London and Paris at impasse over migrants

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: London and Paris at impasse over migrants

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, February 9th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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Credit Suisse investors want its vice chair gone as the lender tries to get out from under a pile of scandals. And one of Britain’s most successful tech companies may list on the Nasdaq after a mammoth deal fell through. Plus, efforts to find a solution to the UK’s migrant crisis have frozen.

Robert Wright
Nobody in this situation, certainly in the UK side, has any of the political imagination or daring to take the kinds of steps that would actually be effective.

Marc Filippino
We’ll explain why London and Paris can’t come up with any solutions. I’m Marc Filippino and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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Investors at Credit Suisse are impatient. They really want the scandal-ridden bank to clean up its act, and they want to start by pushing out its vice chair Severin Schwan. Two top shareholders told the FT that they would vote to block any move to extend the tenure of the bank’s long time vice-chair. Schwan is also CEO of the Swiss pharma group Roche, and investors aren’t confident he can steer the bank and lead the drugmaker at the same time. Shares in Credit Suisse have tumbled more than 60 per cent since Schwan joined the board in 2014. We reported yesterday that Credit Suisse has become the first Swiss bank in the country’s history to get hit with criminal charges for allegedly helping a Bulgarian mafia launder money. The bank releases its annual results on Thursday.

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The head of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, spent the last year and a half trying to sell the British chip company Arm to Nvidia. It would have been a record breaking deal but it collapsed late Monday. And now the FT reports SoftBank may take Arm public in the US. And that could be a huge disappointment to the UK.

Richard Waters
This is absolutely fascinating because it’s all tangled up with nationalism and the politics around Brexit.

Marc Filippino
The FT’s Richard Waters reminds me that SoftBank’s original purchase of the British chip company Arm right after the UK voted to leave the European Union was seen as a huge vote of confidence in British industry. Selling it to the US company Nvidia, well, that would have been hard to swallow.

Richard Waters
So there will be relief now that Arm isn’t going to be bought by an American company, but it’s going to have to stand on its own feet and that presents all kinds of other problems,

Marc Filippino
One of which is where it will list. Again, you’ve got the US and the UK.

Richard Waters
Within Britain, there’s been a real desire for a while to get Arm listed on the London stock market. It would be a real symbol of British technology’s success. But as we report in the FT yesterday, SoftBank wants to list this company in New York because it knows that that’s where it’ll get a high valuation. British investors have not shown themselves over the last year to be, you know, really open to the kind of, quite honestly, quite stretched valuations that tech stocks have achieved compared to the US. And SoftBank knows very clearly where we’ll get the best deal.

Marc Filippino
Richard Waters is the FT’s west coast editor. He covers all things tech.

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Britain’s relations with France are at their lowest point in decades, and a big reason for that is the issue of migrants. The number of migrants seeking asylum in the UK has reached levels not seen since the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis. Many come from France, often in boats across the English Channel. It’s a huge hot button issue, and officials from the two countries haven’t been able to see eye to eye

Virginie Guiraudon
At this point. We call it ping pong. The UK blames the French. The French blame the British.

Marc Filippino
In our third and final report on the UK migrant crisis, we’ll speak to a leading expert and find out what could be done. First, here’s the FT’s social policy correspondent Robert Wright on why British officials aren’t coming up with solutions and just reaching for a harsh deterrent approach.

Robert Wright
Nobody in this situation, certainly on the UK side, has any of the political imagination or daring to take the kinds of steps that would actually be effective. There’s not that much downside in just refusing to budge. It looks like they’re being cruel, which probably to some people looks like an effective strategy, and flexibility just doesn’t have any real political upside to them. So I think they’ll just dig in. You’ll still have people coming across. They’ll seek to put them into horrible accommodation and seek to be unpleasant to them. I would think that not terribly much is going to change. And of course, the price of that may well be further horrible tragedies of the kind that we saw in November.

Marc Filippino
Right. And that’s when we saw nearly all of the 30 people in an inflatable dinghy drowned when their boat capsized in the English Channel. Robert, does it make any difference to point out how few migrants the UK takes in and gives asylum to compare to, say, France or other European countries?

Robert Wright
It should change the debate and it doesn’t. The fact is that the UK is by dint of geography in a fairly privileged position. It doesn’t have a land border that people are coming across, so it can afford to be isolated about this. So I don’t think people do generally know that the French are taking far more people. It certainly doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference to the debate that is happening. There is just a sense that the perfidious French are letting people flow across and it’s all the fault of the French. And the debate about this in the UK is not terribly well rounded or well set up.

Marc Filippino
Are you hearing of any viable solutions, you know, in an ideal world? With politics aside, is there anything London could do?

Robert Wright
The thing that they could do, I think most dispassionate observers think, is set up safe and legal routes for people to come to the UK. The UK government has said it will do that, but the issue is there’s just far more people seeking to come to the UK and they’re coming from a far wider range of places and really there isn’t a proper, safe and legal route for them to come here. Something else that the UK could do that probably would make a difference would be to strike a new returns agreement with the European Union, so it could be sending some of those people back. But the UK is refusing to negotiate with the European Union. It keeps saying it’s going straight bilateral deals with countries. The countries in the European Union say, sorry, no, you have to deal with the European Union and this, and that’s one of the things that’s reached a standstill about all this.

Marc Filippino
Robert Wright is the FT’s social policy correspondent. Now let’s turn to Virginie Guiraudon. She’s a leading migrant expert and research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. She says domestic politics in France is also hampering efforts to negotiate a solution.

Virginie Guiraudon
Well, one important factor is that France is in an election year. We have a presidential election in April. And being tough on borders, showing that you respect French sovereignty is important and that cuts both ways. If the French President Emmanuel Macron is too nice with the British, his competitors will say that he is just a sheriff’s deputy to the British, and at the same time the dominant view in France among almost all candidates, except perhaps the Greens, is to be tough on migration. They want to be tough on migration and they also want to be tough on the British. They don’t want to say, oh fine, we’ll just take every migrant that arrives in Dover back to France.

Marc Filippino
And people in France also complain that Britain encourages migrants to cross the channel with its less restrictive labour laws. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Virginie Guiraudon
The French are saying in the UK you can work without papers. There’s a sort of economic attraction of the UK because they don’t have the same kind of strict control of the labour force that exists in France, but also in other places such as Germany. And the UK also has entire sectors of its economy that welcomes foreign labour. So the French are also saying, don’t blame us if people are going to the UK. They know there are jobs and they know that it’s easy to work without a work contract.

Marc Filippino
So what has France’s strategy been?

Virginie Guiraudon
So what they’ve tried to do now is to try to involve other member states of the European Union to try to say this is not just a French problem with the UK, especially after Brexit. We should try to have an EU agreement with the UK on how to deal with the situation, trying to have a more comprehensive diplomatic solution. But the problem is that the UK so far has really not done anything except politicise the issue domestically. They’re not willing to negotiate so much with the French. The only thing they’ve offered the French is more money. So basically giving a budget to the French to have more personnel on the ground, more police personnel, for instance, and that’s it.

Marc Filippino
Are there any viable solutions for the governments?

Virginie Guiraudon
Both researchers but policymakers as well know that there is a solution by just looking at the situation itself. Who are the people in Calais? Where do they come from? Why do they want to go to the UK? You will see that clearly people in Calais who are going to this area of France are people either with legitimate asylum claims. If the UK makes a move, it could welcome these people through laws that exist. Asylum law and family reunion laws. And on the other hand, the French would say, and in the meantime, we’re continuing to do whatever is possible to prevent people to arrive irregularly, you know, without papers. People are not going to stop going to Calais overnight. They have to have an alternative way of making it to the UK.

Marc Filippino
Virginie Guiraudon is a research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. Special thanks to the FT’s Anna Gross for connecting us.

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com. By the way, if you want to hear part one and part two of our refugee series, we have links to those stories in the show notes. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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