

This year we are pleased to partner with the Curious Arts Festival as well as the Frontline Club, for an even bigger and more exciting event.

Byline Festival is unique because it com-bines music, comedy and spoken word with talks, investigations and workshops that tackle the big issues facing us today including those facing our environment.

Our headliners this year are impres-sive with the return of Pussy Riot, the Blow Monkeys, Salena Godden and Hardeep Singh

Kohli. Festival newcomers include: The Feeling, Lowkey, Matt Bianco, Don Letts, Kevin Rowland and Jerry Dammers.

We hope you have a great festival and remember that the most important people over this weekend are you - our festival-goers.

STEPHEN & PETER

– { C U R IOUS H IGH L IGH T S } –

PHILIPPA PERRYNumber one best-selling writer, Philippa

Perry will be discussing The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

GINA RIPPONDiscusses The Gendered Brain – her

brilliant book which the Guardian argues could do more for gender equality than

any number of feminist manifestos.

MISHA GLENNY The McMa� a creator takes us into the

minds of his underworld subjects.

JOHN NIVENExpect an exhilarating conversation

with the legendary John Niven.

DAVID NOTTDiscusses his extraordinary Sunday Times

Number One best-selling, War Doctor.

GEOFF DYER Multiple award-winning author and writer in residence at University of

Southern California discusses his latest book, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy.

CANDICE CARTY WILLIAMS Her debut novel Queenie has stormed

the bestseller list and been called the politicised Bridgett Jones.

MURRAY LACHLAN-YOUNGPrepared to be dazzled by poetry,

comedy and charm.

ELIZABETH MACNEALWriter, potter, Caledonia Novel 2018 winner and Sunday Times best seller

talks about The Doll Factory.

DYLAN JONESMulti award-winning Editor in Chief and best selling author discusses Bowie, Jim Morrison and The Wichita Lineman.

LEMN SISSAY Festival Favourite Lemn Sissay returns

to Curious to discuss his remarkable new memoir My Name Is Why.

JO NEARYJoin the Crab Prince – a wonderful

and hilarious children’s show.

~ ~ BY L I N E DAY T I M E HIGHL IGH T S ~ ~CAROLE CADWALLADR

& NICK DAVIESAward-winning journalists discuss privacy,

intrusion & internet hacking in British Politics in the Media Circus, 4.40pm, Friday.

NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA FROM PUSSY RIOT

Joins Luke Harding and Carole Cadwalladr to discuss Putin and

the Subversion of Democracy in the Media Circus, 10.30am, Saturday.

ROGER HALLAM, CO-FOUNDER OF EXTINCTION REBELLION

Is in discussion with Professor Rupert Read, Anita McNaught and Marc

Lopatin about Deep Adaption on the Rebel Rebel Stage, 3pm, Saturday.

SCILLA ELWORTHYThree times Nobel Prize Nominee for Peace-Building talks about her

‘Business Plan for Peace’ in the Forest Forum, 4.30pm, Saturday.

GINA MILLER Gina Miller, transparency activist in

conversation with Helen Mount� eld QC in the Media Circus, 12noon, Sunday.

GAVIN ESLERTalks about his book ‘Brexit Bullshit’ in the Forest Forum, 1.30pm, Sunday.

PETER YORK & PETER JUKESJoin Kirsty Lang and Patrick Howse to

discuss ‘How We Can Defend The BBC’ in the Forest Forum, 3pm, Sunday.

BONNIE GREERIs speaking on the panel ‘Myth and Taboo- Can Integration Ever Solve

Racism? With Hardeep Matharu, Maya Goodfellow and Naz Shah MP, in the

Media Forum, 1.30pm, Saturday.

WHAT THE PAPERS DON'T SAY

The Byline Times team dissect what’s missing from the Sunday Papers in the

Forest Forum, 10.30am, Sunday.

CLOSING SHOWWith music from the Urban Flames Choir

and Brexit Girl as well as poetry from Festival Laureate, Salena Godden and Icelandic Poetician, Birgitta Jonsdottir

in the Media Circus, 3pm, Monday.

* * * BY L I N E N IGH T T I M E HIGHL IGH T S * * *OPENING SHOW & SAMBA PARTYCitizens of The World Refugee Choir;

an Extinction Rebellion Funeral; poetry from Salena Godden & Birgitta Jonsdottir.

Media Circus, from 8.30pm, Friday.

THE FEELINGOur Friday headline band brings their

chart-topping album songs to our opening night in the Media Circus, 10pm, Friday.

DON LETTS DJ SETLegendary DJ, Film-maker and of Big

Audio Dynamite fame, Don Letts DJ set is part of our Reggae Dancehall night in

the Forest Forum on Saturday night.

LOWKEYActivist and Rapper, Lowkey, follows his afternoon panel discussion with a special set in the Media Circus, 7pm, Saturday.

THE WAG CLUB Chris Sullivan, founder of the famous 80s

Wag Club, is recreating it for one night only starting with a DJ set by Jerry Dammers, founder of Two-Tone and The Specials,

in the Future Dome, from 10pm, Saturday.

PUSSY RIOTPussy Riot return to the Festival with

their Protest Art and Music performance in the Media Circus, 10.30pm, Saturday.

BAD PRESS AWARDS WITH HARDEEP SINGH KOHLIOur annual look at the worst of the press has a di� erent twist this year!

Media Circus, 7pm, Sunday.

MATT BIANCOThe Matt Bianco band bring their Latin and Jazz inspired rhythms to the Festival to get you on the dance ° oor, Media Circus, 8pm, Saturday.

THE BLOW MONKEYS Another festival favourite, The Blow

Monkeys, are our Sunday night headliners in the Media Circus, 9.30pm, Sunday.

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BYLINE IMMERSIVE

EXPERIENCES

Human Library The Human Library® is, in the true sense of the word, a library of people. We host events where readers can borrow human beings serv-ing as open books and have conversations they would not normally have access to. Every human book from our bookshelf represents a group in our society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatisation or discrimina-tion because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status or ethnic origin.

Mile in my ShoesWhat’s it like to have been a prisoner of war? To be a sex worker, miner or refugee? Or to have rediscovered love in your eighties? Empathy Museum invites you to take a moment to look at the world through someone else’s eyes.

Established in 2015 by artist Clare Patey, the museum explores how empathy can not only transform our personal relation-ships but also help tackle global challenges such as prejudice, conflict and inequality.

A Mile in My Shoes is Empathy Museum’s travelling interactive shoe shop, where you can walk a mile in someone else’s shoes – literally – while listening to them tell a story about their life. With a diverse collection of over 250 shoes and stories collected from around the world, A Mile in My Shoes invites you on an empathic and physical journey.

Embodiment Cloakroom

We want to create an uplifting space in which people can leave their emotional baggage. This baggage could range from fear of rain or camping toilets, to some recent heartbreak or current distrac-tions in their lives preventing full energy being channelled into enjoying the festival.

Combining our backgrounds in osteopa-thy and art, Louisa uses techniques to help the visitor to the cloakroom voice, visu-alise and release their baggage, whilst at the same time Alice draws a visual repre-sentation of the baggage to hang up in the cloakroom for the duration of the festival.

OPE N ST U DIO

W I T H

K AT H A R I N E

W E AT H E R H E A D

Come to view Katharine Weatherhead’s ‘Exorcism’ col-

lection of paintings that explore addiction. Meet the artist and hear her talk about her paintings at her studio clearly signed from the top of the camp site.

Open from 12noon to 4pm Saturday and Sunday.

V isit our opening installation about the state of the journalism

industry for young people on themes of pay, diversity, internships and more.

Our team will be around all weekend to o�er advice clinics to those looking to break into journalism or improve their skills.

The team will also be hosting a free drinks reception on Friday evening, to meet the team and see the installa-tions. To �nd out more, or see the full programme, follow @journoresources on Twitter.

Fodder & Dynamic Wine dining experience

Chapel Down

SCOOP!

L I F E DR AW I NG

ROBERT MONTGOMERY

Curious Brewing

New River Press

THE TROUBLE CLUB

Countercultural UK poetry publisher New River Press return to Curious Arts to celebrate their third birthday with readings from current and forthcoming releases. They’ve been described by Autre magazine as “one of the UK’s edgiest and most exciting poetry imprints” and Tom Stoppard as “always rewarding”. They take their cues from indie music record labels like 4AD and Sub Pop, concrete poetry, and punk poetry. Seeking out poetry that is visual, elegant, and rebellious, their cry is NEW LANGUAGE FOR SAD TIMES. New River are poet, filmmaker, and actor Greta Bellamacina, artist Robert Montgomery, and writer Heathcote Ruthven. They will be joined by the poets Ana Seferovic and Niall McDevitt.

The Trouble Club presents Dr Fern Riddell and Stephanie Theobald.

Discussing books, sexuality, gender and unconventional people.

Naturally Curious – a 100% organic restaurant and wine bar pops-up.

Dynamic Vines and fodder are creat-ing a drinking and dining experience featuring the best of British produce and European wine – we’ve dubbed it Naturally Curious. We’re working with 100% organic producers, farmers and winemakers to unearth some magical delights at our feasting tent. Join us for artfully cooked food, delicious wines and a nose-to-tail barbecue. Serving only the best produce and wine from low-intervention, sustainable producers, our pop-up restaurant and wine bar will let the quality and provenance of every ingredient take centre stage.

'BETWEEN THE VINES' SHOWCASE EXPERIENCE

Tasting experience spanning beer, wine and spirits. Hosted

by Paul Blezard in conjunction with Head Brewer (Matt Anderson) and Head Winemaker (Josh Donaghy-spire). A fascinating and joyous walk through Chapel Down's his-tory with lots of sipping of sumptu-ous wine and beer!

Join the Scoop team as we explore everything that goes into the creation of a magazine whilst making your very own. As you �ll your magazine with poetry, quizzes, comic strips and more you’ll learn all about the di�erent ways stories on your chosen theme can be told. Whether you want to spread the word about climate change, crea-tures of the deep or maybe even your favourite football team, a magazine making workshop with Scoop is the perfect way to do so!

Life Drawing with Artists, Models, iNK. Join artists and life models for a drop in session set in the magical grounds of Pippingford Park

BEST KNOWN FOR HIS BILLBOARD POEMS.

A REFLECTIVE MOMENT AT DUSKTHAT INSPIRES A STATE OF POETIC CONTEMPLATION.

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MEGAPHONE TENT

Join the Megaphone artists to create a record of the festival on

a giant drawing wall.

— Write and draw your own comic pages, and share your stories from the festival and beyond!

— Commission portraits and satirical sketches from our political cartoonist.

— Write your message to the world on the pillars of Democracy.

— Use Megaphone to convene with the muses and shout Eureka!

— The best results by the Byline public will be displayed and collected in a special Megaphone Byline printed edition

BYWIRE TENTFind out how blockchain technol-

ogy can solve the funding crisis in media and help bring truth to the world. Our tent is open from 11am to 7pm with spoken word from Curtis Arnold-Harmer, music from DJ Dan Nunn, general discussions and live broadcast-ing of ‘Nothing News Here'.

EXTINCTION REBELLION We couldn’t have a festival on chang-ing the world without a spotlight on our most current threat, the pandemic that is the climate crisis that is grip-ping the earth. Extinction Rebellion is one of the most important direct action groups of our time, and we are lucky to have insights, not only from co-founder Roger Hallam, but many Extinction Rebellion activists that make the movement happen. We would love to encourage all festival-goers to have a conversation at the Rebel Rebel stage if you are not already enamoured by the movement, and even get trained up in the Rebel Training Space, so that what you get from Byline Festival does not stop when the festival gates close.

LIVEWIRE POETS

Festival Poet Laureate Salena Godden and Matt Abbot are bringing the

LiveWire poets to the Forest. Check out the LiveWire Salons, SpeakEasy Tent, 22.00, Friday and 22.30, Sunday

SPA & JOURNO

RESOURCES TENT

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FRIDAY 23RD AUGUSTMEDIA CIRCUS FOREST FORUM FUTURE DOME SPEAK-EASY REBEL REBEL STAGE

tent, Friday

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D I S C U S S I O N

Propaganda, fake news and political polarisation - the consequences of a contemporary digital society?

3 pm

S P O K E N W O R D

Performance by artist Curtis Arnold-Harmer.

4 pm

W O R K S H O P

Learn about cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Wirebits and EOS, the blockchain and how ByWire is different.

5 pm

PA N E L

Nothing News Here is a youthful news show that aims to prove even a panel of tipsy 20-somethings can produce the news better than the mainstream media.

6 pm

DJ S E S S I O N

With Dan Nunn

JOURNALISM IS NOT A CRIME: THE JOURNALISM IS NOT A CRIME: THE EXTRADITION OF JULIAN ASSANGEChair: Vaughan Smith, Nick Davies,

Birgitta JonsdottirBirgitta Jonsdottir

TRUTH, TRUST AND TRANSPARENCY TRUTH, TRUST AND TRANSPARENCY IN THE COURTS

Chair: Brian Cathcart, Lucy Reed,Sophie Walker, Adam Wagner, Mark HannaSophie Walker, Adam Wagner, Mark Hanna

NET LOSERS: SOCIAL MEDIA, NET LOSERS: SOCIAL MEDIA, ANONYMITY AND THE ISSUE OF TRUST

Chair: Taniel Yusef, Stephen Kinsella, Mike Butcher, Caroline OrrMike Butcher, Caroline Orr

HOW CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE WORKS HOW CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE WORKS Learn about the tactics and strategy of Learn about the tactics and strategy of

Extinction RebellionExtinction Rebellion

HEADING FOR EXTINCTIONIntroduction to the Climate Crisis

REGENERATIVE CULTUREREGENERATIVE CULTUREAncient Tibetan Singing Bowls,Ancient Tibetan Singing Bowls,

Energy Healing Soak up a Sound Bath

POLITICS IS A CRIME SCENE: LEVESON TO CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICATO CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

Carole CadwalladrCarole CadwalladrNick Davies

THE PARALLEL STATE: TRUTH, LIES AND POLITICAL FICTION IN AND POLITICAL FICTION IN CONTEMPORARY TURKEYCONTEMPORARY TURKEY

Guy Martin in conversation with Jo GlanvilleGuy Martin in conversation with Jo Glanville

FUTURE ENVIRONMENT: DESERT BRITAIN FUTURE ENVIRONMENT: DESERT BRITAIN HOW OUR WATER SUPPLY IS RUNNING HOW OUR WATER SUPPLY IS RUNNING OUT - AND FASTER THAN WE REALISE

Chair: Anita McNaught, Trevor Bishop, Stuart RobertsStuart Roberts

MISHA GLENNY - MCMAFIA STANDUPThe story behind the international bestseller

KEVIN ROWLAND (DEXYS)KEVIN ROWLAND (DEXYS)DJ Show

DELPHISAward-winning Indie Folk Band

TOKYO TABOOColourful, energetic, with dark lyrics

SASHA AND THE SHADESSASHA AND THE SHADESConvergence of Blue-collar Rock, Blues and Convergence of Blue-collar Rock, Blues and

Punk MusicPunk Music

SEETHING AKIRA5 Piece Electronic Rock Band

AMBUSH TACTICS AND TWIZZY ( ROUGHCUT AMBUSH TACTICS AND TWIZZY ( ROUGHCUT COLLECTIVE) AND JINXSTA JXCOLLECTIVE) AND JINXSTA JX

Hip Hop SoulHip Hop Soul

HOUSE OF COMEDYHOUSE OF COMEDYRobert Hughes Robert Hughes Dereks MojoDereks Mojo

Paul CoxJoshua Robertson

& MC Elle Burt & MC Elle Burt

HOUSE OF COMEDYHOUSE OF COMEDY Tanyalee Davis, Tanyalee Davis,

Elle Bert, Darcie Silver,

Phil Kay & Daniel Edison & Daniel Edison

NABZ PATNABZ PAT SHAKEITUP: THE IMPROVISED SHAKEITUP: THE IMPROVISED SHAKESPEARE SHOWSHAKESPEARE SHOW

The home of Bard-based BedlamThe home of Bard-based Bedlam

THE TROUBLE CLUBTHE TROUBLE CLUBFern Riddell and Stephanie Theobold on books, Fern Riddell and Stephanie Theobold on books,

sexuality, gender and unconventional peoplesexuality, gender and unconventional people

ORLANDO SEALEORLANDO SEALEFULL FATHOM FIVE WITH ANNINA LEHMAN

JOIN THE XR FUNERAL PROCESSION

YASMINE SEALETranslator from Arabic and French

TC MUSUMBA AND AFROW DRUMMERSWest African chants and rhythms

MARGO RAATSSoulful Indie Folk

POWERDRESSLipstick Pop meets Jaunty Dance

MELTOUT (MELTOUT (REPREZENT RADIO)REPREZENT RADIO)

Multi-Genre Londan based party crewMulti-Genre Londan based party crew

MOIN MIRAuthor of The Prince Who Beat the Empire

JOSIE BARNARD JOSIE BARNARD The Multimodal Writer The Multimodal Writer

Digital Inclusion Digital Inclusion

EBSONSoul singer songwriter

PROFESSOR GRAMOPHONEPROFESSOR GRAMOPHONEDJ with two gramophones and a love of Swing, DJ with two gramophones and a love of Swing,

Jazz, Bluegrass and Big BandJazz, Bluegrass and Big Band

DJ SMUTTYfrom Levi and the Rockats

DJ D-VOXDJ D-VOXHouse, techno, drum & bass, disco, breaks and

original, live vocals

LIVEWIRE POETS LIVEWIRE POETS HOSTED BYHOSTED BY MICHELLE FISHER MICHELLE FISHERHOSTED BY MICHELLE FISHERHOSTED BYHOSTED BY MICHELLE FISHERHOSTED BY

with Connor Byrne, Sunnah Khan, Oakley, Sheena Patel, Repeat Beat Poet, Oli Spleen, Maria Ferguson, Toria Garbutt, Joelle Taylor, Maria Ferguson, Toria Garbutt, Joelle Taylor,

Matt AbbottMatt Abbott

OPENING SHOWCITIZENS OF THE WORLD CHOIR

XR FUNERAL WITH SALENA GODDEN AND BIRGITTA JONSDOTTIR

THE FEELINGTHE FEELINGNo 1 UK Album selling bandNo 1 UK Album selling band

OPENING SAMBA PARTYOPENING SAMBA PARTYTribo samba drummers and dancers from Tribo samba drummers and dancers from

Notting Hill. With DJ Notting Hill. With DJ Chris Sullivan.Chris Sullivan.

TALK/PANELKEY MUSIC PERFORMANCE / POETRY COMEDY WORKSHOP DOCUMENTARY DJ

ELAINE MCGINTYELAINE MCGINTY

JOHN NIVEN - KILL 'EM ALLAuthor of satire on the music industry

SPEAKERS AND TIMINGS MAY BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE - CHECK THE WEBSITE WWW.BYLINEFESTIVAL.COM

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FRIDAY 23RD AUGUSTDOCUMENTARY TENT WORKSHOP TENT 1 WORKSHOP TENT 2 WORKSHOP TENT 3 WORKSHOP TENT 4

Kids, and Young Adults, activities on Friday

CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS FOR KIDS with Paula Rawsthorne

1 HR 5 pm in Tent 1

This fun workshop by multi-award winning Young Adult writer, Paula Rawsthorne, will help you develop skills to write convincing, compelling characters.

You’ll be conducting interviews with each other that will leave out the boring stuff and instead uncover unique personalities, wishes, dreams and fears. Then you’ll use this information to write a letter to apply to be their Super Personal Assistant where you’ll convince them that you can arrange the best day of their lives!

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BEDTIME STORIES with Paul Blezard

1 HR 7 pm in Tent 1

4-D FILM IN THE WOODS with Tim Ireland

2HR 6 pm in the Information Tent

An audio-interactive fi lm experience in the woods in dance-in-the-aisles sing-a-long magic that will make you punch the air with your fi sts in triumph time and again. A special event for young people, with limited back-row seating for the young in the head. Contains a Star Wars (one of the good ones) and a banging sound track with music from the dawn of the 70s to the dusk of the 80s.

tent, Saturday and Sunday

11 am

W O R K S H O P

Learn about cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Wirebits and EOS, the blockchain and how ByWire is different.

1 pm

D I S C U S S I O N

Are you okay with living in a world free from personal privacy? Because you do.

3pm

S P O K E N W O R D

Performance by artist Curtis Arnold-Harmer.

4 pm

W O R K S H O P

Learn about cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Wirebits and EOS, the blockchain and how ByWire is different.

5pm [SUNDAY ONLY ]

PA N E L

Nothing News Here is a youthful news show that aims to prove even a panel of tipsy 20-somethings can produce the news better than the mainstream media.

6 pm

DJ S E S S I O N

With Dan Nunn

BRIGHTON ROCKS SHORT DOCS BRIGHTON ROCKS SHORT DOCS SERIES # 1SERIES # 1Salto [17]

The Fight For Hambach Forest [8]Race Hate in the UKRace Hate in the UK [19][19]Apartheid ContinuedApartheid Continued [24][24]

Kokota: The Islet of Hope [15]by Community Forestsby Community Forests

THE POST TRUTH BUSINESS AND THE POST TRUTH BUSINESS AND EXTINCTION REBELLIONEXTINCTION REBELLION

Sean Pillot de CheneceySean Pillot de Chenecey

QUICK TIPS ON HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF AGAINST FAKE NEWSYOURSELF AGAINST FAKE NEWS

Laura GarciaLaura Garcia

GUERRILLA FILM-MAKING Sheridan Fynn

PHASING WORKSHOPCliff O'Sullivan

SHAKEITUP IMPROVSHAKEITUP IMPROV

CAN YOUTH SOCIAL ACTION FIX A BROKEN SOCIETY?BROKEN SOCIETY?Miriam Jordan KeaneMiriam Jordan Keane

MENTAL HEALTH AND MENTAL HEALTH AND THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIESTHE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

Penny FosterPenny Foster

LYRIC WRITING WORKSHOPOrlando Seale

GUERRILLA WEB PUBLISHING GUERRILLA WEB PUBLISHING STARTING AND SUSTAINING AN ONLINE JOURNALISM PROJECT Andrew Staffell and Thomas EagleAndrew Staffell and Thomas Eagle

THE AGE OF STUPID + Q&ATHE AGE OF STUPID + Q&AA future archivist looks at old footage A future archivist looks at old footage from the year 2008 to understand why

humankind failed to address climate change.

FF**K, IT’S OVERK, IT’S OVERA look through Artist Henrietta Sophia A look through Artist Henrietta Sophia Wallace Dunlop's eyes at how Soho has

changed with gentrifi cation.

GOODNIGHT LONDONGOODNIGHT LONDON+ Q&A+ Q&A

Goodnight London is a love letter Goodnight London is a love letter and a note of warning to a city that is

undergoing rapid change through gentrifi cation and redevelopmentgentrifi cation and redevelopment

BLEACHY DOOMSDAYBLEACHY DOOMSDAY[starts 9.10pm][starts 9.10pm]

Jez and Misha are smart, universityJez and Misha are smart, university-educated millennials working in a -educated millennials working in a

car wash on a trip like no other, a journey of unfi ltered nihilistic anarchic rage.

BATHROOMBATHROOMA dystopian sci-fi low-fi circus comedy movie. A dystopian sci-fi low-fi circus comedy movie.

All shot in a real bathroom in East Belfast. All shot in a real bathroom in East Belfast. Ronald and Regina are the only surviving circus artists in the aftermath of the Situation. They live in a bathroom for their own protection.live in a bathroom for their own protection.

AND IT WASA woman who hides her indigenous features under a thick layer of white features under a thick layer of white

makeup and a blonde wig, works as a makeup and a blonde wig, works as a night-time cleaner in an aquatic centre night-time cleaner in an aquatic centre

and her only dream is to be able to swim.

ROWLEY LEIGHAward-winning chef talks about his book 'A Long

And Messy Business'And Messy Business'

SPEAKERS AND TIMINGS MAY BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE - CHECK THE WEBSITE WWW.BYLINEFESTIVAL.COM

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SATURDAY 24TH AUGUSTMEDIA CIRCUS FOREST FORUM FUTURE DOME SPEAK-EASY REBEL REBEL STAGE

THE CURIOUS ARTS BREAKFAST CLUBPaul Blezard looks at the daily papers

PUTIN AND THE SUBVERSION OF PUTIN AND THE SUBVERSION OF DEMOCRACY

Nadya Tolokonnikova, Carole Cadwalladr, Luke Harding in discussionLuke Harding in discussion

WHITEWASHING CLIMATE CHANGE: WHERE ARE THE VOICES OF COLOUR?

Chair: Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, Rosamund Chair: Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, Simmone Ahiaku, Dalia Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, Simmone Ahiaku, Dalia

Gebrial, DamiEn Gayle

BREXIT AND EMPIRE: BREXIT AND EMPIRE: Chair: Hardeep Matharu, Shahmir Sanni,Chair: Hardeep Matharu, Shahmir Sanni,Lord Victor Adebowale, Aisha ali-Khan Lord Victor Adebowale, Aisha ali-Khan

A VIRTUE OF DISOBEDIENCE: CIVIL RIGHTS TODAY

Chair: Asim Qureshi, Lowkey, Hoda Ketedi, Chair: Asim Qureshi, Lowkey, Hoda Ketedi, Aamer Rahman, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Dr Aamer Rahman, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Dr

Azeezat Johnson

JOEY BASEHip Hop Rap with Pop twist

LOWKEYRapper and Activist

MATT BIANCOJazz Funk Latin band

DON MESCALL DON MESCALL Irish singer songwriter and bandIrish singer songwriter and band

THE PRISCILLASTHE PRISCILLASPower-Pop/Glam/Garage PunkPower-Pop/Glam/Garage Punk

BALAKLAVA BLUESBALAKLAVA BLUESUkrainian Guerilla-Folk Electronic Dance Music Ukrainian Guerilla-Folk Electronic Dance Music

BLACK KAT BOPPERSHot Boppin' Groovin' Four Piece Band

PUSSY RIOTProtest Art and Music Collective

THE MICRODOTSElectronic Music Duo

BOASY SOLGYDancehall Hip Hop

DON LETTSDON LETTSDJ Set

Reggae, Fusion, Post-Punk and Alternative Dance

DJS GREENSLEEVE RECORDS DJS GREENSLEEVE RECORDS WITH DJ MIXMASTER J AND SARAH C

Dancehall and Reggae Music from the famous record label

THE WAG CLUBCONTINUES WITH CONTINUES WITH CHRIS SULLIVAN CHRIS SULLIVAN

The founder of the legendary 1980s club brings The founder of the legendary 1980s club brings it back to life for one night only. it back to life for one night only. HMS SWEET CHARITYHMS SWEET CHARITY

A collection of lesser known, forgotten-to-time-A collection of lesser known, forgotten-to-time-and-taste records from across the globeand-taste records from across the globe

DJ DANNUNNDJ DANNUNNElectronic, drum & bass and trip hop, with a Electronic, drum & bass and trip hop, with a

touch of world beats to make you smiletouch of world beats to make you smile

THE WAG CLUBJERRY DAMMERS DJ SETJERRY DAMMERS DJ SET

(Founder of THE SPECIALS and TWO TONE) D.J. (Founder of THE SPECIALS and TWO TONE) D.J. SET playing (mainly Jamaican) Ska, Reggae , SET playing (mainly Jamaican) Ska, Reggae ,

Roots, plus Funk, Rhythm and BluesRoots, plus Funk, Rhythm and Blues

IZZIE YARDLEYIZZIE YARDLEYAlternative FolkAlternative Folk

REBECCA PEDRO Singer, Songwriter, Dancer and Gymnast

MISS VSinger Songwriter

SOPHIE NAUFALBritish Lebanese composer and performer

MURRAY LACHLAN-YOUNGMURRAY LACHLAN-YOUNGSatirical commentary from a British poet & Satirical commentary from a British poet &

stand-up performerstand-up performer

CAIRO MOONCAIRO MOON60’s Soul and ethereal Rock.60’s Soul and ethereal Rock.

WILL PURDUEWILL PURDUESongwriter infl uenced by the 1960sSongwriter infl uenced by the 1960s

THE RENEGADE SAINTS Improvised Theatre about Peace-Building

BEING THE STORY Immersive storytelling experience to Immersive storytelling experience to

inspire new ideas, challenge perceptions, inspire new ideas, challenge perceptions, and stimulate conversation on the big and stimulate conversation on the big

social issues by Sound Delivery

PALE, MALE AND STALE – PALE, MALE AND STALE – REPRESENTATIONS OF AFRICAChair Thembi Mutch, Audrey Brown,

Nishta Chugh, Eliza AngangweNishta Chugh, Eliza Angangwe

MODERN FAMILIESPhilippa Perry, psychotherapist and author

DANIEL MORGAN MURDER: DANIEL MORGAN MURDER: THE FIRST GREAT HACK

Chair: Peter Jukes, Alastair Morgan, Kirsteen Knight, Jake ArnottKirsteen Knight, Jake Arnott

DIVERSITY IN JOURNALISM DIVERSITY IN JOURNALISM & BROADCASTING

Chair: Hardeep Matharu, Bonnie Greer, Rizwana Hamid, Brian CathcartHamid, Brian Cathcart

BUSINESS PLAN FOR PEACE - BUSINESS PLAN FOR PEACE - INVESTMENT, PREVENTION & FEMINISMINVESTMENT, PREVENTION & FEMINISM

Chair: Teohna Williams, Scilla Elworthy,Kristina Lunz, Jeremy Gilley, Taniel Yusef

AI AND ROBOT WARS: HOW TO AI AND ROBOT WARS: HOW TO CONTROL THE IMPACT OF ARTICIFICIAL IINTELLIGENCE ON MODERN WARFARE Chair Taniel Yusef, Laura Nolan, Liz O'SullivanChair Taniel Yusef, Laura Nolan, Liz O'Sullivan

WHY DOES THE MEDIA IGNORE WOMEN WHY DOES THE MEDIA IGNORE WOMEN IN SPORT?

Chair: Maggie Murphy, Suzy Wrack, Claire RaffertyRafferty

FAR RIGHT FUNDING FAR RIGHT FUNDING AND TERROR NETWORKS

Chair: Otto English, Louise Raw, Mike Stuchbery, Caolan RobertsonMike Stuchbery, Caolan Robertson

FIFTH BATTLESPACE: IS SOCIAL MEDIA FIFTH BATTLESPACE: IS SOCIAL MEDIA UNDERMINING REAL REPORTING?UNDERMINING REAL REPORTING?

Chair: Sana Safi , Misha Glenny, Luke HardingChair: Sana Safi , Misha Glenny, Luke Harding

REPRESSED NATIONALISM: REPRESSED NATIONALISM: IS BREXIT AN ENGLISH PROBLEM?

Chair: Anthony Barnett, Femi OluwuleGeraint Davies, Madeleina Kay, Adam Ramsay

PAULA RAWSTHORNEAuthor of ‘The Truth About Celia Frost’

NIMCO ALICo-founder of Daughters of Eve

CANDICE CARTY WILLIAMSCANDICE CARTY WILLIAMSAuthor of Queenie & creator of Guardian 4th Author of Queenie & creator of Guardian 4th

Estate BAME Short Story PrizeEstate BAME Short Story Prize

TOM RACHMAN TOM RACHMAN – ARTISTS AND DOMESTICITY

Author of 'The Imperfectionists; The Rise and Fall of Great Powers and The Italian Teacher'Fall of Great Powers and The Italian Teacher'

NATALIE HAYNESAuthor of The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

IAN BIRCH IN CONVERSATIONIAN BIRCH IN CONVERSATIONwith Melissa Denes, Editor-in-Chief of the

Guardian Weekend Magazine and Paul McNamee, Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue

GENDER, SEX AND GOSSIP GENDER, SEX AND GOSSIP IN THE ARCHERSIN THE ARCHERS

ACADEMIC ARCHERSACADEMIC ARCHERS

EAR SMOKEConrad GambleGrace PilkingtonGrace Pilkington

Alan MoonAlan MoonDeerHeart

ROGER HALLAM ROGER HALLAM CO-FOUNDER OFCO-FOUNDER OFEXTINCTION REBELLION

WHAT IT HAS ACHIEVED AND WHAT NEXT

DECOLONISING ENVIRONMENTALISMDECOLONISING ENVIRONMENTALISMAn Interative Workshop to work towards Equity An Interative Workshop to work towards Equity

in Activism in Activism

THIS IS NOT A DRILL An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by its An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by its

Authors Authors

DEEP ADAPTATION: GETTING REAL DEEP ADAPTATION: GETTING REAL ABOUT THE CLIMATE APOCALYPSE ABOUT THE CLIMATE APOCALYPSE

Prof Rupert Read, Marc Lopatin, Roger HallamProf Rupert Read, Marc Lopatin, Roger Hallam

IN CONVERSATION WITH GAVIN TURK Art in a Time of Crisis

JO NEARYCharacter comedy show with interpretive dance.

COMEDY OPEN MICTake the stage and try out your best material

DEREK'S MOJOImprov fun, fast and feminist

AMORPHOUS HORSEImprov based on Wikipedia

DJ BSHAW DJ BSHAW Electronic dance music & house

LAUGHING YOGA LAUGHING YOGA UNITED MIND

Join in with this combination of laughter exer-cises, clapping, breathing and relaxation.

TALK/PANELKEY MUSIC PERFORMANCE / POETRY COMEDY WORKSHOP DOCUMENTARY DJ

MJ COMMUNITY CHOIR: POP-UPMJ COMMUNITY CHOIR: POP-UP

YOGAYOGAVinyasa FlowVinyasa FlowAll AbilitiesAll Abilities

HEATHCOTEWriter, Poet and one third of New River Press

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SATURDAY 24TH AUGUSTDOCUMENTARY TENT WORKSHOP TENT 1 WORKSHOP TENT 2 WORKSHOP TENT 3 WORKSHOP TENT 4

Kids, and Young Adults, activities on Saturday

MODERN CAUTIONARY TALES FOR CHILDRENwith Murray Lachlan Young

1 HR 12 noon in Tent 1

From the moment Murray Lachlan Young bounds onto the stage, hair wrapped in a towel, dressing gown fl apping, you know you’re in for a good time. Best of all, he knows exactly what your average 6–10-year-old is interested in – toilets, poo and death being three key subjects discussed during the show.A raucous, silly, scary, funny, poignant and enlightening hour of merriment and mayhem, packed with dark tales and nonsense. A mixture of poetry, stand-up comedy, storytelling, a touch of panto – expect a hilarious and positive route to showing children that poetry can be fun, thought-provoking and even quite cool!"One of the greatest children's entertainer's I have ever seen. Five stars.” THE SCOTSMAN

CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS FOR KIDS with Paula Rawsthorne

1 HR 5 pm in Tent 1

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BEDTIME STORIES with Paul Blezard

1 HR 7 pm in Tent 1

WOODLAND VILLAGE with Tim Ireland

3HR 10 am Information Tent

Help us to create a magical grove of polite but temperamental woodland creatures from naught but recycled wood and a few gadgets from our bag of tricks. Build your own 'troll door', 'goblin door', 'elf door', or 'fairy door' for our collective art project and you get to take it home with you at the end of the festival!

PERSONHUNT! with Tim Ireland

3HR 2 pm Information Tent

Our light guns only shoot photons, but we use them to teach young people to hunt humans in the dark! We have a fantastic fi eld of ferns to hide in, and up to a dozen 'torch guns' for our hunters. Parents / guardians can help man Hide & Seek HQ and maybe play with some of the niftier toys.

ROBIN HOOD COMPLEXAfter meeting a guy going to fi ght ISIS, Emile After meeting a guy going to fi ght ISIS, Emile bought a camera and booked a fl ight to the bought a camera and booked a fl ight to the Middle East which led him to making Robin Middle East which led him to making Robin

Hood Complex. Hood Complex.

UNDER THE WIREOn 13 February 2012, war-correspondent

Marie Colvin and photographer Paul Conroy Marie Colvin and photographer Paul Conroy entered war-ravaged Syria to cover the entered war-ravaged Syria to cover the

plight of civilians trapped in the besieged plight of civilians trapped in the besieged Homs, under attack by the Syrian army. Only Homs, under attack by the Syrian army. Only

one of them returned. This is their story.

TRIBALISM IS KILLING US TRIBALISM IS KILLING US + Q&A+ Q&A

Tribalism, racism, discrimination and losing Tribalism, racism, discrimination and losing white privilege - a montage fi lm asking why it is

that we still live in a divided world.

ROGER LAW AND SPITTING IMAGEROGER LAW AND SPITTING IMAGEA session with the legendary illustrator, A session with the legendary illustrator,

cartoonist and satirist Roger Law, one of the leading creators of Spitting Image.

GEOFF DYER - WHERE EAGLES DARE GEOFF DYER - WHERE EAGLES DARE + Q&A+ Q&A

Documentary about the classic war fi lm narrated by award-winning

critic and novelist Geoff Dyer.critic and novelist Geoff Dyer.

THE GREAT HACK+QA

Exploring how a data company named Cambridge Analytica came to symbolise the Cambridge Analytica came to symbolise the dark side of social media in the wake of the dark side of social media in the wake of the

2016 U.S. presidential election, as uncovered 2016 U.S. presidential election, as uncovered by journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

THE WHITE ROOMA female soldier comes home to deal with

some life shattering news and the effects of PTSD which manifests itself as agoraphobia.PTSD which manifests itself as agoraphobia.

THE MANHATTAN FRONTTHE MANHATTAN FRONTOnce upon a time, in 1915, a German saboteur Once upon a time, in 1915, a German saboteur arrived to Manhattan to interrupt the export of arrived to Manhattan to interrupt the export of American munitions to Britain. He soon fi nds a collaborator in a wayward stevedore who unwit-tingly leads him to a group of labor anarchists.

NOTHING BEYOND MEASURE (ANTIGONE) NOTHING BEYOND MEASURE (ANTIGONE) A woman and two men. A woman and two men.

They cut the chain off the gate at the They cut the chain off the gate at the entrance of the theatre. The tragedy is

Antigone by Sophocles: the confl ict between human and divine laws, the condition of human and divine laws, the condition of

women, the arrogance of power.women, the arrogance of power.

THE MODERN LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA: THE MODERN LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA: THE INTERNET ARCHIVES

Birgitta Jonsdottir

THE ART OF GUERRILLA VIDEO ACTIVISMImran Azam

THE KITCHEN TABLE WRITERAlice Jolly

THE POST TRUTH BUSINESSSean Pillot

SOUND DELIVERYJude HabibJude Habib

How can we give a media platform to people How can we give a media platform to people who often fi nd themselves unrepresented?who often fi nd themselves unrepresented?

GUERRILLA WEB PUBLISHING GUERRILLA WEB PUBLISHING STARTING AND SUSTAINING AN ONLINE JOURNALISM PROJECT Andrew Staffell and Thomas EagleAndrew Staffell and Thomas Eagle

DIAMOND GEEZERS AND INSPECTOR DIAMOND GEEZERS AND INSPECTOR KNACKER: HOW TO BE A WOLF NOT A SHEEP

IN THE WORLD OF CRIME REPORTING Paul LashmarPaul Lashmar

PARENTING TOMORROW'S ACTIVISTSKim McCabe

CHASING A MURDERER AND CHASING A MURDERER AND OTHER TRUE CRIME STORIES OTHER TRUE CRIME STORIES

Peter GillmanPeter Gillman

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISMINVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISMIan OvertonIan Overton

PARENTING TOMORROW'S ACTIVISTSKim McCabe

SHAKEITUP IMPROV

GUERRILLA FILM-MAKINGSheridan Fynn

THE FIRST DRAFT WORKSHOPLaura Garcia

OATS AND BEANS AND BARLEY GROW...Josiah Meldrum

CHANTING WORKSHOP CHANTING WORKSHOP Karen DobresKaren Dobres

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE MUSLIMS THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE MUSLIMS – CHALLENGING ISLAMOPHOBIA

IN THE MOVIES WITH THE RIZ TEST Shaf Choudry, MEND Shaf Choudry, MEND

STAND-UP COMEDY

MAKING A DRAMA OUT OF A CRISIS: MAKING A DRAMA OUT OF A CRISIS: WRITING FILM AND TV SCRIPTS BASED

ON TRUE STORIES Ellin StainEllin Stain

REPORTING THE SECRET FAMILY COURTS REPORTING THE SECRET FAMILY COURTS PART 1PART 1

Lucy ReedLucy Reed

TAROT CARDSDavid KeenanDavid Keenan

ANTI-SURVEILLANCE TIPS FOR ANTI-SURVEILLANCE TIPS FOR SMARTPHONES

Mark Spy Blog

OYSTER SHUCKINGBobby Groves is the Head of Oysters at London restaurant Chiltern Firehouse. He began work-

ing on his local oyster farm Maldon Oysters cul-ing on his local oyster farm Maldon Oysters cul-tivating, delivering and exporting shellfi sh, and tivating, delivering and exporting shellfi sh, and as an oyster shucker in London food markets as an oyster shucker in London food markets for both Maldon and West Mersea shucking for both Maldon and West Mersea shucking

thousands of oysters a day.

PLACEBO: ALT RUSSIA+ Q&A

Following alternative rock band Placebo, per-Following alternative rock band Placebo, per-forming in ten cities across Russia. Narrated forming in ten cities across Russia. Narrated

by the band’s frontman Stefan Olsdal, the by the band’s frontman Stefan Olsdal, the documentary offers a revealing insight into the documentary offers a revealing insight into the

alternative cultures in Russia’s major cities.

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SUNDAY 25TH AUGUSTMEDIA CIRCUS FOREST FORUM FUTURE DOME SPEAK-EASY REBEL REBEL STAGE

TALK/PANELKEY MUSIC PERFORMANCE / POETRY COMEDY WORKSHOP DOCUMENTARY DJ

THE CURIOUS ARTS BREAKFAST CLUBPaul Blezard with guests reviews the papers

DEMOCRACY IN DANGER: DIRTY DATA DEMOCRACY IN DANGER: DIRTY DATA AND DARK MONEY

Chair: Malini Mehra, Damian Tambini, Adam Ramsay, Ian Lucas MPAdam Ramsay, Ian Lucas MP

GINA MILLER IN CONVERSATIONwith Helen Mountfi eld

MYTH AND TABOO: CAN INTEGRATION MYTH AND TABOO: CAN INTEGRATION EVER SOLVE RACISM?

Chair: Hardeep Matharu, Dr Maya Goodfellow, Naz Shah MP, Bonnie GreerNaz Shah MP, Bonnie Greer

CHALLENGING THE POLITICS OF FEAR CHALLENGING THE POLITICS OF FEAR AND RISE OF POPULISM

Chair: Shazad Amin, Naz Shah MP, Caroline Orr,Richard McNeill-WilsonRichard McNeill-Wilson

DAVID NOTT: THE INDIANA JONES OF SURGERY

GENERATION BREXIT GENERATION BREXIT Chair: Gavin EslerChair: Gavin Esler, Tara Grace, Jason Arthur, Tara Grace, Jason ArthurChair: Gavin Esler, Tara Grace, Jason ArthurChair: Gavin EslerChair: Gavin Esler, Tara Grace, Jason ArthurChair: Gavin Esler

Doire Finn, Simranjeet RiyatDoire Finn, Simranjeet Riyat

THE FROW SHOWTHE FROW SHOWA sketch comedy show for and about the A sketch comedy show for and about the

weird and wonderful people of Forest Row and the surrounding areas

MISHA GLENNY MISHA GLENNY ANDAND HACKING SHOW HACKING SHOWA hands-on interactive Hacking DemoA hands-on interactive Hacking Demo

NOT ANOTHER FAKE NEWS CAST SHOWNOT ANOTHER FAKE NEWS CAST SHOWInvestigate the phenomenon in their Investigate the phenomenon in their

typical darkly comic styletypical darkly comic style

BAD PRESS AWARDS with John Mitchinson, Hardeep Singh with John Mitchinson, Hardeep Singh

Kohli, Salena Godden And GuestsKohli, Salena Godden And Guests

WHAT THE PAPERS DON'T SAYWHAT THE PAPERS DON'T SAYWith Otto English, Hardeep Matharu, With Otto English, Hardeep Matharu,

Tina Gharavi, Peter Jukes,Mike Stuchbery, Stephen ColegraveMike Stuchbery, Stephen Colegrave

THE GREAT PENSIONS SCANDALTHE GREAT PENSIONS SCANDALChair: David Hencke, Joanne Welch, Jackie Chair: David Hencke, Joanne Welch, Jackie

Jones MEP, Dr Davina Lloyd, Yvette GreenwayJones MEP, Dr Davina Lloyd, Yvette Greenway

BREXIT BULLSHITBREXIT BULLSHITGavin Esler in conversation with Stephen Gavin Esler in conversation with Stephen

Colegrave about his new bookColegrave about his new book

HOW WE CAN DEFEND THE BBC?HOW WE CAN DEFEND THE BBC? Chair: Peter York, Peter Jukes, Chair: Peter York, Peter Jukes,

Patrick Howse, Kirsty LangPatrick Howse, Kirsty Lang

MAX PORTERAuthor of 'Grief Is the Thing with Feathers'

YOUTH ASSEMBLY – ABORTIONYOUTH ASSEMBLY – ABORTIONEd Statham, Hannah Williams, Lauren Kosky, Ed Statham, Hannah Williams, Lauren Kosky,

Molly Cooke, Natalie LittleMolly Cooke, Natalie Little

FUTURE ENVIRONMENT: WHAT WILL WE FUTURE ENVIRONMENT: WHAT WILL WE EAT? FARMING IN A HOSTILE CLIMATE

Chair: Anita McNaught, Colin Tudge,Josiah Meldrum, Stuart Roberts, John LynchJosiah Meldrum, Stuart Roberts, John Lynch

WHO OWNS BRITAIN? LAND OWNERSHIP WHO OWNS BRITAIN? LAND OWNERSHIP IN A TIME OF REVOLUTION

Chair: Anita McNaught, Guy Shrubsole, Prof Ian Hodge, Antonia LayardHodge, Antonia Layard

GENDERED BRAINGina Rippon in conversation about her book

THE LONDON TIMES THE LONDON TIMES SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM: WHERE

FICTION TRUMPS TRUTHPaddy French, Brian CathcartPaddy French, Brian Cathcart

DAVID KEENANDAVID KEENANAuthor of 'England’s Hidden Reverse and This Is Author of 'England’s Hidden Reverse and This Is

Memorial Device'Memorial Device'

DYLAN JONESDYLAN JONESTalks about his new book The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World’s Greatest

Unfi nished Song.Unfi nished Song.

PLINKPLINKA New Way to sing Old SongsA New Way to sing Old Songs

CHELSEA RENTONPortrait Artist, Cartoonist and Illustrator

RHYTHM AND FLOWRHYTHM AND FLOWinspired & created by Shiva Rea’s Yoga Trance inspired & created by Shiva Rea’s Yoga Trance

Dance®Dance®

JO NEARY JO NEARY ANDAND BEN MOOR B BEN MOOR BLive theatre experience and an experiment in Live theatre experience and an experiment in the limits of patience regarding card tricksthe limits of patience regarding card tricks

BYLINE SOAPBOXCome and have your say, or song, or standup

THE PGSTHE PGSSound making with props and gizmos, and Sound making with props and gizmos, and

guitarguitar

LIVEWIRE SALON POETS LIVEWIRE SALON POETS WITHWITH SALENA GODDEN SALENA GODDEN

with Connor Byrne, Sunnah Khan, Oakley, with Connor Byrne, Sunnah Khan, Oakley, Sheena Patel, Repeat Beat Poet, Oli Spleen, Maria Ferguson, Toria Garbutt, Joelle Taylor,

Michelle Fisher, Matt AbbottMichelle Fisher, Matt Abbott

TIM BURKE MEMORIAL FILMActivist, fi lm-maker, writer, provocateur, fl aneur

HMS SWEET CHARITYHMS SWEET CHARITYA collection of lesser known, forgotten-to-time-A collection of lesser known, forgotten-to-time-

and-taste records from across the globeand-taste records from across the globe

ANGHARADSinger Songwriter from Wales

DIPPER MALKIN DIPPER MALKIN WITH NICK HENNESSY STORYTELLER

Unique combination of 14-string violae, fi nely honed guitar, remarkable vocals, and award

winning storytellerwinning storytellerARGONAUT ARGONAUT Alternative DIY Punk RockAlternative DIY Punk Rock

BLOW MONKEYSPolitically Engaged New Wave

SALENA GODDENByline Festival Poet Laureate

HARDEEP SINGH KOHLIStand up show

CARRIEANN CARRIEANN ANDAND LONE POPPY LONE POPPYEdgy Rock singer with some smooth and emo-Edgy Rock singer with some smooth and emo-

tive dreamy edges tive dreamy edges

ANT WILLEerie Soundscapes

CULT WITH NO NAMEPost-Punk Electronic Balladeers DJ DOBBODJ DOBBO

Best in Motown, Northern Soul and Gospel Best in Motown, Northern Soul and Gospel MusicMusic

CHEAPDATE DJCHEAPDATE DJA Magical Musical tour round the GlobeA Magical Musical tour round the Globe

DJ MABBSDJ MABBSMix of Funk, Hip Hop, Afrobeat, Reggae and Mix of Funk, Hip Hop, Afrobeat, Reggae and

ElectronicElectronic

HOUSE OF COMEDYHOUSE OF COMEDYElle Bert, Elle Bert,

Darcie Silver, Darcie Silver, Phil Kay Phil Kay

Dereks Mojo, El Baldiniho, Alex Martini Alex Martini

& winner of open mic& winner of open mic

DEPARTMENT SPost Punk New Wave

JOEY BASEJOEY BASEHip Hop Rap with Pop twist

THE LUMPAlternative Indie

BYLINE CITIZEN'S ASSEMBLYBYLINE CITIZEN'S ASSEMBLYJoin us for an interactive debate around Join us for an interactive debate around

decarbonisationdecarbonisation

THE ROUTE TO RAPID DECARBONISATIONChair: Professor Rupert Read Chair: Professor Rupert Read Andrew Simms, Anna HughesAndrew Simms, Anna Hughes

MJ GREAT BIG CHOIRPeformance with festival goers joining in

JESS KIDDAuthour of Himself & The Hoarder

GUY KENNAWAYGUY KENNAWAYStudies of oppressed minorities under severe Studies of oppressed minorities under severe

pressure and then making fun of thempressure and then making fun of them

HUGH ST CLAIREArts and Design journalist

WHERE DOES IT ALL FALL APART?: HOW OUR CIVILISATION WILL DISINTEGRATEOUR CIVILISATION WILL DISINTEGRATE

Chair: Anita McNaught, Prof Rupert Read, Chair: Anita McNaught, Prof Rupert Read, Nafeez Ahmed, Nafeez Ahmed,

David Wallace-Wells

THE CLIMATE SCIENCE DENIAL NETWORK: DARK MONEY AND NETWORK: DARK MONEY AND

PROPAGANDAPROPAGANDAChair: Malini Mehra, Mat Hope, Chair: Malini Mehra, Mat Hope,

Nick Mabey, Adam Ramsay

IMAGINE IF THE WORLD WASN'T RUN BY IMAGINE IF THE WORLD WASN'T RUN BY POLITICIANS? POLITICIANS?

An interactive introduction to sortition and citizen's assemblies

YOGAYOGAVinyasa FlowVinyasa Flow

Beginner/IntermediateBeginner/Intermediate

XR EXPLAINEDXR EXPLAINED

ROSIE WILBYAward-winning comedian

RADIO KWG Road songs

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SUNDAY 25TH AUGUSTDOCUMENTARY TENT WORKSHOP TENT 1 WORKSHOP TENT 2 WORKSHOP TENT 3 WORKSHOP TENT 4

Kids, and Young Adults, activities on Sunday

THE CRAB PRINCE CHILDREN'S COMEDY SHOWwith Jo Neary

1 HR 12 noon in Tent 1

The Crab Prince is a seaside version of the Grimm Brothers traditional fairy tale ‘The Frog Prince’. Scuttle The Crab longs to be human. Can little Lucy help to make his dream come true? Should Scuttle The Crab be careful what he wishes for? Meanwhile, Marina The Marine Explorer needs some help to make life in the rock-pools good again for everyone. An original and beautifully crafted comedy show about friendship, home and the environment, with the chance for the audience to help save the day. Art materials provided.

‘What a brilliant show. Loved the little craft interlude too and the kids still have their crabs!’‘Hilarious. Haven’t laughed this much in ages. Oh and the kids really enjoyed it’

Jo Simmons INTERACTIVE READING OF HER BOOKS

1 HR 1 pm in Tent 1

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6+

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BEDTIME STORIES with Paul Blezard

1 HR 7 pm in Tent 1

WATER ROCKETS with Tim Ireland

3HR 10 am Information Tent

The record set for a standard 2L water bottle rocket charged to 40 psi was 89.5 on a gently declining slope at Byline Festival 2018, set by Zac & Kem who attempted a rifl ing effect with their stabilising fi ns and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Your challenge is to better that record, and it's not like it's brain surgery or anything.

CAMPFIRE with Tim Ireland

3HR 7 pm Information Tent

A good old-fashioned campfi re with one simple catch: you have to earn your marshmallow by entertaining us. If you really wow the crowd you might earn a s'more. We're talking high stakes, open mic, and old-school material.

TAROT CARDSDavid Keenan

LOCAL CONTROL: KARL HESS LOCAL CONTROL: KARL HESS IN THE WORLD OF IDEASIN THE WORLD OF IDEAS

Documentary about the political spectrum Documentary about the political spectrum focused on the former corporate consultant

and speechwriter for Barry Goldwater

NOT MY COUNTRYPublic relations for a repressive regime

HACKNEY STUDIONon-linear dark comedy about a body piercer

LAST OF THE MANSON GIRLSLAST OF THE MANSON GIRLSCounterculture journalist Paul Krassner Counterculture journalist Paul Krassner

embarks on an LSD tinged investigation of the embarks on an LSD tinged investigation of the last of Manson's disciples: Brenda McCann, last of Manson's disciples: Brenda McCann,

Sandra Good and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme.

THE TRUTH WILL OUTTHE TRUTH WILL OUT+ TRASHART SHORTS+ TRASHART SHORTS

A British Docu-Horror inspired by the #metoo A British Docu-Horror inspired by the #metoo movement.

WAKEY WAKEYWAKEY WAKEYTeen Josie tries to make sense of a frighten-ing world in which a sleep condition blurs her

dreams into waking life.dreams into waking life.

JONATHAN BARNBROOK JONATHAN BARNBROOK – ACTIVIST GRAPHIC DESIGN

Worked extensively with David Bowie, is also known for his collaboration with Adbustersknown for his collaboration with Adbusters

WHITE RIGHTWHITE RIGHTfi lmmaker and journalist Deeyah Khan sits face-fi lmmaker and journalist Deeyah Khan sits face-

to-face with fascists, racists and the propo-nents of “alt-right” ideologies to fi nd out why.

COMIC BOOK KINGDOMCOMIC BOOK KINGDOMThe most talented Comic book creators working The most talented Comic book creators working

across the UK today.across the UK today.

MILITIA MAN + Q&AAbout the Katanga case, former leader of the About the Katanga case, former leader of the Patriotic Resistance Force in Ituri (FRPI), an Patriotic Resistance Force in Ituri (FRPI), an

armed group in the Democratic Republic of the armed group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), at the ICC. Congo (DRC), at the ICC.

VIBRATIONSVIBRATIONSKuwaiti multimedia artist and social entrepre-Kuwaiti multimedia artist and social entrepre-neur, Zahed Sultan on an uncharted journey

WHEN LAMBS BECOME LIONSWHEN LAMBS BECOME LIONSEmmy-winning short fi lmmaker Jon Kasbe Emmy-winning short fi lmmaker Jon Kasbe

(Heartbeats Of Fiji) documents how this daily (Heartbeats Of Fiji) documents how this daily struggle binds together the inhabitants of Northern Kenya, both man and beast, in a

savage landscape.savage landscape.

BURKINABÉ RISING: THE ART OF BURKINABÉ RISING: THE ART OF RESISTANCE IN BURKINA FASO

Today, the spirit of resistance and political change is mightier than ever and it permeates

every aspect of the Burkinabè life. every aspect of the Burkinabè life.

UNQUIET GRAVES UNQUIET GRAVES Powerful fi lm detailing how members of the Powerful fi lm detailing how members of the RUC and UDR were centrally involved in the murder of over 120 innocent civilians during

“the Troubles”“the Troubles”

CHASING A MURDERER AND CHASING A MURDERER AND OTHER TRUE CRIME STORIES OTHER TRUE CRIME STORIES

Peter GillmanPeter Gillman

ANTI-SURVEILLANCE TIPS FOR ANTI-SURVEILLANCE TIPS FOR SMARTPHONES SMARTPHONES

Mark Spy BlogMark Spy Blog

ENTERING THE WILDERNESS OF ENTERING THE WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS – A JOURNALIST’S GUIDE.

HOW TO TELL WHEN SPIES LIEPaul LashmarPaul Lashmar

THE ART OF GUERRILLA PODCASTING Imran Azam

GUERRILLA WEB PUBLISHING GUERRILLA WEB PUBLISHING STARTING AND SUSTAINING AN ONLINE JOURNALISM PROJECT Andrew Staffell and Thomas EagleAndrew Staffell and Thomas Eagle

THE KITCHEN TABLE WRITERAlice Jolly

SOUND DELIVERYJude Habib

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Goodbye, Liberal Britain

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE FIRST FOUR EDITIONS OF

W elcome to our Byline Festival special edition of Byline Times.

Since we launched our daily news site and monthly

print newspaper four months ago. we have broken stories like the Brexit Party’s questionable PayPal funding, which led to an Electoral Commission investigation; pieced together the relationship between Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Steve Bannon; explored further the

electoral law-breaking of the likes of the Vote Leave campaign during the EU Referendum; reported on the rise of Islamophobia and white supremacy in Europe and beyond; and shone a light on why the story of Brexit is the unresolved story of the British Empire.

Byline Times is already attracting great journalists and writers, many of whom are speaking at the festival. To give you a taster of some of their articles and a feel for the newspaper,

we have put together a selection of highlights. We hope they will inspire and engage you in between panels and shows or by the light of a torch in your tent and encourage you to join us on this quest and subscribe.

With your help, we will continue to hold to account everybody who wants to subvert the liberal values of democracy and undermine the importance of truth. Please share with friends. Spread the word.

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FESTIVAL EDITOR I AL

12 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

BRITAIN'S NEW PRIME MINISTER

Eton Mess

W hen he was at Eton in the early 1980s, Boris Johnson

did something that seems to have set the tone for the rest of his adult life. Cast in the title role of a pro-duction of Shakespeare’s Richard II, he didn’t bother to learn his part.

The character of Richard II has 758 lines in his eponymously titled play. The part requires the actor to be on stage for most of the two-and-a-half hours running time. You can’t ‘wing’ Richard II. But Boris Johnson tried. Pasting his lines on bits of paper about the place, he hoofed the speeches and made up the rest – throwing in jokes whenever there was an awk-ward silence.

His father Stanley, who was in the audience, thought it was all ‘a hoot’. Nobody else did.

The others, who had spent hours attending rehearsals and learning their parts, saw their hard work reduced to the ‘Boris show’. The headmaster, Eric Anderson, was furious. Until then, Johnson had been Eton’s golden child. Known to all, adored by teachers and students alike. But, his arro-gant, self-serving, indolent turn as Richard II was the last straw.

When, in his � nal year, he was not made School Captain, he unleashed an epic sulk prompting his housemaster to write in his end of term report: “I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obli-gation which binds everyone else.”

In the three decades since, nobody has better summed up his character. Boris Johnson gets what Boris Johnson wants and stu� anyone who gets in the way.

The Guppy Affair

A t Oxford University, Johnson was part of the infamous

Bullingdon Club. It wined, dined and then smashed up restaurants before throwing cash at the hapless proprietors who were left to clean it up.

Leaving university in 1987, the 23-year-old Johnson landed a job at The Times. In May the fol-lowing year, he spiced up some copy by inventing a quote from his own godfather, Oxford academic Dr Colin Lucas, and was � red. Most young journalists who get sacked for lying might struggle to work again, but most young people aren’t gifted with the contacts of the Johnson family.

Calls were made and soon he was at the Telegraph as its Brussels correspondent – where he fabri-cated stories about the EU. Among the many � bs directly attributable to him that have passed into folk-lore, are the ones claiming the med-dling bureaucrats were going to ban prawn cocktail crisps – and that double-decker buses were going to be scrapped to meet EU require-ments. Having established him-self as a Telegraph name, Johnson returned to London as a political columnist.

Various scandals followed – not least the Guppy a� air, when a

recording of a 1990 telephone call between him and his old friend Darius Guppy was made public. Guppy had been under investiga-tion by the News of the World for criminal activity and he wanted Johnson to get the address of the journalist so he could have him beaten up. Johnson promised to oblige – but only on the under-standing that he would be kept out of things. When confronted with the call in 1995, Johnson claimed not to have actually given Guppy the address. He was reprimanded by Telegraph editor Max Hastings, but no more was said. Johnson sold papers after all.

Having failed to get elected as an MP in the 1997 General Election, Johnson was then hired as editor of The Spectator in 1999 on the understanding that he wouldn’t try to become a politician. Johnson gave his word, but we don’t need Sherlock Holmes to guess what happened next.

The Spectator’s then proprietor Conrad Black – later to � nd notori-ety as a convicted fraudster – was so taken aback by his lack of integ-rity that he dubbed him “ine� ably duplicitous”, although it is unclear as to whether he meant it as a com-pliment or not.

“Watermelon Smiles”

E lected as MP for Henley in 2001, Boris Johnson failed to

turn up for work. In his � rst four years at Westminster, he was pres-ent for just half of all parliamentary votes and, in his second, a mere 45%.

Bothering with the daily grind of parliamentary procedure wasn’t his bag. He was a highly paid jour-nalist after all, with an undeniable

knack for connecting with his read-ership. Writing about gay marriage in 2001 he said: “If gay marriage was OK – and I was uncertain on the issue – then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog.”

The year after his election as MP, Johnson wrote a piece in the Telegraph in which he described Commonwealth citizens as “° ag-waving piccaninnies” with “water-melon smiles.” Johnson did admit-tedly apologise – but only six years later when he was standing to be Mayor of the most multicultural city in Europe.

This was and always has been the Boris Johnson way: lie, bluster, blather, o� end and then only apolo-gise if it is politically expedient.

When he became Mayor of London in 2008, Johnson promised to donate a � fth of his £250,000 Telegraph salary to local London charities. But, once elected, he gave away just £20,000. He also decided to ‘work from home’ on Fridays to the irritation of colleagues.

Johnson’s eight years in oÉ ce in the capital were lacklustre by any standard. Never interested in details, he obsessed over vanity projects including a line of ersatz Routemasters that came in at three times more than a standard London bus. He also oversaw the planning for a doomed garden bridge that Londoners didn’t want and which never got built. In all, these proj-ects are estimated to have cost the London taxpayer a whopping £940 million.

Yes, the Olympics arrived in London in 2012, and there were those bicycles which took his name

– but Johnson had nothing to do

Johnson had come to realise that his

Telegraph column was his platform

in the same way that Twitter was Trump’s.

by Otto English

Boris Johnson is Britain’s best known politician – but in two decades in public life, what has our new Prime Minister actually achieved? Sit back and enlighten yourself on the life, times and the very many lies of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

THE JOHNSON SHOW

13

THE DEATH OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY BRITAIN'S NEW PRIME MINISTER

with either. Both were his predeces-sor Ken Livingstone’s initiatives.

Then in 2014, despite having pledged 17 times that he wouldn’t stand to be an MP while performing his mayoral role, Johnson sought and won selection for the safe Tory seat of Uxbridge. David Cameron, who had been in the year below him at Eton, was now ‘Head Boy’ of the country and it clearly rankled Johnson every bit as much as missing out on School Captain had in the 1980s.

Johnson – the very rich, very cossetted son of immense privilege

– sees himself as the main character in a � lm in which everyone else is an extra. When asked as a young child what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would answer “the king of the world”.

While that childish ambition was always beyond the realms of plausibility, in the years to come he would see his chance to be the next best thing – if only he could get that damned Cameron out of the way � rst.

Integrity Defi cit

I n March 2013, Boris Johnson had appeared as a guest on the BBC‘s

Andrew Marr Show. The genial Marr had recently su� ered a stroke so was taking an extended break from the Sunday morning sofa and, in his place, sat the political journal-ist Eddie Mair. Johnson was then at the peak of his powers. Consecutive polls showed him to be the most pop-ular politician in the UK.

So, on that Sunday morning, he was probably looking forward to some banter and a subtle plug for his Prime Ministerial ambitions. Unfortunately for him, it was not to be. As Johnson shifted uneasily in his chair, Mair took him apart.

Why had he made up a quote and been sacked from The Times? Why had he lied to Michael Howard about his a� air with Petronella Wyatt? Why had he o� ered to supply Darius Guppy with the address of a News of the World journalist – so he could have him beaten up? “Why don’t we talk about something else?” Johnson blustered. “Because this is about your integrity,” Mair shot back – adding: “you’re a nasty piece of work aren’t you?”

The ‘bicycle crash’ encoun-ter showed that when Johnson was properly scrutinised, he fell apart. Subsequently, he and his team did everything they could to avoid broadcast interviews. In any case, Johnson had come to realise that his Telegraph column was his platform in the same way that Twitter was Trump’s. He didn’t need to subject himself to potentially hostile jour-nalists. Via his journalism, he could have complete control over his mes-sage and his image. The Telegraphwas his Pravda.

To Leave or Remain?

A s the 2015 General Election approached, Johnson had a

problem. He was now a middle aged man in a hurry. Having just turned 50, he had, at best, 10 years and two General Elections left to become Prime Minister. And so, despite having promised 17 times that he would not run to be an MP while still at City Hall, he did what he always does and went back on his word.

Johnson won the Uxbridge seat and was now back at Westminster.

If Cameron wasn’t looking over his shoulder, he should have been. Pressure was growing for the Tories to deliver on a manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on membership of the EU and, in February 2016, Cameron announced that the contest would be held that June. This posed something of a problem for Johnson: who to back?

It certainly wasn’t obvious, for despite having made a name for him-self inventing stories about EU direc-tives, he wasn’t a natural Eurosceptic. His father Stanley had been an MEP and Johnson junior was in many ways your classic Eurotrash. He had spent his early childhood living in Brussels. His paternal great-grandfather was Turkish, while his mother’s family were of French and Jewish Russian descent.

As a former Mayor of London, he was acutely aware of the impor-tance of EU membership for trade and commerce telling the FT in a revealing 2013 interview: “The real problem is the political signal that it sends, particularly the signal it sends

to foreign investors.” Johnson had once even made a convincing case for Turkey joining the EU.

But, principle was nothing when set against his ambition. When you are rich and pampered, when you have never lived outside the cloisters of wealth, privilege and open doors, you can treat life like a game. He weighed his options.

By backing Remain, he had nothing much to gain beyond a show of loyalty to a man he clearly despised. By backing Leave, he had a chance to play directly to the Eurosceptic grassroots of the Tory party. If the country voted to stay in the EU, as everyone then pre-dicted, he would have set out his stall for any future leadership bid and won the hearts of the EU loath-ing rank-and-� le.

But it got better. If Leave won, Cameron would be toast anyway – leaving a vacancy with a Boris- sized space at the top.

He had nothing to lose and having written both a Remain and Leave case for his Telegraph column, � red o� the ‘Brexit’ one to his editor. I need hardly tell you what happened next.

Keeping the Show on the Road

J ohnson became the Vote Leave pin up.

He posed in front of buses. He warned about the dangers of Turkey joining the EU, despite having said the exact opposite less than a decade before. He hammered home the ben-e� ts of Brexit. And, he sat back and watched the country burn.

Only, once Cameron had fallen, things didn’t go quite the way Johnson had planned. He didn’t get the gig. But all was not lost. Once May came to power, he got the Foreign OÉ ce instead. Five of the last twelve Prime Ministers have been Foreign Secretary � rst and it can provide a superb platform on which to prove leadership mettle on the world stage.

But, Boris f*cked it up. In fact, it’s not an understatement to say that, during his brief tenure, he was prob-ably the worst Foreign Secretary in living memory.

Diplomacy was not his thing. In 2016, he caused outrage by referring to Africa as “that coun-try” before suggesting that the con-tinent would benefit from the old colonial masters interfering once more. A year later, he implied that Libya could be the next UAE, but only once the country had “cleared the dead bodies away”. During a visit to Myanmar, he thought it appropriate to recite a colonial era Kipling poem in one of the coun-try’s most sacred temples. In India, he invoked the Nazis and implied that the EU wished to impose

“punishment beatings” on the UK.At a Foreign OÉ ce reception in

2018 to celebrate the Queen’s birth-day, he shocked foreign dignitaries by responding to a question about post-Brexit trade concerns by saying:

“F*ck business”. Foreign counter-parts reported that he was hope-lessly ill-prepared, that he hadn’t done the most basic homework, that he was pompous, unguarded, rude and embarrassing.

But, if making Britain a bigger laughing stock than it was already was bad enough, he also demonstrated that, by being given great power, he could show great irresponsibility.

During a select committee hearing in 2017, Johnson wrongly claimed that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British mother cur-rently imprisoned in Iran, had been training journalists in the country before she was arrested. It was a disaster for Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe who was immediately hauled in front of an Iranian judge and told that her sentence would likely be doubled. His dis-regard for her safety and the con-cerns of her family should have led to him tendering his resigna-tion. But, Boris Johnson runs on Boris Johnson rules. He only quit as Foreign Secretary when he thought it might bring Theresa May down.

Good Luck

T hat this unpredictable and unre-liable chancer, who has spent a

lifetime bluÉ ng, lying, gambling, cheating and reversing his positions to suit his own ends has now ended up in Downing Street should terrify us all.

The thought of Boris Johnson with his � nger on the nuclear trig-ger is worrying enough, but he is also charged with navigating us through the most hazardous waters that the UK has faced since the Second World War. That, perhaps, should frighten us even more.

Good luck Britain – you’re going to need it.

14 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

BYLINE TIMES SPOTLIGHT: STEVE BANNON

Churchill College, Cambridge, December 2013. The YBF 10th anniversary conference with (left to right) Raheem Kassam, Steve Bannon and Harry Cole

If you are able to go to war then you can affect policy. We are the party

of ‘yes we can’.YBF 10th Anniversary attendee

C hurchill College, Cambridge, 2013. A December weekend

out of term time, and a hundred or so right-wing libertarians are gathered in a lecture hall to hear an American talk with two rising stars of the Young Britons Foundation (YBF) on its 10th anniversary.

Self-described as a ‘Conservative Madrasa’, the YBF was a youth insurgency movement within the Conservative Party and the right in general. The founda-tion’s dolphin symbol was a play on this badge of ideological purity: the founder, Donal Blaney, would reward young activists, journal-ists and would-be politicians with a ‘Golden Dolphin’ award for being ‘ultrasound’. This wasn’t, however, a home-grown movement.

Low tax and deregulation were old Thatcherite themes, but the group’s emphasis on untram-melled ‘liberty’, relaxing gun control, privatising the NHS (a 60-year “mistake”, according to YBF president Daniel Hannan) and an odd strand of right-wing evangelical intolerance, betrayed its US origins.

The YBF was an o� shoot of the Young Americas Foundation (YAF), based at the Reagan Ranch in California, which relied heavily on funding from US hedge fund billionaire, Robert Mercer. And 2013 was a particular moment in this particular transatlantic bridge. The sister YAF was ° ying dele-gates over to Cambridge for a 2013 Special Relationship Scholarship programme. The relationship between Mercer, Bannon, the Trump campaign and the young ideologues from Britain would very special indeed.

Given the in° uence of the US republican right, YBF members were sceptical of Prime Minister David Cameron’s modernisation project, which was more closely

aligned to President Barack Obama who had just been re-elected for a second term.

The YBF and its aÉ liates like Conservative Way Forward longed for a more ‘ultrasound’ leader. For years, the YBF presi-dent Daniel Hannan – by then a prominent Eurosceptic Member of the European Parliament – had

been their favourite. But, since his victory in the mayoral campaign in London in the previous year, Boris Johnson was now openly discussed as the preferred choice.

How could they win? The Obama campaign had

shown the power of online activ-ism and digital propaganda, and matching that was a constant ques-tion in the YBF since his victory in 2008. According to one attendee, Harsimrat Kaur, the rallying cry at the 10th anniversary was: “If you are able to go to war, then you can a� ect policy. We are the party of ‘yes we can’!” How could the right tap into the same energy and enthusiasm among the young?

One man had an answer.

Digital Warfare

S teve Bannon, destined to be Donald Trump’s campaign

manager, had spent the last decade or so as a � lm producer and then mining ‘World of Warcraft’ gold. He had developed an understand-ing of both the cultural dimension of the battle ahead, and the need to take that battle online.

Two years earlier, he had started discussions with Nigel Farage (reportedly introduced to him by the YBF’s executive direc-tor Matthew Richardson) about starting a British-style populist ‘Tea Party’ movement to respond to the crisis after the credit crunch. In 2012, Bannon had entered into an alliance with YAF funder Robert Mercer to become executive direc-tor of the ‘Alt Right’ Breitbart publications.

At the panel session with the YBF in Cambridge the following year, Bannon shared a stage with Raheem Kassam, a conservative activist and campaigns manager for the Henry Jackson Society. Seated on his other side was Harry Cole, news editor of the Guido Fawkes

blog. They were there to discuss digital activism. No record remains of what was said.

But, just around the corner, Chris Wylie and Alexander Nix, of SCL Elections, an electioneer-ing and digital operations company contracted by the UK Ministry of Defence, were hurriedly setting up an oÉ ce in Cambridge, sta� ed by new recruits, to impress Bannon.

Bannon and his backer Mercer wanted to use the military grade SCL ‘target audience acquisition’ technology on the US population. He was impressed by both British culture and academia and wanted to give the new company the same kind of kudos. So Cambridge Analytica was born.

Three years later, the com-pany would shoot to fame for – in Nix’s own words at the time – win-ning the surprise Leave vote in the EU Referendum, and then power-ing the shock election of Donald Trump. It was closed down in 2018 when a history of election manip-ulation worldwide and extensive hacking of millions of Facebook users was revealed.

The YBF was just as scan-dal-prone. It was closed down in 2015 when a young activist, Elliott Johnson, committed suicide claim-ing he had been bullied by the YBF’s director of outreach Mark Clarke, a former Conservative parliamen-tary candidate. He had organised the Roadtrip Battlebus for young volunteers, which itself came under investigation for multiple examples of overspending during the 2015 General Election. Mr Clarke has denied the allegations.

In retrospect, the Cambridge Analytica form of online electoral manipulation would have much wider repercussions.

Why 2013 was so Pivotal

T he dark arts of digital ‘infor-mation operations’ and data

mining, which would play such an important role in both the Trump campaign and Brexit referendum three years later, all began to con-verge that winter of 2013.

In December, Prime Minister David Cameron, facing a rebel-lion from hardcore Eurosceptics in Parliament, agreed to a referendum on membership of the EU within

BORIS JOHNSON – BANNON’S PRIME MINISTER:The Transatlantic Triumph of Trumpism Though most people assume Steve Bannon-style populism arrived with Brexit in 2016, Peter Jukes reveals the planning, the people, and the project fi rst came together three years earlier – and how they converged to make Boris Johnson our next Prime Minister.

15

BYLINE TIMES SPOTLIGHT: STEVE BANNON

a year of winning the next election. But, a wider con° ict would make the stakes even higher.

That November 2013, another crisis was brewing to the east.

Vladimir Putin had initiated his long-term plan to bring Ukraine back under Russian domination through his puppet Yanukovitch, only to be met by a surprise resistance from students in Kyiv who occupied the Maidan to oppose his ‘Eurasian Union’ replacement for the EU.

Putin’s close associate Yevgeny Prigozhin had set up the Internet Research Agency to provide online social media propaganda against Ukraine. More than a thousand blog-gers would be employed. Within a year – when Yanukovitch had been ousted and Putin sanctioned for annexing Crimea – it was hiring dozens of English-speaking gradu-ates, mainly to promote pro-Donald Trump but also anti-EU propaganda.

New alliances were forming.Steve Bannon’s friend Nigel

Farage met the Russian ambassador in November 2013, having declared that Vladimir Putin was the politi-cal leader he most admired. Farage started appearing regularly on Russia Today (later RT), largely considered a state-led Russian pro-paganda network.

As yet, Bannon and Mercer’s powerful new online tool was a populist campaign still looking for a candidate to back. But, one was emerging.

For that November 2013, Donald Trump was in Moscow, actively discussing running for the presidency in 2016 – with the support of Putin’s “internet guru” Konstantin Rykov.

The Two Matthews – the Transatlantic Strands of Brexit

W hile the media and digital operations that connect the

Trump campaign to the Brexit ref-erendum were all given birth to in the cradle of the YBF conference in Cambridge in 2013, they had yet to � nd their candidates.

Trump would not become the choice until late in the presidential race and Bannon was only appointed his campaign manager after the suc-cess of his work on Brexit in August 2016.

To many, Trump appeared like a New York Democrat until 2015.

And, before his momentous deci-sion to lead the Vote Leave cam-paign in 2016, Boris Johnson had projected himself mainly as a cuddly, cosmopolitan centrist, celebrating his Turkish roots. Faced with the ‘two columns dilemma’ in his well-rewarded Daily Telegraph gig, what made Johnson � le the pro-Leave article rather than the pro-Remain? His Vote Leave campaign went on to create a campaign of fear around migration, especially from Turkey.

In a sense, all candidates are actors in search of an author. Apart from the blonde bou� ant, both Johnson and Trump have something else in common – they are opportun-ists willing to move with the times. And, at the YBF that year, the back-room boys were creating two main prongs which would dislodge the UK from the European Union and provide a vehicle to topple David Cameron.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

M uch has been made of the per-sonal antipathy between per-

sonalities in the oÉ cial Vote Leave and unoÉ cial Leave.EU campaigns. But, they began a joint project three years before the EU Referendum, just as they are now converging three years later.

Back in 2013, Matthew Elliott – who was then expanding his opaquely funded Taxpayers’ Alliance to other campaigns run from his base at London’s 55 Tufton Street – was both a panellist and host at the Churchill College weekend. He had previously convened a ‘think tank career development workshop’ for the YBF and would become execu-tive director of Boris Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign in 2016.

Meanwhile, Matthew Richardson – then executive director of the YBF and reported to be Robert Mercer’s lawyer in the UK – would join Nigel Farage’s rival UKIP a few months later, becoming its secretary in the years leading up to the Brexit referendum. He worked closely with Leave.EU and Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica to provide membership details for online targeting.

Vote Leave v Leave.EU; Johnson v Farage; witty Etonian versus beer-swilling man of the people. Was this a real dichotomy or two sides of the same coin?

The Johnson-Farage double act of Brexit managed to achieve the shock Leave vote and all that has ensued – with some help from Bannon’s digital operations, Russian troll farms, and multiple instances of over-spending and illegal data use. Campaigns are not allowed to co-ordinate or have a common plan, but there’s nothing to stop the vari-ous players behind them having a

common project.This common project, to wrest

the UK away from the EU and closer to the US, is clear from the YBF con-ference. The foundation’s director of research, Alex Deane, went to head up the Grassroots Out movement, which formed the basis for the Leave.EU campaign. A former operations manager, Christian May, then at the Institute of Directors, was unexpect-edly made the editor of City AM, London’s pro-Brexit business daily newspaper.

Speakers billed to have attended the YBF 10th anniversary in Cambridge include Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes, who was due to speak about ‘blogging, new media and freedom’; as well as Douglas Murray, of the Henry Jackson Society, who was billed to talk about Jihad, Islamism, Israel, the War on Terror and Neo-Conservatism.

Previous attendees at YBF conferences included many young politicians and commentators who went on to become bigger names including: Alan Mendoza, direc-tor of the Henry Jackson Society; former Times comment editor Tim Montgomerie; and Mark Wallace, of the Institute of Directors and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, destined to become editor of Conservative Home. Future MPs like Steve Baker, Louise Mensch, and James Cleverly all also attended YBF conferences.

There’s little doubt the YBF was a Brexit establishment in embryo, and nearly all of them are now backing Boris Johnson to be Prime Minister.

Back to that panel in the winter of 2013.

The meeting was held under Chatham House rules so there are no reports of what Bannon said (and many YBF web pages have been taken down since the 2015 scandal) so we don’t know if he discussed with the audience his nascent Cambridge Analytica electioneering machine.

But, Bannon would go on to appoint Raheem Kassam as editor of Breitbart London, and Cambridge Analytica would have unique re-selling rights to Breitbart data. The media and digital operation was symbiotic.

Like the YBF director Matthew Richardson, Kassam would switch to UKIP in a few months time, becom-ing leader Nigel Farage’s companion, aide and speechwriter and even run-ning for the leadership of the party himself in 2016.

As for the second panelist, Harry Cole, he was destined to become a parliamentary reporter at The Sun and is currently deputy political editor of the Mail on Sunday. But, his employer at the time, Paul Staines, has a direct con-nection to the other strand of digital

electioneering and data gathering coming out of the YBF.

Earlier that year, Staines formed a digital campaigns opera-tion with the future Vote Leave executive director, Matthew Elliot. It was a partnership with data experts Andrew Whitehurst and Jag Singh and was called WESS Digital after the initials of the four men. By April 2013, WESS Digital had already compiled a political data-base called METIS which contained data on half a million people previ-ously involved in online campaigns. They planned to increase that data-base to a formidable 10 million in the following year using “aggregated census records, social media pro� le data, and online political advertising response data”.

The combination of data gather-ing and political campaigning was not new for Paul Staines. In 2006, just as he was starting up his infamous Guido Fawkes website, he had created his own company, MessageSpace, with Jag Singh. Messagespace o� ered “techniques used by cam-paigners for US (‘Republican’) poli-ticians, including targeting based on behavioural data and viral ads” when it was formed. The company worked for the Boris Johnson mayoral cam-paign in 2012 and, with some pre-science, Staines registered the site Boris2020.org in April that year. A few months later, as Private Eye reported, MessageSpace was work-ing for the Russian Embassy.

2019: The Two Streams Converge Again – Around Boris Johnson

L ooking back on 2013, it’s obvi-ous that – whatever the per-

sonal di� erences and policy nuances – the leading � gures in both the Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaigns had a joint point of interest, and a joint inspiration through the work of Steve Bannon.

Both campaigns used the services of Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica to some e� ect: Leave.EU directly, according to its own words at the time; Vote Leave indirectly through spending most of its cam-paign budget with AIQ (formerly billed as ‘SCL Canada’), which accessed the same databases and was an o� shoot of Cambridge Analytica, according to the whistleblower Chris Wylie.

Though Cambridge Analytica is now defunct, no one knows what has happened to the voter targeting data deployed so e� ectively during the EU Referendum. “Everyone tries to walk away with the data,” a Vote Leave insider told Byline Times in April.

Meanwhile, with major donors who backed Vote Leave and Leave.EU all coming on board with the

Boris Johnson campaign to lead the country, the money and the data is converging.

More than a million was spent on Facebook ads in early 2019, by shadowy organisations like Britain’s Future and Mainstream Network, targeting Tory MPs who oppose a hard Brexit, and Leave.EU has successfully campaigned online to get them deselected by their local constituencies. Another murky online advertising campaign urging Conservative MPs to vote against Theresa May’s doomed deal was linked to employees of Sir Lynton Crosby, who is currently advising Boris Johnson.

The website created by Paul Staines in 2012, Boris2020.org, has spent the spring of 2019 urging members of the public to get “Boris On The Ballot”, claiming there is a

“plot” by pro-EU Conservative MPs to stop him becoming leader.

At the heart of this is the digital warfare � rst set up by Steve Bannon in 2013 in Cambridge.

Bannon has made no secret of backing Boris Johnson, secretly advising him since late 2016 and openly preferring him to Theresa May in the summer of 2018. Around that time, emerging from purdah after his resignation as Foreign Secretary, Johnson began to deploy classic ‘culture wars’ Bannon themes – calling Muslim women “letterboxes” and talking of a “deep state” pro-EU conspir-acy. And then, in June this year, on a state visit to the UK, President Donald Trump explicitly nomi-nated Johnson as his anointed British partner.

Whatever the rhetoric, what-ever the personalities, the money and the data have now come together to � nd Britain’s Donald Trump in the form of Boris Johnson.

And, with his appointment as the head of the UK Government, the transatlantic triumph of Trumpist populism is complete, ful� lling those plans hatched back in Cambridge in the winter of 2013.

Both Johnson and Trump have something else in

common – they are opportunists willing to move with the times.

Looking back on 2013, it’s obvious that –

whatever the personal differences and policy nuances – the leading

figures in both the Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaigns had a joint point of interest, and a

joint inspiration through the work of Steve Bannon.

By Hardeep Matharu

16 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

“Brexit is the story of Empire. An unfinished, untold story on which the

sun won’t set for a very long time.”

BREXIT & EMPIRE

THE STORY OF BREXIT IS THE STORY OF EMPIREWhy Did So Many Asian Immigrants Vote To Leave The EU?

The complicated love-hate

relationship of immigrants

from former colonies with

the British Empire cannot be

ignored if lessons are to be

learned in post-Brexit Britain.

W hy, in British public life, do we almost never

speak about Empire? It was a question that struck me again recently as I was watching the news with my parents. Another day in Parliament with Theresa May embroiled in the continu-ing chaos around Brexit.

Having migrated to Britain from Kenya and India over 40 years ago, I still � nd it perplex-ing that they both voted to leave the EU in the 2016 Referendum.

Responding to their disil-lusionment on Theresa May’s attempts to deliver Brexit, I asked them whether they would still vote leave now, knowing what they do about all that was to follow

“Yes,” they both said with-out hesitation. “It was still the right thing to do.”

That the Brexit vote was, in no small part, about Empire for Commonwealth immigrants and their love-hate relationship with its legacy has long needed discussion in British society.

Although non-white groups were generally more pro-Remain than white British people, “ethnic minorities showed a non-negligible

level of support for leave, which was twice as high amongst Indians as amongst other minor-ity groups”, according to an ‘Understanding Society’ report.

The relationship of Britain’s long-standing immigrant com-munities with the Empire is a complex one. At once, Britain’s colonisation has created a patri-otic allegiance in immigrants who see themselves as British rather than migrants, while at the same time demanding repa-ration and recognition for all the damage Britain in° icted

on countries such as India.In many ways, Brexit is the

story of Empire. An un� nished, untold story on which the sun won’t set for a very long time.

Swaraj, the � rst name of my father, means ‘self-rule’ and

was a term used by Gandhi to

describe India’s quest for inde-pendence from hundreds of years of British rule. My grandfather gave him the name as he was born in August 1947, when India � nally achieved self-governance.

Raised in Nairobi, Kenya, until he was 18, my Dad spent two years in India, before coming to Britain in 1967 aged 20. His family, Indian Punjabis, had originally gone to Kenya to build the railways for the British.

While recognising the violence of colonisation, my father enjoyed growing up

under British in° uence.“I liked the way of life when

I was in Kenya under the British rule, everything was run prop-erly, all the laws, the administra-tion,” he told me. “It was a very nice place to be and that’s how I’ve always had this loyalty to Britain and I always wanted to

come to England and I wanted to be part of this country. I had no problems settling here.

“I used to read magazines like Time magazine, Life maga-zine, Reader’s Digest and the old Daily Mirror papers, Eagle comics in Kenya. I learnt to speak, read and write English at school because we had English teachers so I had no problem when I came over to Britain.”

What about racism? I asked him.

“Racism was something I was used to in Kenya as well. I knew that it existed, over there they used to call it ‘colour bar’. There were certain hotels that were only meant for white people and there were certain parts of Nairobi where only white people could buy houses and live, Asians weren’t allowed. So I knew from a very young age that this went on.

“There was a lot of racism [when I came to Britain], but one had to learn to live with it.”

On voting for Brexit, my father admits harbouring “resent-ment” at how Britain has changed, in his eyes, for the worse – something he feels is

17

BREXIT & EMPIRE

“My uncle fought in the Second World War in Burma and our ancestors have been

entwined in the British Empire and Britain.”

“Previous generations weren’t educated in the way that we were as young millennials who are hyper aware of colonialism and imperialism

and the effect it had on our ancestors.”

Hardeep's father Swaraj with his sister in Nairobi, Kenya

linked to being part of the EU.“My allegiance is to Britain,

I don’t see myself as part of Europe, I don’t want to be,” he said. “Europe is trying to impose its own rules, regulations and laws onto this country. Britain should have kept on its own. We were better o� that way.”

He believes that Britain was always renowned for its fair-ness and that it seems unfair that immigrants from Europe can come here relatively easily to work and make their lives.

“It’s changed the whole culture of this country now,” he added.

The issue is not that simple, however. My father often speaks about how wrong it was of a morally corrupt Britain to impose its rule on countries more prosperous than itself.

Both my parents made a point of telling me about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919, in which Colonel Reginald Dyer killed hundreds of non-vio-lent Indian protestors, when I was

younger. Upon visiting the site of the killings last year, I was shocked by how close it was to the Golden Temple, a place of profound peace.

But, paradoxically, because of this brutal history, my father feels Britain owes a loyalty to its former colonies over Europe.

“They had a very good time in those countries and they ben-e� ted a lot from them and they built their own country as well during those years of the Empire,” he told me. “This country was built on the Empire, they took a lot of money from India… They should have some allegiance to those countries as well, whereas Europe? I don’t see what Europe has ever done for Britain.”

My mother Baljeet agrees. She left India for Britain aged 26 in 1975 to marry my father and sees herself as British, having worked hard to con-tribute to the country and assimilate into life here.

She said she voted to leave on the grounds of British sov-ereignty because “we should have our own laws and poli-cies to run the country”.

We have had many a pas-sionate discussion in which I have argued that Britain is sov-ereign, and that only a minority of laws emanate from the EU.

My mother also feels that Britain does not need immigration from Europe.

S peaking to other immigrants from former colonies, it’s

clear that – like my parents – the reasons why Asian communi-ties voted to leave the EU are nuanced and diÉ cult to assume.

One second generation immigrant I spoke to said some Pakistani people cam-paigned to leave because they wanted to “control immigra-tion in a way that was favour-able to the Indian subcontinent”.

“One of their arguments was that, if we leave, we’d be better able to accept people from the Indian subcontinent, profession-als such as doctors, rather than taking them from Europe,” he said. “There was that strand that we’d lost control of immi-gration, that lots of people from eastern Europe were coming over, but, therefore, people from the Indian subcontinent weren’t get-ting a fair crack at the whip and it was that disparity. They felt the immigration system was unfair.”

While EU migrants generally

bene� t from freedom of move-ment, those from countries such as India and Pakistan are sub-ject to visa and work restrictions

– a distinction that was played on by Vote Leave’s Michael Gove during the referendum campaign when he suggested that Britain’s immigration system was “racist”.

Another second generation immigrant, whose parents also migrated to Britain from Pakistan, said he voted for Brexit because he had concerns about the EU “being an economic bloc to the detri-ment of the rest of the world”.

“I had no animosity towards the eastern Europeans because, if I was in their position, I would do the same for economic reasons and my parents did the same when they came to Britain,” he told me.

But, he now believes a second referendum should be held as Brexit is “fragmenting our soci-ety” and fuelling far right racism against the very immigrant com-munities that voted to leave.

“The day after I voted, there were people in white vans with Union Jacks driving around where I live and that shocked me,” he said. “I didn’t vote for nationalistic reasons so to see the way the white racist community behaved on win-ning the vote gave me serious con-cerns about the dynamic in Britain.”

For him, notions of Empire played a role in immigrants voting to leave the EU.

“People like me were born here, my parents migrated here,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the British Empire and the rule of India we wouldn’t be here.

“My uncle fought in the Second World War in Burma and our ancestors have been entwined in the British Empire and Britain, but we have been given less rights in terms of migration into this country as compared to some eastern European countries who were actually � ghting the British during the Second World War. So, what’s that about?”

S hahmir Sanni, who was born in Pakistan, worked for BeLeave,

an o� shoot of the Vote Leave campaign for the EU Referendum. He turned whistleblower last year, when he exposed electoral wrongdoing at the organisation.

Tasked with target-ing and persuading black and ethnic minority people to vote leave, Shahmir said many of the second generation immigrants he spoke to in areas such as London and Birmingham were already set on voting for Brexit.

“They would say ‘we don’t need the EU, we were born here, we were bred here, we have worked here, we don’t need it, we have never associated with it so why would we focus on it?’ he told me. “They would also say things like ‘it takes so long for my friends and cousins to get a visa’.

“There was a lining of xeno-phobia towards eastern Europeans among Asian and Afro-Carribean communities. There was the per-ception that people from Europe have got a free pass to come here.”

He believes such com-munities have “a huge feel-ing of being left behind”.

“In the last 20-30 years they’ve seen greater integration with Europe and not with their own com-munities and they have seen the bene� ts the Europeans have gotten, particularly in terms of immigration and free rein to go back and forth.

“But, then there’s also a huge population of the south Asian com-munity who have a very strong sense of patriotism, who are very proud to be living in the UK and, sure, they will criticise the British Government, but they are still very proud Britons and that’s where you can have the same sort of mentality among the major-ity of leave voters which is that Britain can be better on its own.”

For Shahmir, notions of the Empire and immigrants from former colonies feeling an alle-giance to Britain had a huge part to play in why they voted to leave.

“Previous generations weren’t educated in the way that we were as young millennials who are hyper

aware of colonialism and imperi-alism and the e� ect it had on our ancestors,” he said. “If you look at it from the frame of immigrants then who saw no opportunities back home and came here and were suddenly comfortable, and very comfortable, even if they were working class, the fact that they had a council house if they were working class was a blessing. It was huge. ‘The Government of this country gave me a home’.”

He said his work at BeLeave was designed to play on this allegiance to the Commonwealth over Europe.

“It stirred this colonial mindset within non-EU immigrants that the Commonwealth and Britain have so much more in common

than the EU,” he told me. “So there was this false idea that we would be back with the Commonwealth again. An older generation of non-EU immigrants do feel like Britain has a solid connection with places like India. That we have a relationship and a friendship with Britain and that stems from colo-nised minds.”

And why did he vote to leave the EU?

“Because I didn’t like Europe as a white super-state.

“Britain has a moral obli-gation to reconnect with the Commonwealth and I consider that a form of reparations. That, if we’re going to have free move-ment, it should be between Britain and India, Pakistan and countries

like Nigeria, not with the EU. I also think it’s unfair that European migrants get privileges over non-EU migrants. You can argue that there are people of colour in Europe, but these countries have been desecrated by Britain and it has an obligation to cater to that.”

These are clearly diÉ cult conversations for some to have.

P oliticians over a number of years have made a mistake in

not challenging inaccurate narra-tives around immigration, as well as not engaging with the views of immigrant communities long set-tled in Britain and their thoughts about our relationship with Europe and the rest of the world.

As the British-born child of

parents who were born in coun-tries of the Empire, I was taught nothing about it at school. Even when I did learn about the slave trade and Britain’s industrial revolution, these were not set within the context of colonialism.

It may be an uncomfort-able, ugly and challenging area of our history to probe, but not doing so ignores the e� ect is still has on how many feel and think about Britain today.

The longer we refuse to hold a mirror up to Britain’s past, the longer we will fail to properly understand how we have arrived at the present and the conse-quences of this for the future.

In a post-Brexit world, this will be more vital than ever.

18 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

The UK’s welfare system was slammed by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, who said the Government had dismantled its social safety net and compared its policies to the creation of Victorian workhouses. Natalie Bloomer and Samir Jeraj report on how this will come as no surprise to those using the West Favell food bank in Northampton.

S arah (not her real name) walks into the Weston Favell food bank in

Northampton pushing a double buggy.Bundled up inside, is a tiny baby and

a lively toddler. Before she tells sta� why she is there, she is o� ered a cup of tea and some toast. She gratefully takes the tea and passes the toast straight to the little girl in the pushchair.

“I’m really tired,” she says. “I’ve been up all through the night with the kids and I’ve just had to catch two buses to get here.”

Sarah has � ve children all under nine, and the toddler who is now happily sucking on her toast, has had a string of illnesses.

Shortly after giving birth to her youngest daughter � ve weeks ago, Sarah was rushed into hospital for an emergency operation to remove a retained placenta. She says this happened on the same day she was due to attend a meeting for the Universal Credit bene� t.

“I had a choice to make,” she says. “Either go to the appointment or do what the doctors were telling me to do. So, I went to the hospital. As soon as I came out of theatre I called them to explain, but they said it was too late. I was sanctioned.”

She says that her doctor also called to con� rm what had happened, but he was told that the decision wouldn’t be changed.

This isn’t the � rst time Sarah has been sanctioned. It has happened before when her toddler was in hospital.

“It’s really stressful,” she says. “I wouldn’t be coping without help from my mother-in-law. They think I might have post-natal depression now, I’m sure all this hasn’t helped.”

Sarah waits with her tea while her food parcel is prepared and the sta� move on to the next person that’s arrived. It’s a man sitting alone in the corner of the room.

He tells the sta� that he was previ-ously on Job Seeker’s Allowance, but signed o� because he found a job. He had been expecting one last payment from the job centre, which would have paid for his bus fare to work for the � rst week, but there was a mix up and he never received it. This

meant he couldn’t get to work and he had to sign on again – only this time he had to claim Universal Credit.

“We were already struggling,” he says. “Now there’s this � ve-week wait. Me and my partner haven’t had a proper meal since Friday [it’s now Wednesday], we’ve just been having the odd sandwich. Everything else is saved for the kids.”

He says the stress is taking its toll on his health.

“I’m just so stressed, I’ve got this con-stant headache and I’m not sleeping. We’ve got debts and stu� and this is just making it all worse.”

The roll-out of Universal Credit in Northampton began in November 2017.

It took a while for the impact to be felt, but around half of the people visiting the food bank today mention it as part of the reason why they are there.

Another man we speak to says that the amount of money he was entitled to dropped when he was switched onto the new bene� t. As a former problematic drug user, he has struggled in the past to manage his � nances. Because of this, he requested that his rent be paid directly to his landlord like his housing bene� t had been previously.

“I knew I wouldn’t cope with it all being paid to me in a lump sum,” he says.

“But when I asked them to pay it to the landlord, they said I needed to be behind with my rent before they could do it. How stupid is that? I had to get in debt before they’d help.”

The biggest operator of food banks in the UK, the Trussell Trust, says that, when taken together, Universal Credit and bene-� t changes and delays are the main reasons for people seeking emergency food parcels.

As well as the recent damning report into the UK’s social welfare system by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, another report by Human Rights Watch also found that cuts to welfare since 2010 have resulted in tens of thousands of families being left without enough food – something the group says is a breach of the Government’s duty to ensure the right to adequate food.

“The way the UK Government has handled its reduction in welfare spend-ing has left parents unable to feed their children in the � fth-largest economy in the world,” Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch, Kartik Raj, said.

Universal Credit isn’t the only bene� t that is causing problems.

Another issue that repeatedly comes up at the Northampton food bank is dis-ability bene� ts being stopped or reduced.

A woman with a walking frame is waiting to be seen.

She has MS, osteoarthritis, inconti-nence issues and mental health problems. She says that when she was on her previ-ous bene� ts, Disability Living Allowance (DLA), she received £440 per month. But, this changed when she was moved onto Personal Independence Payments (PIP). She now receives just £90.

“I’ve been waiting 32 weeks for a tribu-nal hearing,” she says, pulling a letter from her pocket. “I requested an urgent hearing but, look, it was denied because they said there were no exceptional circumstances.”

Before sta� move on to the next person, she quietly asks if they have any large incontinence towels in stock. “I call them my nappies”, she says. “The normal sized ones aren’t any good, I need the big ones, it would really help if you have some.”

As more and more people struggle just to get by, food banks are being forced not only to provide essential food and toilet-ries, but also baby products and advisory services.

In Northampton, a di� erent organ-isation is on hand to help each week. Sometimes it’s a housing adviser, other times a debt specialist or someone who can help people to keep their energy costs down. But, as demand increases, it is get-ting harder to ensure that everybody gets what they need.

At Christmas, sta� were worried whether they would have enough space to store all the donations they were getting in but, just months later, they are regularly running out of basic items like chopped tomatoes and pasta sauce. They say they are receiving around the same amount of food as they were this time last year, but so many more people are arriving in need of help.

Food banks have become an important lifeline to people across the country but they are also a symptom of policy failure.

As one man who comes in for help asks: “Who would create a system like this? It’s just crazy, people are going hungry. Who would think any of this was a good idea?”

“Who would create a system like this? It’s just crazy, people are going hungry.

Who would think any of this was a good idea?"

Food bank user

WELFARE

A D A Y I N T H E L I F E O F FOOD BANK BRITAIN

19

Over the past few years, my local council, along

with the Government, has unleashed some inter-

esting initiatives.

The “enforcement oÉ cers” of my local borough

have been my favourite. Clad in black fatigues, eerily

reminiscent of a failed paramilitary coup, they’re sent

to “clean up” my newly gentri� ed area. Patrolling

with keen eyes for rubbish, they � ne the public and

homeless up to £80 for dropping receipts or throwing

away single cigarette butts. Approaching with an air

of imposition rather than authority – a step away from

“why are you here?” – they thrust a notepad in your

face declaiming you as a litterer.

Homeless people are often asking themselves the

same question, it seems: is it illegal to just be here? You

feel guilty before you have even opened your mouth.

Logically, to an enforcement oÉ cer, the biggest

o� enders are the homeless because they spend most of

their time lying on the ground. Spotting and removing

them could only be a good thing.

ILLUSTRATIONS: Cartoonist Slymoon has worked with homeless people and experienced periods of homelessness. Having lived in Manchester for 20 years, here are his depictions of the city from street level. “It is a vibrant European city which I am proud to call home,” he says. “But, it’s impossible to view Manchester without seeing the sad cases of homelessness and despair.”

Diary of a Homeless Man Drew B explains his experience of sleeping rough in London

and his battle on the streets against being deported.

C ommon enough along the side of any London bus shelter are the advertisements beseeching the public to call a number and report rough sleep-ers. They’re asked for all relevant information on the location and description of the person, their comings and goings, who they might be. Likely, with all the good intentions in the world, the good Samaritan hangs up and goes on their way with a sense of mis-sion completed.Outside on the street somewhere, the “rough sleeper” in question is going to receive an unexpected visit.Around 6am to 7am in the morning, two workers from an outreach team “engage” the person by waking them up and asking them how they’d come to be there, how long they’d been there and, most importantly, where they were from.

There could be a team of immigration oÉ cers with them, asking for identi� cation and how long the sleeper had been in the country. Bleary-eyed, it’s a tough choice of who to look at and who to be more wary of – those with the knives behind their backs or those jabbing a pen at you. This all the while being talked to as if you’re the owner of a dog that’s shit on the road without having cleaned it up – except, it’s your life.Having agreed to the idea of being helped into a hostel or showing any interest whatsoever, the person would be urged to meet the worker the following day at a day centre. A ticket for a shower, have some food, make a call. There, having met with their case-worker to-be, they’ll discuss whether the rough sleeper has identi� cation and their origins. Without proper paperwork, there is largely nothing to be done and no procedure that can go ahead unhindered be it a bank account, job application, GP or library visit.

This can feel like a leap of faith for someone who has the potential to be wary of authority � gures

in general (isn’t this the system that I wasn’t good enough for?) and who is in an incredibly vulnerable position. You open yourself to these people and expect support – at the very least, a show of humanity. They are supposed to be there to help lift you back up and into a life that you actually want to lead. Emotionally, it’s a precarious place to be – you are hopeful for a better future, but unsure of what it is exactly this person wants from you.

Slowly, the bad news will be broken – often in a clinical, chastising tone – should you be too honest about breaking up with your spouse or having lost your paperwork. Being merely separated from an EEA (European Economic Area)/British national husband or wife renders you an illegal in the UK – a new chal-lenge with all the unpleasantness already in tow. After this, will come threats of deportation or attempts to remove the said “client” from the borough. At � rst, there is an o� er of a ° ight back home, then an implied threat or a slow trail of paperwork leading to the Border Agency. As someone who went through this process last year, I can state that I was simply too shocked to react with anything but sadness and dismay.

The likelihood of � ghting a successful legal battle,

let alone calling an oÉ ce when you’re fatigued,

depressed, and confused, is low. This often leads to

sleeping in places one doesn’t necessarily feel safe or

comfortable, out of sight of the rest of the world but

within proximity to a million other dangers.

You already feel as though you’re in trench war-

fare – sore, cracked feet from bacteria in shower stalls,

no bus fare, at the mercy of the weather, sweaty but

incapable of washing clothes regularly – just a few of

the things that bring you to your lowest.

Morale isn’t even the word because eventually the

battle becomes you; it is simply weathering an end-

less storm. While the rest of the world is walking o�

to work or their various appointments unaware of the

real-life drama unfolding in the side street next to

them.It became worse in the build-up to and after the

Brexit referendum. Only public backlash lead to its

end, that and the tenacity of the homeless – particu-

larly a case brought before the High Court that ruled

it was unlawful to deport rough sleepers from the EEA

in December 2017.

R egardless of the origin of the person, the relation-ship between organisations claiming to be sent to help the homeless and the Border Agency or the police o� er a frightening glimpse into a world where bureaucracy and technicalities lead to open warfare on an incredibly vulnerable – yet still valuable – segment of society. There is a feeling they have the power to act in this way while the public is ignorant or disa� ected due to the current political climate. But, those sleeping rough need the public, their faceless neighbours that walk past them on a day-to-day basis, to be the watch-dog – it’s often the only defence they have against authority.

I don’t think Orwell would have approved of any of it. It’s one thing to be Down and Out and another to be ejected from one dystopian society into another, where looking back at those in a position of power necessitates a hungry challenge in the eyes to gain any foothold in the world, when life’s throwing you consis-tent curveballs.

T ry registering for anything that requires stand-

ing in a queue knowing you’re reeking but inca-

pable of getting to a nearby shower or feeling too shy

to go stink up a friend’s doorstep in an already hectic

world. For a “regular guy” on the streets, any everyday

encounter of a social kind feels like going into a job

interview. You feel cast as a wounded soldier stripped

of uniform, with no worthy story to tell.

This year, it has seemed safe to speak with the

street teams sent to deal with those of us in this “unfor-

tunate” situation, but my advice is you’re still better o�

keeping mum on anything related to your legal status

in the UK if your paperwork isn’t � nalised or if there

are any grey areas that could be used by those with

quotas – those forever waiting in the rafters, ready to

swoop down and eject you.

I ’ve already led a nomadic life and want to place my roots with the people I love regardless of where

they are. Fortunately, the local teams have changed for the better since the 2017 court ruling. Now, you’re allowed the possibility of a roof over your head in a night shelter (albeit with their own issues) and ongo-ing support with the process of claiming bene� ts. It’s enough to start work again. But, this took close to two years of being on the streets, trying to work on-and-o� six days a week in kitchens for up to 10-12 hours and going through my own heartache. All the while struggling to save money and then falling back down through the gap somewhere.

The answer doesn’t lie in anything but unity and understanding of the human condition. And this starts with those in the most vulnerable positions.

20 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

By Iain OvertonThe horse is the ultimate symbol

of power in Britain. Why?

J eremy Hunt’s short-lived announce-ment that he would bring back

fox-hunting in his unsuccessful bid to become Prime Minister was not just a kick in the face for a liberal, metropolitan Britain – one already being dragged o� the cli� -face of Brexit – but part of a wider lurch to the nationalistic right.

You see this nationalism everywhere. For, whereas imperialism inevitably looks towards the future, nationalism has its eyes � rmly planted on the past.

It is there in Nigel Farage’s tweed suits and his pints of bitter, in Gavin Williamson’s Twitter picture depicting a perfect cricket pitch at the height of summer, in the Tory Party’s image of an oak tree. All speak of a yearning for a bygone past: of village fetes and where honey is still for tea.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this love for the pastoral, but when it infuses political life, it mutates and becomes something else.

Hunt, living up to his name in seek-ing a return to blood-sports, is reverting to one of the most enduring icons of the British Establishment: the master on his horse.

The Establishment’s enduring love a� air with that image runs deep. The horror of the national press when it was discovered that eastern European horsemeat had entered into our food chain in 2013 was not, at its heart, about the danger of eating that form of meat. Rather, it was an insult to a set of values that have become ingrained in British society. You only need to go to the National Gallery to see George Stubbs’ iconic painting of the horse Whistlejacket to see how deep-rooted that love a� air is: few other national galleries have such a dominant icon.

At the very heart of this debate is the rarely asked question: why do the British not

eat horsemeat? Simply put, it is because we have not had the sort of seismic revolutions that have toppled Europe’s elites.

Yes, there are arguments that our endur-ing love a� air for the horse – and all it represents – might stem from pre-Roman religious belief systems.

But, there are plenty of nomadic cultures that once venerated the horse, but whose modern ancestors do not shy from consuming it.

Rather, the horse in British culture has taken on a unique status that is deeply entwined in the preservation of privileged power. It is no mistake that the word chivalry – a notion so beloved by the ruling knights of medieval England – was born from the French noun cheval, or horse. The knight on horseback – the most powerful � gure on the battle� eld – enforced his privilege and status through brute force.

Over time, the violence that the horse (the medieval version of the modern day tank) rep-resented to the serfs of Britain, mutated into a less explicit but more entrenched power.

It is there in the Queen’s stables, in the Army’s elite Cavalry Regiments, in the

Conservative Party’s love a� air for the fox-hunt. It is there, embedded in high society’s ‘Season’ with Royal Ascot, the Cheltenham Gold Cup, Badminton Horse Trials, the Grand National, the Royal Windsor Horse Show, the Epsom Derby, Glorious Goodwood and Cartier Queen’s Cup. There in the fact that the 12th Duke of Devonshire served as the Queen’s rep-resentative at Ascot and was the senior steward of the Jockey Club – a man who is worth an estimated £800 million.

From medieval royal pageants where jousting took centre stage, to the modern day attempt of Tory politicians to bring back hunt-ing, the horse has been a fundamental icon of the elites of Britain. They are an elite of 1% that owns half of England. They are an elite who, despite political attempts to dilute their power – through death duties or universal suf-frage – have endured. One that has 92 heredi-tary seats in the House of Lords. One where, at the start of this century, the descendants of the Plantagenet kings were estimated to be worth some £4 billion, owning 700,000 acres.

The elite’s enduring power is marked. Of

today’s 24 non-royal dukes, half went to Eton. So, too, did our future king, Prince William, along with Brexiteer Boris Johnson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the editor of the pro-Brexit Daily Mail, the chief of the general sta� , and a number of current and previous Law Lords.

The pillars of state: royalty, politics, church, law and the press are all there. It is of no surprise that that school boasts a polo team.

So, while Anne Widdecome MEP might rail at the European Parliament, claiming that Brexit is an act of rebellion of “slaves against their owners… the peasantry against the feudal barons”, the truth is that Brexit is an act of profound conservatism – rooted in a longing for the past, where hunting is re-established, nationalism ° ourishes and the true seats of power in Britain are preserved.

A Brexit that, at its heart, rejects Europe’s consumption of horsemeat, along with the European appetite for social revolution.

BRITISH NATIONALISM

WHY DO THE BRITISH NOT EAT HORSEMEAT?How Icons of the British Countryside have been

Weaponised by the Brexit Establishment

“Brexit is an act of profound conservatism – rooted in a longing for the past, where hunting is re-established,

nationalism flourishes and the true seats of power in Britain

are preserved.”

21

“Warlords at peace tables are vying for power, resources, money and positions in a

future government, while women bring to the table the needs of orphans, the injured,

the widows and those with PTSD.”

Stephen Colegrave meets three-time Nobel Prize nominee Dr Scilla Elworthy to explore her business approach to peace and the qualities of feminine intelligence required to build a safer world.

S cilla Elworthy, founder of the NGO Peace Direct and co-

founder of Rising Women Rising World and FemmeQ, is not the idealist you would expect for someone who has spent her whole life as a peace-builder.

Instead, she has a steely determination which began when she was 13. Back then, in 1956, Elworthy was so upset about the Soviet invasion of Hungary that she wanted to leave home and do something about it.

Fortunately, her mother per-suaded her not to go, but instead o� ered to help her acquire and develop the skills required to be more e� ective in con° ict situations.

True to her word, two years later she sent her daughter to work

in a holiday home for concentra-tion camp survivors for a fortnight so that she could gain � rst-hand experience of victims of con° ict.

This was followed by stints working in an orphanage in Algeria and across Africa over the next decade. This led to Elworthy becoming convinced that there is a better way of preventing war and con° ict.

Since then, she has been at the forefront of peace-building.

Elworthy has been nomi-nated three times for a Nobel Prize for her work with the Oxford Research Group, which she co-founded. The work has included developing e� ective dialogue between nuclear weap-ons policy-makers worldwide and their critics.

Three Most Effective Ways to Build Peace

W here others would give up because of the sheer scale

of the task of building peace and preventing war on a global scale, Elworthy takes a practical and analytical approach.

She combined her experience

with thorough research for her book ‘The Business Plan for Peace‘, the title of which alone distances itself from our expected image of peace-builders.

As well as reviewing 25 dif-ferent ways of building peace, Elworthy calculates that the cost of preventing con° ict would only be $2 billion over 10 years, as opposed to the $1,789 billion spent each year on war.

Of the 25 ways to build peace considered in the book, she considers three of them to be the most urgent methods of prevent-ing con° ict.

Firstly, armaments indus-tries must be treated like the fossil fuels sector,which would give investment funds good rea-sons to divest them from their portfolios.

Secondly, more budget and focus must go into con° ict pre-vention rather than post-con° ict resolution, especially to ensure that all NATO countries have a con° ict prevention budget in addition to their defence budgets.

In many ways, the third solu-tion is far more fundamental. War and con° ict has been very much

a male creation and preserve. A critical part of the solution is to enable and ensure that more women gain powerful and senior positions to prevent con° ict, as well as to build and create peace.

The Power of Women

E lworthy cites UN � gures from 2009 which show that

only 2.5% of those involved in peace negotiations were women and that the average length of peace agreements negotiated was � ve years.

Today, when women account for even 10% of negoti-ators, peace agreements can last for more than 15 years.

From her experience, Elworthy has spotted the reason.

“Warlords at peace tables are vying for power, resources, money and positions in a future government, while women bring to the table the needs of orphans, the injured, the widows and those with PTSD,” she says.

“This means that the cycle of violence can be broken, and people can move from revenge to rebuilding.”

The increase in the number of women involved in this testos-terone-fuelled world is de� nitely a powerful agent for change and is happening, albeit from a low base.

“Persuading investors to stop supporting the armaments trade in the same way that environmen-tal groups are targeting fossil fuel producers will take time,” Elworthy says, “but watch this space.”

Hope for the Future

S igni� cantly, of all the UN Sustainable Development

Goals, number 16 – for Peace – is the one which is least invested in.

This is largely because the concept of peace is vague in most investors’ minds, and they have been given few measurable exam-ples. Elworthy and her colleagues are now busy changing that.

Moreover, Elworthy is not afraid to open dialogue with the arms industry directly, including at the world’s largest defence and security event which takes place at London’s ExCel Centre every two years.

In terms of prevention bud-gets and plans, the signs are more hopeful.

As in healthcare, the really powerful intervention is to pre-vent con° icts happening in the � rst place. NATO members including Britain, Germany and Holland are beginning to discuss prevention budgets alongside defence budgets.

Elworthy is regularly invited to talk to the Armed Forces and respects the skills that they bring to preventing and avoiding vio-lent con° ict.

‘The Business Plan for Peace’ takes a complex and seemingly intractable problem and exam-ines in detail how it could be transformed. It also shows the local reader how anyone can take actions to build peace locally or nationally, as well as describing how to learn the skills to do that. It should be required reading for all politicians, military, investors and arm industries.

Elworthy is optimistic that change is coming.

“We see huge shifts happen-ing at the grassroots, below the radar of the media, in locally-led initiatives to stop armed violence all over the globe,” she says. “Of course, this change must involve not only local communities, but industry, multi-nationals and governments.”

Elworthy takes comfort from the way Extinction Rebellion has pushed the environment up the agenda and reckons that some-thing like this is the next step for peace-building.

GLOBAL CONFLICT COULD BE AVERTED FOR JUST $2 BILLION – AND WITH THE HELP OF MORE WOMEN

WAR AND PEACE

22 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

TRUMP’S RACISM

Electing Trump was about White Supremacy, Not ‘Making America Great Again’

By CJ Werleman

The President has stepped-up his worrying attempts to gain support by tapping into deeply-rooted anxieties and prejudices concerning race in America.

When Hillary Clinton said during the closing weeks of the 2016 US

presidential election that half of then can-didate Donald Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” characterised by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenopho-bic, Islamophobic” views, she was widely condemned for demonstrating an aloofness with predominantly blue collar whites and their “economic anxieties”.

This economic ‘theory’ has remained a stubborn explainer for why and how Trump secured electoral success in states and counties that had voted for President Barack Obama in 2012, despite the fact that it has been debunked in one major study after another.

“The nativist narrative about ‘taking back America’ and anti-immigrant sen-timent became stronger forces than eco-nomic issues,” observes Ann Oberhauser, one of the sociologists responsible for col-lating and analysing the shift in attitudes among Iowa voters from Democrat to Republican between 2008 and 2016.

Ultimately, the data demonstrates that, the less educated a voter and the less likely they were to actually have close per-sonal relationships with non-whites, the more vulnerable that voter was to Trump’s racism, xenophobia and fear-mongering.

That voters rewarded a campaign built on overt hatred and fear of the for-eign ‘other’ was a damning indictment on the emotional state of American soci-ety in 2016, but things have become sub-stantially worse in the nearly three years under the rule of the most obviously racist US President in more than a century. The country is on the brink of crashing through yet another dangerous moral threshold.

Trump has normalised overt racism in such a way that genocidal “great replace-ment” theories have moved from the dark corners of the internet into mainstream political discourse, with neo-Nazis coming out from their secret hiding places to march openly in the streets.

Black churches are � re bombed, mosques are � red upon and synagogues are under attack like no other time since Europe’s dark-est days – a reality emphasised by the rocket-ing of hate crimes against Muslims and Jews since Trump’s inauguration. It must be noted that right-wing extremists are responsible for 100% of terrorist attacks on US soil since the end of 2017.

The ban on Muslim immigration and the separating of migrant children from their parents at camps set up on the US-Mexico border have also become nota-ble low-level water marks for a presidency that seemingly knows no moral bounds.

That Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters has been at around 90% during the country’s rapid Trump led decline into the moral abyss, subjecting the country to the scorn and condemnation from its Western democratic peers, remains a perplexing phenomena for anyone who isn’t a Trump supporter.

It matters not to a Trump supporter that the President has told nearly 11,000 lies and false statements in the nearly 900 days he’s held oÉ ce.

It matters not that Trump’s tax cuts have failed to deliver them a single tan-gible economic bene� t while, at the same time, ballooning the de� cit by a whopping 77% a year. And it matters not to them that Trump has taken away their access to healthcare.

Electing Trump was never about ‘making America great again’. It was always about making the country “white again”, as observed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many others – despite the fact that a whites-only America has existed only in the imagination of the demented and deranged.

The way in which both Republican law-makers and voters have responded to

Trump’s repugnant attacks on four female congresswomen of colour might be viewed by future historians as the point in which the country passed the tipping point of no return from what promises to be a dysto-pian destiny.

The President used one of the most aggressively racist tropes in urging them to “go back and help � x the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”, even though three of the four women were born in the United States. The fourth, Ilhan Omar was naturalised as an American citizen at the age of 17.

The response that followed from Republicans will have sent a chill down the spine of anyone who has studied the rise of authoritarian regimes. Not only did a nationwide poll taken two days after Trump’s racist tweet storm show a five per-centage point increase in his net approval among Republican voters, but also only a lone Republican sena-tor described the President’s com-ments as racist. All but four House Republicans voted against a resolu-tion condemning Trump’s remarks.

Then came the pro-Trump rally held in North Carolina – one at which the President was greeted by a chant that called for America’s � rst black Muslim congress-woman to be deported. The words “send her back” echoed throughout the audito-rium, prompting Jon Favreau, a former White House speechwriter, to describe the scene as the most “frightening” thing he has ever witnessed in US politics.

Since, Trump has described the crowd as “great Americans who love their coun-try”, thus creating a horrifying positive reinforcement loop in which his supporters

reward his racist viciousness and, in turn, he rewards theirs. One can only dare to imagine where this all ends.

Dangerously, Trump portrays the United States to be locked in a battle between whites and non-whites, or American born citizens versus immigrants. In this zero sum game, “whites must con-tend with non-whites for jobs, wealth, safety and citizenship,” as stated by the New York Times. It’s a contrived battle that will end disastrously for America, the same way it ended for Germany in the 1940s.

“Both Hitler and Trump excelled at scapegoating,” says Burt Neuborne, a civil liberties professor at New York University. “Hitler’s poisonous rants blamed Jews, Roma, and the ‘elites’ for Germany’s

problems. Trump blames Muslims, undocumented immigrants from Central America, and ‘the elites’ for America’s problems.”

“Hitler hard-ened Germany’s border, restricting travel to and from the country and engaging in trade wars designed to bene� t German industry. Trump bans Muslims, wants to build a

wall on the Southern border, and has initi-ated trade wars with China, India, Europe, Canada, and Mexico.”

Nazi metaphors aside, whatever you make of Donald Trump’s latest appeal to mankind’s worst impulses, the fact of the matter is that the current occupant of the White House has broadened the Republican Party’s appeal to non-college educated, white voters by tapping into deeply-rooted anxieties and prejudices con-cerning race.

The damage done to the country will take more than an election or two to undo.

“Hitler’s poisonous rants blamed Jews,

Roma, and the ‘elites’ for Germany’s problems. Trump blames Muslims,

undocumented immigrants from Central America,

and ‘the elites’ for America’s problems.”

– Burt Neuborne

23

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The Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on election security and Russian interference in the 2016 US

presidential election, concluding that “the Russian govern-ment directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against US election infrastruc-ture at the state and local level”.

The heavily-redacted 67-page report found that Russian hackers likely probed election systems in all 50 states in 2016, con� rming previous public statements by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Initially, DHS reported that only 21 states had been targeted, but later acknowledged that Russia had probed election infrastructure in every state.

The report stated that the Committee found no evidence that voter registration data or vote tallies were altered as a result of Russia’s hacking operation, but it acknowledged that “the Committee and [intelligence community’s] insight into this is limited”.

Russian hackers did manage to penetrate voter reg-istration databases in two states – a � nding that was previ-ously reported and con� rmed in the new report. In Illinois, the hackers accessed up to 200,000 voter registration records “resulting in the ex� ltration of an unknown quantity of voter registration data”, including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s licence numbers, according to the report.

Although the Committee said that it did not know with con� dence what Moscow’s intentions were, it raised two pos-sibilities: “Russia may have been probing vulnerabilities in voting systems to exploit later. Alternatively, Moscow may have sought to undermine con� dence in the 2016 US elections simply through the discovery of their activity.”

In another section of the report, the Committee cited comments by a DHS sta� er, who noted that Russia was in a position to potentially manipulate voter data, but – as far as we know – it didn’t. This suggests that Russia may have wanted to get caught in order to undermine con-� dence in the election results just by planting the idea in Americans’ minds that votes could have been changed, the DHS sta� er said.

In other words, Russia’s e� orts to penetrate US election systems may have been more of a psychological operation – “psyop” – than a hacking operation.

If that is indeed the case, then Russia has succeeded in achieving its goal. Much of the American population is con-vinced that votes were altered in the 2016 election. Among those who aren’t convinced, many still doubt that Russia would have gone to the trouble of targeting election infrastructure without trying to alter vote tallies or voter rolls.

That seed of doubt may very well be the outcome Russia was aiming for all along.

When Russia has carried out cyber operations targeting political parties and governments in neighbouring countries, these have taken the form of much more extensive and direct attacks on government websites and digital infrastructure.

RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE

Russia Didn’t Need to Hack Votes to Help Elect Trump – It Hacked Voters’ Minds InsteadBy Caroline Orr

By overstating the threat, or continually pushing the idea, that Russia hacked votes in the 2016 US presidential election, we may be playing right into its hands.

“Convincing voters to doubt the legitimacy of election

outcomes for the foreseeable future could undermine

Americans’ faith in democracy for years to come.”

Yet, we didn’t see anything like this in America in 2016. Rather, we saw an extensive information war-fare operation aimed at shaping voters’ decision-making by manipulating the information they saw ahead of the election.

It’s entirely plausible that the Kremlin’s hacking operation was part of that information warfare campaign. Widespread fear over the security of election infrastruc-ture has the potential to under-mine our elections by instilling doubt in voters, making them believe that their votes may not count and giving voters a reason to question the legitimacy of all future election outcomes.

Russia didn’t need to hack votes if it could achieve the same goal by hacking voters instead.

Jennifer Mercieca, a Texas A&M University scholar who studies political rhetoric, has warned of this very dynamic. Social media, in particular, encourages people to use loaded terms and hyperbolic rhetoric that ulti-mately damages democracy, Mercieca has said.

In her view, “the way you get rewarded in that system is by expressing these really polemical, emotional things”. “When this type of rhetoric dominates public discourse, reasoned debate gets sidelined and emotions end up guiding our decision-making,” she has said.

Furthermore, this can also provide an opportunity for bad actors to sow discord and further erode con� -dence in democracy by amplifying fear-mongering rheto-ric and injecting disinformation into the public debate, Mercieca has warned.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do everything we can to secure our election systems and pre-vent possible future attacks. We would be foolish not to address known vulnerabilities, many of which were iden-ti� ed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report.

But, as we discuss these vulnerabilities and work to bolster election security, we need to keep in mind that Russia’s ultimate goal is not to elect a speci� c candi-date or boost one party over the other – it is to under-mine con� dence in the democratic process, instil doubt in voters’ minds, and tarnish American democracy. By overstating the threat or continually pushing the idea that Russia altered votes in the 2016 election and could do it again at any point, we may be playing right into our adversary’s hands.

If Russia’s hacking campaign was a psyop, it was a wildly successful one. Altering the vote count in one election could (maybe) swing the results in a favorable direction for Russia, but convincing voters to doubt the legitimacy of election outcomes for the foreseeable future could undermine Americans’ faith in democracy for years to come – which is the very thing Russia set out to do.

24 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

REPORTAGE

CJ Werleman on why the international community should hang its head in shame over its failure to help stop the genocide still ongoing in Myanmar.

I t’s been almost two years since Myanmar security forces

launched their most recent campaign to annihilate the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority – an e� ort described by the United Nations as

“textbook ethnic cleansing”.It is still ongoing today, but

the international community is doing little or nothing to resolve the humanitarian crisis.

Today, roughly one mil-lion Rohingya Muslims remain homeless and stateless in squalid refugee camps along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. At the same time, 200,000 remain trapped in small villages and townships throughout Rakhine state or – what Mohammed Salam, chairman of a local Rohingya welfare commit-tee, described to me recently as – a

“genocide zone”.The Rohingya’s current plight

began on 25 August 2017, when Myanmar’s soldiers, accompanied by local Buddhist militias, launched a wave of attacks on Rohingya vil-lages in the north-west corner of the country, including mass kill-ings, gang rapes, looting, and the

destruction of homes and property.The violence carried out

against the Rohingya was so vicious that the international aid group Doctors Without Borders estimated that at least 10,000 Rohingya had been killed and thousands more raped and injured. It has stated that 700,000 were forced to ° ee to the Bangladesh border in the three-month period spanning the end of August to the start of December 2017, while other aid agencies have documented 18,000 incidences of rape.

These atrocities continue today, with Amnesty International recently � nding “fresh evidence” that the Myanmar security forces are carry-ing out attacks on Rohingya villages, while at the same time blocking all humanitarian aid, as they carry out military operations in the area against the separatist Arakan Army.

When I spoke with Mohammed Salam in April, he told me how a Myanmar military “gun-ship” attacked a Rohingya village in the township of Buthidaung.

“A half dozen were killed, and the injured were taken to the hospital in Buthidaung, which is running out of medicines and anesthesia,” he said.

But, despite these ongo-ing atrocities, and the desperate pleas of more than one million Rohingya, the international com-munity has stubbornly resisted any serious attempt to provide security,

comfort, and a long-term solution to those trapped at the border of Bangladesh and within Rakhine state.

In fact, there has been almost no collective action to hold Myanmar accountable for its crimes against humanity within the United Nations, aside from a draft resolution that was put forward by the UK at the UN Security Council, one that was ultimately boycotted by permanent members Russia and China.

Earlier this year, the UN launched an inquiry into its “dys-functional” conduct towards the Rohingya genocide after interna-tional human rights groups accused the UN of ignoring the warning signs of escalating violence prior to the commencement of widespread atrocities committed by Myanmar security forces in August 2017.

Alarmingly, the ignoring of “warning signs” and the boycotting of draft resolutions by UN Security Council members to resolve the Rohingya crisis ranks among the least of the international commu-nity’s failures – given the fact that a number of countries have continued to sell weapons and provide military assistance to the junta-controlled

“democracy” in Yangon, even as it carries out veri� able crimes against humanity.

China, Israel, and Australia are notable examples of countries who

maintained their military ties with Myanmar long after the UN had identi� ed the human rights viola-tions against the Rohingya to con-stitute ethnic cleansing.

For instance, one investiga-tion by a human rights group found that Israel sold more than 100 tanks, light weapons, and a number of patrol boats, which have been used to attack Rohingya � shermen.

Moreover, Myanmar military oÉ cials were spotted at an arms expo held in Tel Aviv last week, despite the fact that Israel has claimed that it has stopped selling weapons to Myanmar.

The manner in which the US has dealt with Myanmar could be described as even more duplicitous, given the fact that an investigation found that the Trump administra-tion isn’t fully enforcing the very limited sanctions it had imposed on a mere four of the country’s generals in 2018 for their respective roles in the ongoing genocide.

Politico observed that the US has been “permitting the children of some past and present Myanmar military leaders to travel to the US

– despite a years-old law prohibit-ing such immediate relatives from obtaining US visas.”

While the European Union has enacted a ban on arms sales to Myanmar, its assistance to the Rohingya has been limited to refu-gee and humanitarian aid, with the

UK alone contributing more than £129 million, according to UKAID.

Refugee aid and assistance only constitutes band aid measures, however, and do nothing to pro-vide long-term security or guaran-tee human rights to the Rohingya Muslim minority.

“The international community should push for accountability for atrocities against the Rohingya in Myanmar,” John Quinley, a human rights specialist at Fortify Rights, told me. “We believe this will have a preventative e� ect and stop future attacks in Rakhine state.”

As for Rohingya refu-gees who have been displaced to Bangladesh, Malaysia and further a� eld, the international commu-nity must increase its pressure on the Myanmar Government through sanctions and diplomatic means, in order to inch it closer towards pro-viding the Rohingya, not only a safe return to their homes, but also full citizenship rights. This would allow them to attend schools and seek employment and basic rights they have long been denied.

To cross that bridge, however, the international community must � rst stop pretending that the geno-cide isn’t ongoing.

It is.And the fact that it did noth-

ing to prevent the slaughter in 2017, and has done little to stop it today, should embarrass us all.

WHEN WILL THE WORLD DO SOMETHING TO SAVE THE ROHINGYA MUSLIMS?

MYANMAR

25

Art Installation in Karamay

China is home to the world’s largest concentration of ‘smart cities’ – and therefore the biggest and most intrusive surveillance architecture ever built by any single nation. Dr Nafeez Ahmed reports.

A s Western government agencies raise alarm bells about the surveillance

dangers of Huawei’s technology exports, many have missed the bigger story: that major Western companies helped build China’s surveillance state – a model which is now being quietly exported back to the West under the guise of installing eÉ cient and sustainable ‘smart cities’.

So far, most stated concerns are about the risk of China spying on the West through technology provided by Huawei. But there is another con-cern – getting into bed with a company complicit in building the surveillance infrastructure for the largest deten-tion camps since the Holocaust.

While Huawei is best known for its smartphones, the telecommunications giant played a major role in designing one of China’s � rst major “smart city” projects in the autonomous province of Xinjiang, in the remote oil town of Karamay.

The Internet of Things: The Politics of Control

A cross the town, bus stations were equipped with electronic screens

displaying travel information. In homes, ageing residents could push panic button to alert emergency ser-vices or relatives. If the social security system recorded an increase in unem-ployed people, oÉ cials would know right away – all thanks to Karamay’s smart city web of 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi networks.

China’s early smart city proj-ect in Karamay has since blossomed into a computerised police state in Xinjiang. Versions of Karamay have been expanded across Xinjiang to track some 2.5 million residents, targeting the province’s Uyghur Muslim minority.

Persons who are ° agged for suspi-cious activities, such as praying, can be investigated by Chinese intelligence and detained in “re-education” camps. Currently, some one million ethnic Uyghur Muslims have been interned in what has been described by a UN human rights panel as “a massive intern-ment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.

The seeds of China’s smart city paradigm were � rst planted by IBM in its “Smarter Planet” concept in 2009,

when the company engaged with more than 200 city mayors across China. The following year, IBM announced a 10-year smart city development strat-egy for China at a conference in Beijing.

There are currently just over 1,000 smart city projects around the world. Yet, about half of them are in China, making the country home to the world’s largest concentration of smart cities – and therefore the biggest and most intrusive surveillance architec-ture ever built by any single nation.

Among the company’s early smart city projects was the installation of its ° agship Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) for Smarter Solutions in the city of Zhenjiang in 2012.

An IBM handbook published the same year describes the IOC as capable of combining vast quantities of information across “security agencies” and “other levels of government.” Sources include feeds from “weather, citizens, law enforcement, social welfare, video”. The handbook iden-ti� es the potential of Sentiment Analysis, which learns what citizens are saying about city services through social media.

IBM played a direct role in design-ing and transitioning Karamay into Xinjiang’s � rst smart city. This was part of a bigger plan to connect cities across Xinjiang. In the � rst half of 2014, 5,000 4G mobile stations were installed across Xinjiang’s 16 main cities and 63 coun-ties. By the end of that year, a total of 12,000 4G base stations would be built.

By 2016, as smart city infrastructure was expanded across Xinjiang, IBM began introducing “cognitive IoT” (Internet of Things) into Karamay. IBM’s technology was built around the Watson IoT plat-form, an arti� cial intelligence (AI) system that is extraordinarily well-suited for a wide range of surveillance applications.

How exactly the Watson platform was practically applied in Karamay is unclear. IBM declined to respond to questions for this article. But, Karamay is home to many Uyghur “re-educa-tion” camps, whose inhabitants are often detained by police for wearing Muslim

clothing or having long beards. These practices are automated by the city’s extensive surveillance networks – � rst established under IBM’s “public secu-rity” platform, they have evolved into Huawei’s “Safe City” program.

Automated Racism

H uawei’s tremendous growth would have been impossible without sup-

port from IBM. As early as 2000, IBM signed an agreement with Huawei pro-viding it with unprecedented access to its microelectronics division’s R&D facilities.

And, according to a China Daily interview in 2016 with Huawei’s found-ing chief executive Ren Zhengfe, the Chinese telecoms giant pays IBM more than $100 million every year in manage-ment consultancy fees. Like IBM, Huawei did not respond to requests for comment.

Over the last decade, Huawei has established dozens of Safe City pro-grams across China in cities includ-ing Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong and beyond. In May 2018, Huawei continued its work in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, with a new partnership with the Public Security Bureau, establishing an “intel-ligence security industry” innovation lab.

Among the technologies now being applied in Xinjiang is advanced facial recognition designed to search exclu-sively for Uyghurs based on their appear-ance, potentially ushering in what the New York Times describes as “a new era of automated racism”. Huawei did not respond to questions about whether its work in Urumqi supports the emergence of such technologies.

IBM’s ongoing murky relation-ship with Huawei raises questions about its complicity in these processes. Yet, the company has not faced sanc-tions from the US Government.

Meanwhile, Huawei’s oÉ cial litera-ture on the “Safe City” program claims to have exported the model to over 230 cities around the world on every continent.

This includes countries with a history of authoritarianism and inter-nal violence, including Pakistan, Laos, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia.

But, while the US and UK Governments are scrambling to limit Huawei’s access, Huawei is already inside some of the most sensitive national secu-rity domains across the Western world.

In 2017, Huawei signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Frequentis, an Austrian technology � rm specialising in the supply of communica-tions systems for government agencies that provide public safety services like air traÉ c management and emergency services. The agreement gave Huawei input into Frequentis’ smart safety technology solutions. Yet Frequentis provides technology to more than 140 countries including the US, UK and across Europe. Its customers include the UK’s Ministry of Defence, London’s Metropolitan Police, NASA and the US Navy. The UK Ministry of Defence did not respond to request for comment on the risks of depending on Huawei tech-nology supplied through Frequentis.

The agreement raises the ques-tion of how the company which built much of China’s most intrusive surveil-lance infrastructure is already sup-plying some of the West’s most sensi-tive agencies through the backdoor.

However, China is just the beginning. In coming years, the smart city model pioneered by the likes of Huawei with support from IBM is set to become the dominant paradigm of urban government.

By 2025, the global smart city market will be worth $2.5 trillion dol-lars. Dominated by Chinese companies like Huawei, it is a market which no seri-ous Western technology � rm and few governments want to be excluded from.

This article was � rst published in Coda’s Authoritarian Tech section.

SU RV EIL L A NCE, 'SM A RT CITIES '

A N D T H E E R A O F

AU T OM AT ED R ACISM

“Among the technologies now being applied

in Xinjiang is advanced facial recognition designed to search

exclusively for Uyghurs based on their appearance.”

AUTHORITARIAN TECH

26 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

Unspeakable SufferingHow Afghan War Novels Provide Expression for 40 Years of DevastationHizbullah Khan, based in Kabul, explores how fi ction is helping the victims of Afghanistan’s decades of war to face up to the past.

Sitting on a prayer rug, Khush Bakht, a 53-year-old widowed mother, reads

a Zanmargai novel and weeps because she thinks that it is a real story written about her son. Whenever memories of her dead son come to mind and stop her sleeping, Bakht begins reading this popular Afghan genre about suicide bombers.

“When I feel desperate, I start read-ing novels,” she told Byline Times. “It seems as if I’m talking with my son. The novel-ist writes about all those ideas that I had discussed with him. Only novelists write the extreme pains of women who have lost their young sons.”

Bakht’s 19-year-old son Mujeeb Yar was working on their land in the Paghman district of Afghanistan and looking after the home as a guardian when he was sud-denly inspired by a cleric in February 2017. He then left work and disappeared from the home for 22 days.

He spent those days with the Taliban. When he returned home, Yar was com-pletely changed.

Yar refused to marry, although he had collected half of the money – $4,500 – for the dowry for the family of his bride-to-be. He told his mother that he would � ght in the path of God and wanted to become a martyr. After martyrdom, he would go to heaven where he would receive 72 Hoori – beautiful maidens promised in paradise.

After spending six days at home, Yar went to his mother for a � nal farewell. “I am leaving this ruined world, sacri� cing

my life for a great cause and going away from you and my siblings till doomsday,” he told his mother.

Khush Bakht was so astonished she couldn’t reply for a while, but then said she would permit him to leave if he answered her questions: “For whom you are leaving this old widow mother? For whom you are leaving your � ve siblings and one ill brother? For whom you are leaving your � ancé?”

Yar answered only one question. He was leaving his � ancé for the maidens in paradise and didn’t need marriage in a life full of sorrows.

Bakht protested: “Don’t kill your wid-owed mother. As a widow, it was so hard to bring you up. When you were a child, I didn’t eat so I could give food to you,” she cried. “You are our only breadwinner; your small brothers and sisters will die of starvation.”

The son replied that he wanted to go on the right path and no one could stop him. She tried to prevent him from leav-ing. “I’ll never forgive you,” she said. “My son, for God’s sake, don’t go!” But, Khush Bakht’s son ran away.

After 13 days, Yar returned home in a coÉ n. He was killed while � ghting with the Afghan army in Paghman.

“Pangs of My Heart”

After 40 years of recurrent con° ict and devastation, a tradition of war

novels has developed in Afghanistan and attracted a large devoted readership,

especially among victims as they describe the harsh miseries of war, losing entire families, disease, displacement, and destruction of homes.

Aryan Mohsini, an employee of the Kabul University Library, says more than 80% of its readers read novels writ-ten about the Afghan wars. He estimates that, since the Saur Revolution of 1978, which eventually led to the Soviet inva-sion, almost 400 books have been written about the ensuing decades of civil war, the Taliban Government, and then the ‘War against Terror’.

Avid readers of war novels fall into two types of people. Firstly, the victims who lost their loved ones and seek simi-lar tragic tales as happened to them in the novels. Secondly, readers who want to explore the unprecedented and unbeliev-able stories that occurred across the coun-try in the last four decades.

Dr Liaqt Taban, a novelist who wrote about the various diseases of war, believes that writing novels is the most e� ective ways to reveal and relive the traumas of the past.

“Afghanistan has su� ered four decades of non-stop war with millions of casualties,” Taban says. “Almost every Afghan is a victim of war physically, psy-chologically and economically. The issues of Afghanistan are completely di� erent from the rest of the world. That is why the themes of our novels di� erent from the rest of the world. We write about our issues.”

Meena Noori, studying for her mas-ters at the English department at Kabul University, is a survivor of a bomb attack in Kabul in 2017 which killed her younger brother. She says it is natural for people to take an interest in those books which describe their own issues.

“For me, reading novels is a way of expressing pangs of my heart. Whenever I get free time, I read Qomandaan, Zanmargai, and six other types of novels,” Noori told Byline Times. “These eight genres com-pletely describe my own story.”

Among the novels, the Zanmargai, Qomandaan and Kabul Rang Dai are the favourites of victims like Khush Bakht and Mena Noori. The Zanmargai genre looks at the brainwashing of youth and prepar-ing them for suicide attacks and violent Jihad. The Qomandaan genre focuses on the humiliation of Afghan women as refu-gees, and other novels describe other harsh aspects of recent histories.

“In the universities, a large number of students read war novels because there are no other stories in the curriculum about the horri� c situations we frequently face,” Noori says.

While there are English novels in the libraries and bookshops, they do not really grab the attention of Afghans. “English novelists write about the issues of devel-oped societies,” Noori explains. “Those novelists are not able to write about Afghanistan if they didn’t spend time here and see the ordeals of Afghans.”

AFGHANISTAN

27

REFLECTIONS

Otto Englishtells a tragic story of how the social media civil war of the last few years has cost him dearly.

Nick & meThe Great Brexit Storm Uprooting Old Friendships

I � rst met Nick in the early 1990s in a sta� room in Essex.

It was the year after I had left university and after some protracted dithering. I had found myself living with my parents and working as an English teacher at a language school on the fringes of Harlow. The rest of the sta� was made up of borderline sociopaths so when Nick turned up one day, looking the very essence of ‘normal’, it was as if the cavalry had arrived. We quickly became mates.

Neither of us wanted to be there.I longed to be free. I had plans and

ambitions – and Nick – well Nick wanted to be where he had been before. For just a few months before we met, he had been a professional cricketer, playing for Surrey. Destined to go right to the top of the game, an injury had cost him his career aged 25 and he was struggling to � nd a new purpose in his life. Perhaps he had thought that becoming an English teacher would open up the chance to travel to exotic places. But, like me, he had ended up in Harlow New Town.

Nick had found God in the wake of his accident, but he wasn’t a holier than thou Christian. I was an avowed atheist and we had one of those great friendships where we could be completely straight with each other.

One night, the two of us tumbled out of an Essex pub and into the � elds behind my parents’ house. The countryside bristled with barley and we made a den in the middle of a � eld and smoked and drank wine I’d managed to purchase before last orders. We talked about all the stu� you talk about when you’re wasted and in your 20s beneath the stars – neither of us ever forgot it.

Eventually we escaped. He got a job in Spain and I moved to London. Two or three years later, he rang and asked if he could stay and we had a bizarre night out in Brixton that ended with us sleeping in a car. He’d lost God and found politics. So now we could argue about that.

We weren’t that far apart politically, but just enough, and we enjoyed arguing. It was our thing. It sustained us over the next decade.

I got married and settled down, but it was hard for Nick. His former friends and teammates had gone on to be household names and big sporting stars and, while he never complained, it clearly gnawed at him. Of course it did. The weight of what might have been.

He and his partner had a son and, when the relationship ended, he moved to Cheltenham to be closer to his boy. But, I’d sometimes get a call or a text or a thumbs-up on Facebook and every now and then we’d go for pints if he was around and laugh about that time we got drunk in a � eld and that other time when we slept in a car.

Then Brexit happened. Nick voted Remain, but, having done

so, he believed we should accept the result and leave the EU. By now, he had become a psychotherapist and talked a lot about the importance of moving on from trauma.

I have realised since, thinking back, that his whole adult life after his accident had been dedicated to that aim. But, instead of trying to engage with his point-of-view, I started to clash with him.

We argued a bit on Facebook and then a lot.

It was friendly at � rst, but then he began to post articles by Brendan O’Neill and Spiked Online and I began to wonder

what the hell had happened to him. I couldn’t stop myself. If this had been in the pub, we’d have been � ne, but in the arena of social media we both began to square up to each other and dig in over our respective positions. It felt nastier.

“What’s happened to Nick?” like-minded friends who had seen his posts and my replies would ask. But, they might as well have asked what had happened to me. Our relationship became frostier and sometimes I’d � nd myself feeling a bit sad about it and suggesting we go for a drink.

“Yes,” he’d reply, “pint would be good next time I’m in London”.

I’m not sure if he meant it, but I certainly did. Either way, it never happened.

On a Tuesday morning in May, as I sat on the district line trundling towards Hammersmith, I discovered that Nick had died.

He had been ill for almost a year. In the past he would have told me, and I would have gone to see him, but, given the state of our friendship, at the end of his life he didn’t even tell me. In the back of my head I had always imagined that we would one day sit down over a beer and thrash it out. It was not to be.

Nick was one of those people that make life worth-while. He was funny, engaging, larger than life, thoughtful and poetic. It’s rare to have a friend you can so understand and who so understands you. And now I’ve lost him.

Brexit has cost us all so many things – and now it has cost me the chance to say sorry and goodbye to my friend.

I wonder if in 10 years’ time all of us – so engaged in this mad civil war – will wonder if such things were a price worth paying.

“It’s rare to have a friend you can so understand and who so understands you. And now I’ve lost him.”

28 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

CULTURE

John Cleese’s rather foolish tweet “that London was not really an

English city anymore” provoked much criticism, with some seeing this comment as a way of stirring up emotions around the current debate on Brexit and the larger issue of immigration.

But, I’d say he’s missing the point. London was never exclusively an

English city in the � rst place. I don’t simply mean that it was originally an imperial metropolis – the square mile of the old city and its bridge still mark out the boundaries set by the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago. No, the relationship between London and the English has always been a

complex one. As it has with every other tribe that chose to settle here.

When the Anglo Saxons � rst established themselves in the south-east their attitude to London was quite simple: they avoided it. The early English didn’t begin as city dwellers after all. But the port on the Thames continued to be a vital trading centre throughout the Dark Ages.

The very � rst English account of London comes in Bede’s

Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoplewritten in 731 AD where it’s described as “a great emporium for many nations that come to it by land and sea.”

Note the crucial phrase: many

nations. Bede is making a clear reference to the multicultural nature of the city, more than 1,200 years ago. This is the continuity in history that is worth looking at when we start asserting what is ‘English’ or not.

And, when the English did start to settle here, they did it outside the square mile of the city walls. The Anglo Saxons built Lundenwic in what is now Covent Garden and the Strand. Wic is Old English for town and so the Aldwych is a reference to the Saxon ‘old town’.

Alfred the Great re-founded the City of London proper as part of his defences against the Danes and this was known as Lundenburg, but, for

the next two centuries, possession of it was contested by the Vikings and the English. By the turn of the � rst millennium, the political centre of England remained in Winchester.

In 1042 AD, Edward the Confessor built the new power base of Westminster, in the neighbourhood but quite geographically distinct from the City. And, it was here that Harold II, the last Anglo Saxon king of England, was crowned.

After 1066, it started to become a major urban centre once more, with great architectural projects like the Tower of London – built by Normans, from France. It became our capital and home to a series of royal houses,

none of which were actually ‘English’ in the narrow sense of the term (it’s funny that we don’t seem to mind being ruled by foreigners, but the ones that come over here to do our dirty work get picked on).

In adversity, London thrived on diversity.

Conditions were so bad by the 18th Century that the death rate was greater than the birth rate and, without immigration, the city would have shrunk rather than expanded.

So, this ‘great emporium for many nations that come to it’, is as English as it is international. It belongs to everybody and everybody who lives here belongs: as Londoners.

I t was in 1934 that they found her, during the construction of a park in the German town

of Bad Dürrenberg, in modern Sachsen-Anhalt. Together with a child, around six to 12 months old, of indeterminate gender, the woman was buried in an upright, sitting position and packed in red clay.

Around her, were the remains of an extraor-dinary head-dress, created from the bones of any number of animals such as deer, crane and turtle, that would have roamed the forests of Mesolithic Europe.

The woman was also buried with arrow-heads, painting implements and other tools of the common hunter-gatherer.

However, it was the presence of clay, restricted to the burial of individuals of great status – and the ornate head-dress – that told those who studied her who she was: a Shaman of her people; a bridge from one world to the next.

Of course, her bones were studied to try to tell the archaeologists more about the woman and her life.

Wear of the teeth, coupled with severe deg-radation of the upper jaw, underneath her nose, suggested that it was an infection that killed her, spreading from her teeth into her jaw. It is quite possible that she had passed the infection to her child through breast milk, resulting in their sub-sequent death.

However, it was a study of her skull and verte-brae that was to reveal the greatest surprise.

Changes to the base of her skull, and an abnormality of her cervical vertebrae, would have meant that she would have experienced signi� -cant physical e� ects in her daily life. At the least,

she could have expected to have the sensation of insects crawling across her body, as nerves were compressed. She may have also experienced audi-tory or visual hallucinations.

At the other end of the scale, others have sug-gested that, by tilting her head, the Shaman could have e� ectively brought on a near instantaneous altered state of consciousness, as blood ° ow was slowed or temporarily halted.

The Shaman was aged between 25 and 30 when she died, and had given birth to a child. It is clear that she was relatively well nourished and held a position of great prestige among her people.

While her skeletal abnormalities would de� -nitely described as debilitating in some circum-stances, it is clear that, for this particular woman, it was that which made her di� erent, gave her a vocation, and a position of power.

Debates surrounding how we perceive disabil-ity are not new by any means. Many have had to � ght for the right and the means to live with dig-nity over many decades. So it is heartening to be reminded that that which makes us di� erent, was not always that which divided us. In fact, what we consider pathology – a diagnosis – was what this woman’s peers considered to be a link to the gods.

Today, you can � nd the Shaman of Dürrenberg at the Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, in a room meant to evoke the forests that she would have known during her lifetime. It’s a place of peace and tranquility, far from the cold sterile surrounds of many – I like to think she’s still capable of exerting her power.

HISTORY

BETWEEN TWO WORLDSThe Secrets of the

Shaman of Bad

Dürrenberg

On a recent trip to Germany, Mike Stuchbery came across the remains of a woman who lived some 8,500 years ago – astonishing, not only for the impressive manner in which she was buried, but the secrets that her bones contained.

LONDONNEVER WAS

AN ENGLISH CITYThe Anglo-Saxons always distrusted London, but in adversity

it thrived on diversity says the Count of the Saxon Shore

29

As the contest £ nally creaksInto its last corrupted weeks,

So much is owed to the people whoWere robbed so often by so few.

Bombasts, blowhards, sound your horn,Herald this disastrous dawn,Moguls, oligarchs, raise a glassAs your chumps and champions pass.

In a bus, emblazoned in red,Farage and Bannon at its head,Inside he waits for Trump to tweet:This is the triumph of deceit.

Pi¬ e, kippers, dead cats, whey -The land of Shakespeare blown away,Famed for gravity and honour,Led by a dunce to ruin and squalor.

Far away, in warmer water,Kitts and Nevis, Cyprus, Malta

Lucre glitters, laughs and ± iesBack to London where it buys...

Lawyers, bankers, spooks and hacks,Shorting, leaking, legal attacks.On the road to Downing Street,All these frauds and chancers meet.Stolen rubles, hedge fund debt

All double down on this last betTo bribe, blackmail, and take powerIn Britain’s most inglorious hour.

Churchill, Cromwell, pale with shameFreeze with horror at his name.Rooks are silent, lions mute,At the vainglorious March of Loot. Land of honour and fair play

Never saw a darker day.As the doors of Number TenClose behind the hollow menWho whistled up the dogs of raceAnd brought a nation to disgrace.

Weep Britannia, weep in grief.

Hope your neighbours bring relief.Tell the truth - this cannot last.Hold the faith, and hold it fast,As clown, liar, cheat and fool,BORIS JOHNSON STARTS HIS RULE.

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30 READ MORE AT BYLINETIMES.COM

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NOT THE NORMAL NORFOLK{THE ORIGINAL OPIOID CRISIS} If there ever was a golden age for hard drug

use, it was the Victorian era. The widespread use of laudanum (opium

dissolved in alcohol) had � rst been encour-aged by the greatest English doctor of the 17th Century, Thomas Sydenham. He prescribed it for the relief of pain, anxiety, diarrhoea, coughs, insomnia – in fact, pretty much anything.

Its name derives from laudare, the Latin for ‘praise’ (like calling MDMA ‘ecstasy’), and praise it received from all corners of the land.

The roll call of famous laudanum users stretches way beyond the Romantic poets.

Dr Johnson took it originally to soothe ‘a troublesome cough’; Clive of India took it ‘for his bowels’; William Wilberforce ‘for his stom-ach complaints’; George III and George IV to ‘curb the irritation caused by drinking to excess’; Sir Walter Scott for stomach cramps; Elizabeth Barrett Browning for general ‘frailty’; Florence Nightingale to calm her nerves after the Crimea; Sarah Bernhardt to combat exhaus-tion. Even Jane Austen’s mum took it to ease ‘the exercise and fatigue of travelling’.

Not all of them became addicted, but many of them did. A grain was 25 drops and the recommended medical dose for pain relief was no more than two grains every six hours. By 1815, De Quincey, who first used

laudanum for rheumatic pain, was taking 320 grains/8,000 drops a day and Coleridge wasn’t far behind.

It wasn’t only the middle classes who turned to the new wonder drug.

In 1844, in his The Condition of the English Working Class, Freidrich Engels railed against the dependence of English workers and their children on laudanum-based concoctions such as Atkinson’s Infants’ Preservative, Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and Street’s Infant Quietness, which were used indiscriminately both as medicine and cheap alternatives to gin or beer, and had led to a “general enfeeblement in the frame of the working-class”. The net result was that, by the 1860s, in England, children under � ve were seven times more likely to die of opium poi-soning than an adult over 35.

If laudanum was the drug of choice for all sections of society in 19th Century England, there is one area of the UK that deserves spe-cial mention. Every country shop in the Fens stocked laudanum and itinerant salesmen sold it from farm to farm. Wherever people gath-ered in the Fens, opium was sold and no local beer was complete until a few drops had been added. Ely and Wisbech were the ‘Sodom & Gomorrah’ of the English opium trade: in 1867, Norfolk and Lincolnshire consumed half the opium imported into the country (30,000 lbs or 13,600 kg).

Despite the rising rates of addiction, and its largely unrecorded toll on the health of work-ing people, laudanum remained easily available until the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920.

So, when ‘Victorian values’ are next men-tioned, it’s worth bearing in mind that many of the greatest achievements of that remarkable era were performed by people working in the warm haze of opioid bliss.

Contemporary politicians take heed: there’s a lesson in there somewhere…

~~~WETWORLD~~~The Most Unlikely Thing in the Universe

We live in strange times.Familiarity is draining from our lives,

old political alignments are dissolving, the weather is unpredictable and violent. But, perhaps we should try harder to embrace the strangeness: after all, we are made from the most unlikely thing in the universe.

Hydrogen oxide – commonly known as water – is so deeply weird that chemists have a list of its anomalous properties more than 70 items long. It combines the two most abundant elements in the universe – hydro-gen and oxygen – and makes a liquid (any other gas combined with hydrogen produces another gas).

Nothing else in nature is found simul-taneously as liquid, solid and gas. Most sub-stances shrink as they cool but, as water freezes, it starts to expand and become lighter. It takes 10 times as much energy to heat water as it does to heat iron and it’s three times harder to compress than diamonds.

Without water there would be no life. Its capacity to retain heat has helped keep the planet’s temperature stable. Its trans-parency allows life-sustaining light to pen-etrate its depths. Because it can dissolve almost anything, it is the medium in which life’s key metabolic exchanges take place.

Dissolve something in acid and its gone, dissolve it in water and it’s still there. Paradoxically, this also makes it the most destructive substance on the planet. Sooner or later, water eats away everything.

And there’s another, darker paradox.Despite its abundance, 99% of the

world’s water is not usable. It’s not even seawater, but fossil water locked deep in the mantle – enough to re� ll the oceans 30 times over. The black waters of Lake Vostok, the world’s sixth largest lake, locked under four kilometres of Antarctic ice have not seen light for 15 million years,

but still teem with microbial life.Space, we discover, is full of it – from

our � rst discovery of extra-terrestrial water in 1969, we have now found 23 moist spots in our solar system alone. There are deposits of ice on the moon and on Mars and traces of water vapour on the cooler patches of the sun’s surface.

There is something mind-bendingly liberating about this. Water recognises no national boundaries or political jurisdic-tions. It just ° ows and seeps. The great river basins – the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Mekong and the Brahmaputra – cut across some of the most populous nations on the planet.

And it is here where we will need new thinking to address the problems of fresh water supply (by 2025 half the world’s popu-lation will be facing acute shortages).

So, the simple act of turning on the tap reminds us to look deeper at where we come from and how we might survive. Turning it o� , too (if everyone in the UK turned o� the tap o� while cleaning their teeth we would save enough water to supply the whole of Birmingham for a year).

As W.H. Auden once reminded us in First Things First: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water”.

Thousands have

lived without love,

not one without

water

W.H. Auden

* The Upside Down *By John Mitchinson

By the 1860s, in England, children under five were seven times more likely to die of opium poisoning than an adult over 35

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31

ALSO FEATURING

MJ's Great Big ChoirMJ’s GREAT BIG CHOIR is back again for its

fourth consecutive year at Curious. As regu-lar festival-goers have come to know and love,

expect the unexpected. Newcomers should just jump in and experience the excitement.

It’s your choice – be a part of the Surprise or BE surprised on Saturday.

Be an immersive part of the performance fun or come and have an experience at the perfor-mance on Sunday. Meet behind the Frontline

Club at 11am on Sunday to rehearse for a 1pm performance in the Future Dome.

This year’s theme is musicals; from old favourites to the new wave of ideas embrac-ing the in° uence of England and beyond.

If you would like to participate in the rehearsal and join MJ’s GREAT BIG CHOIR, sign up and register with your contact details as

you check-in or just jump in on the day spon-taneously when you see the time slot.

Just google MJ’s Choirs for more information about all her choirs. www.mjparanzino.co.uk

CURIOUS WORKSHOPS FOR ADULTS

Duncan Minshull meditative walks, 11am Saturday and Sunday, meeting at the information tent.

Oyster Tasting with Bobby, 18:00 work-shop tent 1 on Saturday for 1 hour,

Chelsea Renton clay head making work-shop: "Bring along a festival friend as your model for a messy hands-on work-shop making a clay head to take home. Cartoonist and sculptor, Chelsea Renton, will take you through the necessary steps to turn a lump of mud into a recognisable person!" 10am art tent next to XR REBEL REBEL STAGE on Saturday for 2 hours.

Orlando Seale lyric writing workshop, 15:00 Friday in WORKSHOP TENT 4.

LIFE DRAWING CLASSES - 6.30, Saturday, Human Library Tent

Byline Festival is proud to partner with Frontline Club

which is a gathering place for journalists, photographers and other like-minded people inter-ested in international a� airs and independent journalists. Visit the Frontline Club Tent at the fes-tival for the best conversation, drinks and food.

,

MORA

N FILM

S! Moran Films is an award-winning dynamic and enterprising video

production company keen to make an impact on the national and international video scene. With access to a network of talented col-laborators, we can create for you a video that will successfully promote your product/service/business.

Moran Films is the offi -cial provider of fi lm and photography services to the Byline Festival.

w w w.moran f i lms .co.ukRichard Mawbey will demonstrate how he converted his GWizz Car to run off laptop batteries with a before and after demonstration.

He will be near the Extinction Rebellion Rebel Rebel Stage.

FESTIVAL DEMO

CONVERT YOUR GWIZZ ELECTRIC CAR TO RUN OFF

LAPTOP BATTERIES

Thank you to our sponsor MEND Muslim Engagement & Development.

THANKYOU