Category Archives: European Union

This winter in Europe was hottest on record by far, say scientists

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Climate crisis likely to have supercharged temperatures around world, data suggests

The winter just experienced by Europe was by far the hottest on record, scientists have announced, with the climate crisis likely to have supercharged the heat.

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) data dates back to 1855. It said the average temperature for December, January and February was 1.4C above the previous winter record, which was set in 2015-16. New regional climate records are usually passed by only a fraction of a degree. Europe’s winter was 3.4C hotter than the average from 1981-2010.

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The humanitarian crisis in Turkey shines a light on Europe’s failures | Elif Shafak

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Turkey was once on course to join the EU. The desperate refugees trapped on its border reflect a broken relationship

To understand Europe, we need to look more carefully at its borders. Too often, the debates on the future of Europe focus on a few leading nations and overlook the periphery. Yet the fate of the continent is deeply and inevitably connected with what’s happening along its fringes. And there is no bordering country that has as complex and confusing a relationship with Europe as Turkey – it was, after all, the Ottoman empire that was first referred to as “the sick man of Europe”.

Related: Migration: EU praises Greece as 'shield' after Turkey opens border

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Greece’s economic ‘recovery’ is for the few, not the many | Yanis Varoufakis

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Buoyed by fire sales of public assets, a tiny minority of Greeks are thriving. Everyone else is mired in hopelessness

Spring is already in the air across Greece. Even in the bleakest of times, nature’s renaissance renders hope irrepressible. But this one is proving a cruel spring for a people caught up in a decade-old crisis yielding one ritual humiliation after another.

Costas runs a small bookshop in my central Athens neighbourhood. Although jovial by constitution, he finds it difficult to hide the worry lines multiplying on his face. Fifteen years ago he put his flat up as collateral for a business loan to spruce up the bookshop. When the Greek debt crisis wreaked its havoc, it was impossible to service that loan.

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Migration: EU praises Greece as ‘shield’ after Turkey opens border

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Bloc leaders announce financial support as UN questions Athens’ suspension of asylum applications

European Union leaders have given a show of support for Athens, describing Greece as Europe’s “shield” in deterring migrants, despite questions from the UN about breaches of international refugee law.

Four EU leaders met the Greek prime minister, Kyriákos Mitsotákis, at the border town of Orestiada on Tuesday, near where Greek police have been using teargas to deter hundreds of migrants from attempting to cross from Turkey.

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EU member states call for 2030 climate target

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Dozen member states hope letter will focus minds before Glasgow UN talks this year

A dozen countries have called for an EU climate target for 2030 to be drawn up “as soon as possible”, if the bloc is to galvanise the rest of the world before vital UN talks in Glasgow later this year.

In a letter to the EU’s top official on climate action, Frans Timmermans, the dozen EU member states say “the EU can lead by example and contribute to creating the international momentum needed for all parties to scale up their ambition” by adopting a 2030 EU greenhouse gas emissions reduction target “as soon as possible and by June 2020 at the latest”.

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The crisis of the centre-right could rot the European Union from within | Jan-Werner Müller

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From Hungary to the UK, mainstream conservatives have capitulated to the authoritarianism of the far right

If there is one thing on which Brussels insiders and Eurosceptics can agree, it’s that the EU has experienced a decade of crises. The eurozone crisis and the subsequent enforcement of fiscal austerity exposed the coercive underside of Brussels. The arrival of refugees in 2015 tested the limits of European liberalism. Brexit, the first time a member state has handed back its EU membership, wounded the self-image of the EU as an ever-expanding bloc. But as serious as these challenges are, none of them threatens to shake European integration like the entrenchment of the far right in two member-state governments.

Europe’s real tumult lies in the failure of its centre-right parties to avert the rise of the far right. In Hungary, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is about to celebrate his 10th year in office, has developed a rule book for how to stealthily undermine democratic institutions and the rule of law while still appearing to follow legal procedures. For the last decade, his Fidesz party has had a large enough majority in parliament to change the constitution according to its autocratic whims. It has transformed the electoral system such that a real turnover in power is now virtually impossible. Last year, the widely respected democracy watchdog Freedom House downgraded Hungary’s status to a “partly free” country – the first time this has happened from within the EU.

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Support for Eurosceptic parties doubles in two decades across EU

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Research reveals one in three voters now back parties that are critical of or hostile to the bloc

The paradox at the heart of Europe is revealed today in new research that shows that the vote share for Eurosceptic parties has more than doubled in two decades, even though support for the EU remains at record highs.

The sharp increase in the electoral success of Eurosceptic parties is laid bare in research conducted by academic experts in populism and radicalism across the EU who shared their work with the Guardian.

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Four years after Turkey deal, EU no closer to new asylum system

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Distracted leaders have been unable to agree on how to ease the burden on frontline states

It was said to be the moment when the European Union lost its political innocence. Nearly four years ago, in March 2016, EU leaders signed a deal with Turkey aimed at preventing asylum seekers from travelling to Europe.

The pact was “celebrated by people who are dancing on the grave of refugee protection”, said the Europe boss of Amnesty International. But the realpolitik worked: the number of people arriving on the Greek islands from Turkey dropped drastically from a peak of 7,000 a day to a few hundred, although numbers began creeping up again in 2019.

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Child dies off Lesbos in first fatality since Turkey opened border

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Four-year-old dies as crisis sparked by Turkey’s decision to open its borders continues

The first victim of the worsening crisis that has engulfed Greece following Turkey’s abrupt decision to open its borders to thousands of refugees desperate to reach Europe has been confirmed with the death of a child in waters off Lesbos.

Authorities said a four-year-old Syria boy died early on Monday when an inflatable dinghy carrying people from the Turkish coast capsized off the island. “Doctors rushed to save the child but it was too late,” a police source on Lesbos said.

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British economy ‘to grow 0.16% at best under US trade deal’

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Admission lays bare limited benefits of ‘ambitious’ agreement with Donald Trump

The British economy would be at most 0.16% larger by the middle of the next decade under a comprehensive trade deal with the US, the government has admitted, laying bare the limited benefits from striking an agreement with Donald Trump.

In a document published by Liz Truss’s Department for International Trade designed to kick-start post-Brexit trade talks with the Trump White House, the government said the British economy stood to benefit from an “ambitious and comprehensive” trade deal worth a fraction of GDP, equivalent to £3.4bn after 15 years.

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Europe (and yes, that includes Britain) can still be a superpower | Timothy Garton Ash

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The key to European power projection isn’t institutional reform, it’s a shift in attitude and a willingness to cooperate

As a European leader once remarked, Europe should be a superpower, not a superstate. Faced with an increasingly powerful and authoritarian China, global heating, the challenge of AI, not to mention an aggressive Russia, chaotic Middle East and Trumpian United States, this argument is more compelling than ever. In a world of giants, you need to be a giant yourself. If we Europeans don’t hang together, we will hang separately.

Most Europeans agree with this simple proposition. Indeed, this is one of the big things they want the European Union to do. But is Europe up to the job? The answer is not a simple yes or no. It depends what dimension of power we are talking about. In trade negotiations, the EU, which represents the biggest and richest multinational single market in the world through a single negotiator, is already a superpower. It has made trade deals with major economies, such as Canada and Japan, of which Brexit Britain can only dream.

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Boris Johnson talks tough before US trade talks

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PM maintains that NHS is not on the table and animal welfare standards won’t drop

Boris Johnson has said he will drive a hard bargain as the UK outlined its negotiating objectives for the forthcoming trade talks with the US.

Despite fears that disagreements between London and Washington could obstruct the launch of the negotiations, a government press release claimed the prime minister wanted to open up opportunities for British businesses and investors while also ensuring the NHS was not for sale via the desired free trade agreement.

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EU vows to help nationals ‘outside the mainstream’ stay in UK

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Bloc’s first UK ambassador says right to remain for many vulnerable Europeans must be protected

Prisoners and members of the Roma community, along with elderly people and the poorest in society, will be the focus of a new EU push to help Europeans “outside the mainstream” to remain in the UK after Brexit.

There are concerns that thousands of EU nationals will fail to apply to the Home Office to stay because they lack information or the means to see the digital application process through.

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Erdoğan says border will stay open as Greece tries to repel influx

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Turkish leader claims 18,000 people have crossed into EU but some are met with teargas

Thousands of migrants may be in no man’s land between Turkey and Greece after Ankara opened its western borders, sparking chaotic scenes as Greek troops attempted to prevent refugees from entering Europe en masse.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, claimed 18,000 migrants had crossed the border, without immediately providing supporting evidence, but many appear to have been repelled by Greek border patrols firing teargas and stun grenades.

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Refugees arrive on Lesbos as Turkey opens border – video

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Three boats of refugees have landed on Lesbos in the last 24 hours as the island prepares for an influx of people after Turkey announced it was opening its borders. Meanwhile, thousands of people gathered in the Turkish city of Edirne, which borders Bulgaria and Greece

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Article by young Boris Johnson helped inspire Thatcher’s ‘No, no, no’

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Papers show Telegraph article was in briefing pack before historic speech on Europe

Margaret Thatcher’s infamous “No, no, no” retort to Jacques Delors, a historic moment in the UK’s relationship with Europe, which also had the effect of precipitating her downfall, was partly inspired by an article penned by a young journalist named Boris Johnson, her newly released private papers show.

In 1990, 30 years before Johnson took the UK out of the European Union, an article he penned as the Telegraph’s EC (European Community) correspondent warning of the threat the EC posed to national sovereignty was in Thatcher’s briefing pack as she delivered the combative speech to parliament.

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UK races to find extra 50,000 staff for post-Brexit paperwork

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New recruits needed to process millions of extra declaration forms from 1 January 2021

A race to hire 50,000 people in the next six months to process Brexit paperwork is under way after the government confirmed they would be needed for border operations.

But experts have warned it will be a challenge to train enough people in time to be competent in the complexity of customs declarations and the second layer of red tape involving entry and exit declaration forms that are mandatory for trading with the EU.

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UK to withdraw from European arrest warrant

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Government document reveals plans to ditch tool that allows for fast extradition of criminals

The UK is to abandon a crucial tool used to speed up the transfer of criminals across borders with other European countries.

Acting against the warnings of senior law enforcement officials, the government said it would not be seeking to participate in the European arrest warrant (EAW) as part of the future relationship with the European Union.

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Boris Johnson faces Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs – live news

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Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs and Michel Barnier’s Brexit speech

Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, says immigration is crucial for the Scottish economy. The Scottish government’s plans for a Scottish visa system have been welcomed by business and even Scottish Tories. Does the PM accept it was a mistake to reject the plan?

Johnson says this idea was rejected by the migration advisory committee. He says under the government’s plan firms will be able to get the workers they need.

Corbyn says he has learnt a lot from visiting victims of flooding. The PM should try it. He says people cannot get insurance. Isn’t it time the PM found an urgent solution to this problem? Just imagine what it must be like. People are looking to the government for help.

Johnson says there are problems with insurance. But the government scheme has helped many households. He says he is looking at what can be done to protect homes that cannot get insurance. He says any government led by Corbyn would not be able to help.

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