Category Archives: Politics

The politics of envy

Singer James Blunt

There are some industries that it’s very hard to get a job in. Film-making, advertising, the music business, all the glamorous stuff. It’s pretty obvious that rich people find it much easier to get a start in these jobs because their parents will subsidise them while they do internships or hang around in Fulham waiting for their big break. However, when the new shadow culture minister said that there should be more opportunities for poor people he was immediately attacked by public schoolboy James Blunt for being a classist gimp.

Anyone who has complained publicly about the misbehaviour or greed of rich people will sooner or later find himself accused of indulging in The Politics of Envy. It’s a painful accusation to bear, implying moral hypocrisy and a kind of joyless puritanism – You would do just the same if you could, you just won’t admit it. Like any effective lie must do, it also contains a tiny grain of truth, after all who wouldn’t want to be richer?

Psychologists like Timothy Judge and Paul Piff, who have published studies into the way that being rich affects people’s behaviour, have shown correlations between wealth and disagreeable attitudes: Insensitivity, ruthlessness, even selfish driving. These characteristics are likely to make rich people behave anti-socially.

When people express moral outrage at the behaviour of the rich and powerful it is the same outrage that they would express at any other anti-social behaviour. Dropping litter, mugging grannies, drink driving, tax evasion. We don’t get annoyed about these things because we wish we could do them, it’s because we think other people shouldn’t do them. In fact, we feel that when someone acts anti-socially they are actually doing harm to us, personally.

It would be better if James Blunt acknowledged his good fortune and did something to support people who haven’t been as lucky as him. It’s no surprise that he holds up the US as a marvellous example of how he’d like to be treated. It is indeed a lovely country to be rich in, and a terrible place to be poor.

What UKIP stand for

If you have a look at the source code for the ugly UKIP Croydon website you’ll see this collection of keywords that they’ve added. These are the words that they hope will lead people to them in Google searches:

Roads Traffic Parking Enforcement Control CPZ Controlled Zone Freedom Rights Drivers Cars Motorists Streets Byway Footway Pavement Motoring Congestion Motorways Signs Capacity Building Signals Highway Regulation Law Legal Safety Calming Speed Limits Lorries HGV Vans Trucks Buses Coaches Passengers Pedestrians Trams Cyclists Cycling Bicycles Mopeds Motor Bikes Adults Children Stop Go Slow Fast Automobile 4×4 Management Cameras Humps Chicanes Throttle People Elderly Disabled Wheelchairs Vehicles Pollution Air Quality Accelerate Brake Gear Queues Bottleneck Roundabout Mini-roundabout Economy Magistrate Court Disqualification Points Transport Lane Edge Kerb Build-out Cushion Dual Accident Casualty Collision Insurance Increase Reduce Improve Offence Contravention Defence Prosecute FPN PCN CCTV Appeal Fixed Penalty Notice Charge Forum Survey Advice Code Design Appearance Legibility Comprehensibility Consultation Referendum Campaign Petition Environment Police Taxi Minicab Animals Riders Vans Emergency Services Rescue Recovery Pass Loading Bay Publicity Education Footbridge Subway Bridge Flyover Underpass Segregation Statistics

It’s a bit like a stream of conciousness from the mind of a cliché taxi driver, with the swearing and racist language filtered out. It’s also quite poetic if you read it out loud.

I did look at the other party sites for comparisons, but they are too wily to expose their inner thinking so nakedly.

Some M’s

m23

M23 – A rebel group that operates in the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was formed by loyalists to the Tutsi warlord Gen. Laurent Nkunda and takes its name from the date of an agreement signed on 23 March 2009 between Rwanda and DRC to cooperate on the eradication of a Hutu rebel group called the FDLR. It is widely believed that M23 are directly controlled by the Rwandan government.

m25

M25 – A motorway that encircles Greater London. It has various cultural meanings for people in the UK, defining for many the boundary between city and countryside. It also played a huge role in 80’s rave culture as people whizzed around it on their way to parties in rural barns and warehouses. Iain Sinclair wrote a geeky book about it which was made into a movie by Channel 4.

m83

M83 – A nice and melodic electronic band from France. They used to be pleasantly obscure but they recently composed the soundtrack for a movie called Oblivion that’s being advertised on a lot of buses at the moment so they may become famous and lose some of their exclusive charm. They are named after a spiral galaxy called Messier 83.

Class War #23

A picture of an angry man with a shaved head

So I’m cycling up Brook Street in Mayfair. If you’re not familiar with the area, it’s one of the two most expensive squares on a Monopoly board, the home of Claridges, Hermès and Halcyon Days, official supplier of objets d’art to the Royal Family.

A delivery man carrying a pile of boxes for Halcyon Days saw me riding towards him, decided that he didn’t care and walked straight into my path.

I swerved around him and called him a moron. He said, “Fuck off you white, middle class wanker.” He was white himself, stereotypically shaven-headed, but apparently the “middle class” insult wasn’t enough on its own. I rode back to him, annoyed.

“You thought I was going to get out of your way, didn’t you! Clear off and read your Guardian.” He yelled with the bitter, assumed contempt of a committed running-dog.

“You think you’re pretty hard don’t you?” I said, looking him in the eye.

“Piss off before I come and take your satchel off you,” he sneered, and walked straight into a lamp–post.

Bye, bye Scotland

A couple of points with regard to the referendum the Scottish Nationalists want to hold, to decide whether or not they want to stay in this relationship with us. Firstly, shouldn’t we also have a referendum in the rest of the UK to decide whether we want to keep them? Nobody likes to be taken for granted. Even if they do decide to stay, we might want them to go!

Secondly, if they do go we’ll need to clear out all their stuff, including untagging all their photos in Facebook and removing the cross of St Andrew from our flag. So while we’re doing a redesign, why not take the opportunity to include something from the loyal and unappreciated Welsh? Here’s my proposal for the new Union Flag. I know it doesn’t look right yet, but maybe that’s just because it’s new?

New Union Jack with Wales added

Pitzi

There’s a great word in Romanian, Pitzipoance, which you can pronounce (badly) in English as pitzy pwonka or just pitzi. It is usually used to describe over made-up and frivolous young women but you can use it to describe men, or anything really. There’s a good little article about it over at I’m More Romanian Than You!

Compensation Culture

I was hit last year by a woman who jumped the lights in Brixton, admitted responsibility for destroying my bike and then spent the next six months trying to avoid paying for it. Luckily there was a witness and once I’d tracked her down and given the information to the police, the driver was charged and convicted of dangerous driving.

When I contacted the driver’s insurance company they refused to deal with me. They told me that they would only consider my claim for compensation once the driver had reported the accident to them. She never did that, and she soon stopped replying to my phone calls and text messages. I had no choice but to go to a solicitor and threaten to sue the insurance company. As soon as I did that they paid up.

That is why I’m very suspicious of the Insurance Industry’s moral posturing about No Win, No Fee arrangements. They are already in an outrageously advantageous position because anyone who owns a car must buy insurance from them. They share information about customers and all have the same policies and thus effectively operate a cartel. But despite this, the industry is self-regulated and complaining about an insurance company is time-consuming and complicated. For someone in the position I was in, a solicitor is the easiest and fastest solution, and it’s little wonder the insurance companies don’t like that. Their main objective is always to avoid paying, even when they should.

By the way, if you arrive at this post because you’ve had a bike accident, I’d strongly recommend the company I used www.cycle-claims.co.uk, they did a great job.

Charity Shops

I read an article a few years ago about how most charity shops don’t make a profit, they are just there to raise awareness of the charity by providing a permanent and cheap advertising billboard on the High Street. The guy who wrote it suggested that people would be better off selling their unwanted clothes on eBay and donating the money directly to a cause they cared about.

The British Heart Foundation produced a story today, picked up rather uncritically by the BBC, about how many of the clothes donated to charities end up being sold to commercial traders. It’s not a new story, the BBC actually made a programme about a very similar issue back in 2006. The BHF doesn’t seem to have actually published the specific details of the research that the story is based on, despite the many statistics quoted in their film, and they don’t mention on their site whether or not they sell unwanted donations on to commercial traders. It will be interesting to see whether those charities they’re indirectly criticising will respond to what they’ve said.

Transparency is always a difficult issue for charities. The harsh reality of the work they do is often at odds with the cosy world that their donors like to imagine. Competition is fierce and they worry that any story that raises even the faintest anxiety in the minds of their donors will cause them to switch to some other organisation.

Many people working in the media come from a similar background to those working for charities. Journalists working in the field often rely on their charity contacts for help with stories and logistics. This personal relationship, coupled with a reluctance to criticise people who are obviously well-meaning, makes it hard for reporters to properly examine the work of charities. Most interviews I hear start off with “Oh no, really? That’s terrible, what are you doing to help?” with follow-up questions that are entirely unchallenging. When there is even the slightest suggestion that things on the ground aren’t as clear-cut as the charities would like us to imagine, such as last year’s story about some Band Aid money being diverted to buy weapons in Ethiopia, the charities fly into a fury.

This aversion to scrutiny comes partly from the fact that charities employ a whole army of professional PR and advertising people. These professionals are entirely focussed on delivering results for their employers. They may not care if the new donors they recruit have simply switched from another charity and they are not interested in whether or not the charity is actually effective in accomplishing what it says it will. They just want people to sign up, and they will always advise their clients to avoid complexity and controversy and to challenge criticism aggressively.

So we, as potential donors, have a problem. The public face of the charities we support is created by professional marketers, not by the well-meaning people we think we’re supporting. The effectiveness of those organisations is not scrutinised by the media, and government charity watchdogs are only concerned with fraud and misappropriation. So who can we trust to tell us the truth about what happens to our donations?

The article I mentioned at the start of this post was on a site called Intelligent Giving which provided exactly the sort of scrutiny that is needed. Unfortunately it closed down, I don’t know why, and has been taken over by New Philanthropy Capital who are focussed on supplying help to charities rather than to donors. You can still find some tasters of the kind of hard-hitting work they did on their mothballed blog. The other sites available in the UK, such as Philanthropy UK, are much more equivocal. If you want some up-to-date help in finding effective ways of giving you’ll have to look to the U.S.

GiveWell has several excellent resources including a Giving 101 which includes reasons to give as well as reasons not to, and an explanation of why the wrong donation can accomplish nothing at all. Charity Navigator is another interesting site. They have some great top 10’s, including this list of charities which spend more than half their budget paying professional fundraisers! It’s a real shame there isn’t an equivalent site for UK charities, I’m sure more people would give more money if they didn’t suspect that it would be wasted.

(Disclaimer: Although I work for the BBC I didn’t work on any of the stories mentioned above. These are my personal views and nothing to do with the Corporation.)

Disaster?

The government of Israel has a policy of assassinating political leaders in Gaza. That means that the people who have ended up in charge of Hamas are the violent nutters rather that anyone who might be interested in a political solution. If the British government had shown this kind of clumsy disrespect for the rule of law in the 1980’s (and let’s face it they came close) then Gerry Adams and his colleagues wouldn’t have been around for any kind of peace process and we’d still be waging a war in Northern Ireland against the throwbacks who eventually became the Real IRA.

Even so, despite being idiots Hamas can fairly reasonably claim to be a legitimate party of government in Gaza because they were kind of voted in. They are committed to armed conflict against Israel, that is the ticket they ran on and that is what people voted for. Which is fair enough. I don’t think they should be described as terrorists, they are entitled to go to war if they want to. It does mean, though, that the awful casualties that the Israelis caused in their retaliation are not a ‘disaster’. They are casualties of war. Describing it as a disaster, as though it couldn’t be avoided, is dishonest.

So I agree with the BBC’s recent decision not to show a fundraising film on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee. While I hate to have to agree with the annoying Mark Thompson I think that he’s right when he says:

…Gaza remains a major ongoing news story, in which humanitarian issues – the suffering and distress of civilians and combatants on both sides of the conflict, the debate about who is responsible for causing it and what should be done about it – are both at the heart of the story and contentious.

People say that the BBC should trust the judgement of the charities who make up the DEC. Why? The people who work for charities are only human, they can be corrupt, incompetent or wrong just like anyone else. And because their credibility depends on maintaining a pristine image they don’t publicise their failings. They also have their own biases. Just because the DEC thinks that aid can be delivered safely and without being diverted by Hamas that doesn’t mean it can be. It is reasonable for the BBC to be sceptical about their claims.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t think people should give money to the DEC, of course they should if they want to. But BBC news isn’t there to tell people how to react to what’s going on, it’s just there to report the story. Reporting the suffering of the people of Gaza is the right thing to do in a news programme. Showing a film afterwards which is specifically designed to tug on the heart strings and raise money isn’t. We all know that when there stop being developments in the story it will stop dominating the headlines and yet the suffering will go on. That is the right time to show a fund-raising film, not now.

Congo

If you’ve ever seen the Stan’s Cafe show Of All the People In All The World, where every grain of rice stands for one person, you may have been surprised by the size of the pile representing all the people who died between 1998 and 2004 as a result of the civil war in the Congo. The pile is about the size of an up-turned wheelbarrow and is roughly as big as the mound representing all the slaves who were ever carried from Africa in British ships during the slave trade.

Ironically the largest proportion of slaves who were taken from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade were from West Central Africa, a region that includes modern Congo and Angola. They were almost all captured during wars between native kingdoms. In fact the desire to capture slaves was often the main cause of wars in Africa at that time.

I always imagined that the civil war in Congo, which is still going on, was an ethnic conflict. That is how it is usually portrayed and it’s quite a comforting view for people like me because it means I don’t have to feel any sense of responsibility for what’s going on there. Today I heard a dispatch by the BBC’s Mark Doyle, a man who has spent an awful lot of time working in Africa. His explanation is more complicated and convincing. Have a listen.