Enough, already

9 December, 2013 (21:14) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I don’t want anybody else to mention Nelson Mandela to me. Specifically, I don’t want any more live ‘news’ reports asking people what they thought of him, nor do I want any more comment from opportunistic cowards like David Cameron, whose only difficult decision about race issues was to decide what cocktail to order a black waiter to bring him.

I have found the coverage of the great man’s death disgusting. Hypocrites and charlatans have queued up to pay tribute amid the great dumbing-down that is today’s ‘news’. For all the HD colour on offer, the news – apart from a tiny number of broadsheets – functions only in black and white, its own apartheid of mediocrity. The picture of Mandela has barely mentioned the faults that he acknowledged he had.  There has been little attempt to address the corruption and violence that disfigure modern South Africa, and no realisation at all that while the world of inequality against which Mandela stood continues to thrive, this will thrive too.

All these world leaders queuing up to kiss the dead backside of a socialist! Yet anybody who, like Mandela, suggests action to tackle global poverty or action to build equality of opportunity is howled down, amid suited snuffles of righteous indignation while armies of private security operatives guard the trains and boats and planes and mansions.

I remember being interviewed by the Police in the 1980s because I was a supporter of the African National Congress; when I sold the usual Christmas draw tickets for the ANC in the office where I then worked, somebody doctored a photo of me so I looked like a black and white minstrel, captioned it ‘The Soweto Kid’ and pinned it to the noticeboard. Only the other night, I overheard people in the pub criticising, like I am, the 24-hour news mourning of Mandela, but by saying “he was a terrorist, after all”. Casual, easy racism, the sneer of the haves for the have-nots, still exists today, just as it did as recently as the 1980s.

What have the leaders pompously giving us their worthless comments about a great man done to provide, for example, the free global health army that might tackle Aids, or the diseases of poverty? They have done little about that or anything else; the west has grown ever richer and the chosen few at the top even richer. They are as corrupt as the government South Africa got after Mandela. Instead of governments acting to free people from poverty in the way that black South Africans were freed from racist abuse, we’ve had to make do with shreds of help, with charity, with Victorian philanthropy – and we’ve even had the added human rights issue of having to listen to the likes of Bob Geldof, Annie Lennox and sodding Bono.

I expect I’m being naïve and idealistic again. Yet the one thing Mandela showed was that naivety, idealism and a belief in right against wrong can, will, triumph in the end.

If all these professionally-mourning people believe, as they say they do, as they should do, that Mandela was right, that all people, whether rich or poor, black or white, Christian or Muslim, all people should have equality of opportunity, social justice and a chance to live – let them show it right now, right this minute. Or shut up. Shut the fuck up.

Boom boom

I don’t know whether those booming, explosion-like bird scarers that farmers use do anything much to scare off birds, but by God they frighten dogs.

A farmer across the valley from us has one, booming away every few minutes or so. To add to the enjoyment we’re all deriving from this, more or less every dog in the vicinity is in a state of advanced terror. My Belle is refusing to go into the garden at all now, and some dogs have fled the scene entirely. One was only found after four days missing.

As you know, I much prefer living in the past, and it seems to me that farmers managed to grow crops while they had scarecrows in the fields. I’m going to suggest he puts up one dressed as George Osborne. If that doesn’t frighten the birds, nothing will.

Boom wages?

There has been much criticism of the writer Jeanette Winterson for asking why people should work for just £6 an hour. Much of that criticism has come from people who work for very, very much more than £6 an hour, naturally.

I’d work for £6 an hour. It’d be a pay rise.

But the choice of whether to work for £6 an hour isn’t just economics. Neither is it anything to do with laziness. It is, for many, a choice that has to include careful budgeting: whether the journey to and from work could be paid for by that £6 an hour, for example. Whether that £6 an hour would, for example, cover what the family would then lose in tax credits or housing subsidy. So just as farmers weigh up what they do for subsidy, just as chief executives weigh up how much tax to pay, just as somebody weighs up whether to accept the offer of a new job, just as bankers weigh up how much bonus a decision might earn them, so people offered a job for £6 an hour must take careful economic decisions. In fact, when the decision that’s taken might mean the difference between heating the house or not, people need to weigh it up even more carefully.

Now, news is coming in that an independent pay panel has decided to award me a pay rise, so I must be off.

Comments

Comment from Old Fiddle
Time December 9, 2013 at 9:49 pm

Best blog today and anywhere. Should be offered to schools and universities as a discussion document. Or anywhere where the ethos is to try to think objectively…. but with some life-affirming passion.

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