Matthew Elliott, one of the leaders of the British Taxpayers’ Alliance, TPA, will give a talk in Room 101 in Logberg Friday 20 September, 12–13, about the resistance movement of taxpayers against greedy and aggressive authorities. The Icelandic Taxpayers’ Alliance sponsors the meeting with RNH. The British TPA was founded in 2007. It is an independent grassroots organisation which has been very visible in the British media and influential in British politics. Elliott served as the Chief Executive of the TPA until July 2012.

Born in Leeds, Matthew Elliott completed a degree in public administration from the LSE before working for a number of MPs and MEPs in the House of Commons and the European Parliament. He has written three books in cooperation with others, The Bumper Book of Government Waste (last updated 2013), downloadable from the Internet, The Great European Rip-Off; How the Corrupt, Wasteful EU is Taking Control of Our Lives (Random House, 2009) and Fleeced! How we’ve been betrayed by the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers — and how much they’ve cost us (Constable, 2009). Elliott was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in June 2007 and is on the Advisory Committee of the New Culture Forum. In 2009, he was one of the founders of Big Brother Watch, to campaign for civil and personal liberties. He led the “No to AV”  campaign in the 2011 nationwide referendum on changing Britain’s elector system: the NO compaign won two to one, by 67.9% to 32.1%.

Elliott is on the Board of Wess Digital, and is the Executive Director of Business for Britain, an independent, non-partisan campaign seeking a better deal for Britain in the EU. According to the BBC, Elliott is “one of the most effective lobbyists at Westminster”. In 2010, Elliott was on a list composed by the online magazine Total Politics of the top 25 political influencers in the United Kingdom, headed by media magnate Rupert Murdoch and the then-governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. An interview with Elliott in Total Politics is here. Elliott blogs regularly on the Daily Mail website. The participation of RNH in this event is a part of the joint project, with AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, on “Europe, Iceland and the future of capitalism”.

Dr. Andreja Valic Zver gives a paper at Iceland’s National Library Monday 16 September, 17–18, on the topic: “Why Should We Remember the Victims?” The meeting at which Dr. Zver reads her paper marks the closure of a photo exhibition at the National Library on “International Communism and Iceland”. The exhibition was opened on the European Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Totalitarianism, 23 August. This day was chosen by the European Parliament as remembrance day because on this day in 1939, Hitler and Stalin made the non-aggression pact by which they divided Central and Eastern Europe up between them, and started the Second World War. At the meeting, Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson will hand over to the National Library many Comintern documents which Professor Arnor Hannibalsson found in archives in Moscow and which, when his own health failed, gave to Professor Gissurarson to work on for his book on Icelandic communists, 1918–1998. The meeting is held in honour of Professor Hannibalsson, a tireless opponent of totalitarianism, who died in December 2012.

Dr. Andreja Valic Zver is a historian by training. She completed her doctorate from Ljubljana University in Slovenia and has published widely in her native language. She is the director of the Study Centre for National Reconciliation in Slovenia and a member of the Management Board of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. She was the president of the History Teachers Association of Slovenia 2003–8, and is the president of the school section of the Historical Association of Slovenia, the chairwoman of the Archival Commission of the Republic of Slovenia and a member of the Executive Committee of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience. She is married to one of Slovenia’s best-known politicians, Milan Zver, who was Minister of Education and Sports in 2004–8 and presently a member of the European Parliament, with the greatest number of votes from Slovenia. The meeting and the lecture forms a part of the joint RNH-AECR project on “Europe of the Victims”. The event is co-sponsored by the Institute of International Affairs at the University of Iceland and by Vardberg, the Icelandic Atlantic Association. Mr. Illugi Gunnarsson, Minister of Education and Culture, will chair the meeting.

Photo: B. I. Gunnarsson

Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, a member of the RNH Academic Council, gives a paper on the Icelandic bank collapse and lessons which European nations may draw from it, at a conference organised by the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, 12 September 2013. In his paper, Gissurarson will discuss the characteristics of the Icelandic bank collapse and its specific causes, in addition to the main causes of the international financial crisis. These specific causes include two systemic risks in the Icelandic banking sector; one because of cross-ownership and the inflated value of collateral; and another one because of the asymmetry of the field of operations and field of institutional support. He will present his theories and investigations on why the American Federal Reserve System did not support the Icelandic Central Bank, at the same time as it made generous currency swap agreements with almost all other Western central banks outside the eurozone, and why the British Labour government closed the two Icelandic banks in England, on the very same day as it bailed out all other banks in England, and why the Labour government also used an anti-terrorism law against Icelandic companies and institutions, with the consequence that a total collapse of the financial sector became inevitable.

This event is a part of the joint RNH-AECR project on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”. After the conference, Professor Gissurarson will participate in a seminar in Vilnius 13 September 2013 on free-market think tanks and their future agenda. In the evening of 13 September, Professor Gissurarson will give a talk at a meeting of young Lithuanian liberals (in the classical or European sense) in Vilnius. In his talk, “Three Liberal Thinkers: Hayek, Popper and Friedman”, he will discuss the personalities, ideas and arguments of these three major thinkers all of whom he knew quite well, through his studies at Oxford University in 1981–5, his participation in the Mont Pelerin Society meetings since 1980 and his Visiting Scholarship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in the 1980s and 1990s.

HHG Slides Vilnius 12 September 2013

HHG Slides Vilnius 13 September 2013

Marta Andreasen, former Chief Accounting Officer and Budget Execution Director at the European Commission, will give a lecture on Friday 30 August 17–18 in meeting room N-132 in Askja, the Natural Sciences House of the University of Iceland. She calls the lecture “The European Union: Where is it Heading?” The meeting is chaired by Bjorn Bjarnason, former Minister of Justice, but its sponsors, besides RNH, are Icewise, an association of freedom-loving Icelanders against the EU, the website No to the EU, Heimssyn, the movement for independence in European affairs, Isafold, the association of young people against EU membership and the Europe Watch, a website about European affairs.

The RNH participation in this meeting forms a part of the joint RNH-AECR project on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”. Andreasen, now a member of the European Parliament for the British Conservatives, has forcefully criticized the European Commission for corruption and various irregularities. Born in Argentina in 1954, she is a certified public accountant and economist who worked for many accountant companies and the OECD, before taking up her position in Brussels in 2002. When she refused to endorse the EU Commission accounts she was first suspended and then fired. Married and the mother of two, she is the author of Brussels Laid Bare published in 2009.