Meet Colette Batten-Turner, Founder and CEO of “Conversation Over Borders”.
She’s an example of what I call an “Open Border Babe” (OBB); one of numerous women who now devotes a large amount of time, professionally or otherwise, to telling us all to BE KIND and support refugees entering the UK.
OBBs and otherwise increasingly have the means to be sanctimonious. Conversation Over Borders has received over £150k from the National Lottery since 2022 - and just wait until I show you its activism!
I discovered Batten-Turner through this video below, posted in collaboration with Ben & Jerry’s UK - which also funds Conversation Over Borders.
For the video, Batten-Turner joined forces with another OBB (Open Border Babe), Mathilda Della Torre, the Activism Manager at Ben & Jerry’s UK (as well as the “Founder of Conversations From Calais, a global poster project aiming to re-humanise the refugee crisis”) to promote Ben & Jerry’s “No Escape Room” - an “installation showing what it’s really like in asylum hotels.”
Ben & Jerry’s has installed this installation before in Shoreditch, London…
… but this time it was at Forwards Festival in Bristol. Speaking about the site, Della Torre explained: “I think festivals are a really, really important place to have this conversation because people are here to take the time and are actually emotionally much more vulnerable and ready to have conversation to understand what someone else’s reality might be like.”
Conversation Over Borders, a Community Interest Company, is not only funded by the National Lottery and Ben & Jerry’s via the “UK Fund of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation”, but also the People’s Postcode Lottery and others, such as the Sussex Community Foundation (which in turn leads to tens of “fundholders”).
The grants Conversation over Borders has received are listed on 360 Giving, which also shows the Department for Work and Pensions as a funder:
Conversation Over Borders describes itself as “a UK-based organisation that brings refugees, people seeking asylum and local communities together through conversation, learning and community action.”
It adds: “At a time of growing division and hostility, community matters more than ever.”
What does this look like in practice?
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Well, Conversation Over Borders produced a “festive survival manual” to help people “navigate conversations about the ‘hotel’ accommodation system with kindness, clarity and facts”…
… it posted that “Borders are man-made & so is hate” (liked by the London Green Party)…
… and claimed women’s safety “has been weaponised by anti-refugee protestors”:
It also backed the obstruction of an immigration van - and the authorities doing their job - in Glasgow…
… and criticised the “deeply hurtful” Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman being based on biological sex:
I could go on and on… Here’s its Instagram page if you want a depressing read.
Batten-Turner’s own posts aren’t much better. For instance, last year she called out an “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Language training where neither the attendees nor trainers identified their pronouns.” The horror!
Elsewhere she says “Trans women are women. This is not, and has never been, up for debate”…
… and has been photographed with Zack Polanski at The World Transformed (“an annual festival and year-round political education project” for the ultra left):
In another post, Batten-Turner said she was “burnt out” before listing how difficult it is for charities due to cuts and even Donald Trump:
What a shame.
But it still doesn’t explain how this ridiculous outfit received over £150,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund.
More:
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Keep going, Charlotte. Just think of the £billions that can be spent on "real" people once these idiots are flushed away!