From Compass magazine
Twelve years ago I went to Rwanda post genocide to report on the terrible state of the refugee camps in neighbouring Congo – what was then Zaire.
The camps were hewn from the forest by members of the Hutu tribe using the same machetes with which weeks earlier they’d massacred their Tutsi countrymen. Smoke from the fires used for cooking outside thousands of makeshift shelters formed a choking cloud over these twig cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants each; the ultimate status symbol was a blue tarpaulin cover provided by the United Nations.
Bodies lay at the roadside between camps, and children with swollen bellies waited to die in the makeshift hospital tents provided by Médécins sans Frontières.
Workers from 50 charities, falling over each other to provide aid for the starving and the dispossessed, were powerless to do anything: the fact was that refugees formed themselves into groups based on the communities they lived in when they fled Rwanda. If you were a refugee who had been parted from your community, your needs were ignored. These fetid camps, in which the hard, unrepentant soldiers filled their bellies at the expense of women, children and the weak, worked under the maxim of sauve qu’il peut.
The $1 million a week that poured into the UNHCR (the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) alone still wasn’t sufficient to pay for a simple blue piece of plastic for every shelter. Which begged the question: why not simply give these people money rather than employing a workforce of young Westerners sating themselves with new life experiences? It seemed to be lost on the aid workers that they were the face of a baggy-trousered, T-shirt colonialism, looked upon with contempt by the poorest people on the planet they were trying to save.
The people of Africa knew that, unless they got to marry one of them, these charity workers were essentially useless. When the Live8 concert was going to Make Poverty History in 2005, it seemed to occur to no one that since millions of dollars were raised by the original Live Aid in 1985, Africans have actually got poorer. Aid, in other words, isn’t working.
The reason can be found in countries such as Nigeria. With oil production of 2.6 million barrels a day, it should be one of the world’s wealthier countries, but corruption has brought it to its knees. Thanks to the likes of Bono and his Live8 mates, Western governments wrote off Nigeria’s £16 billion – let’s repeat that, £16 BILLION – debt, but most of its 140 million inhabitants live on less than 52p a day. Even official figures tell us that since independence in 1960 $380 billion has been stolen by its politicians.
These people are simply sticking two fingers up at the concerns of posh white people wearing charity wristbands who anyway blame nasty capitalism rather than political greed for the maladies of the poor.
Yet charity itself is a £65 billion-a-year industry and chief executives of these organisations can enjoy six-figure salaries. A nouveau riche of thrusting young executives are falling over each other trying to persuade journalists to give them publicity and working up advertising campaigns with fatuous slogans such as “Love Your Heart” from Heart Research UK.
There are some 185,000 charities listed on the Charity Commission’s register and between them they employ 563,000 people according to The Guardian newspaper.
We used to know where we stood when we put our spare pennies in the Spastics Society box outside the Grocer’s. Now there are a bewildering range of causes clamouring for our cash. But do they deserve it? The Lottery, for example, has given money to, inter alia, The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, which has helped terrorists fight deportation, Dancers of the Northern Ireland Filipino Association, the UK Network of Sex Work Projects – which calls for the state regulation of brothels – and £403,000 to Allavida to start community groups in Bulgaria.
Allavida, in case you haven’t heard of it: “…is concerned with mobilising financial resources, building local grant-making and grant management capacity, enhancing skills in community organisations for local development, encouraging local philanthropy and facilitating learning in and between organisations.”
It really has come to something when a charity decides that what the poor of Bulgaria, Romania, the Western Balkans, East Africa and Central Asia really need is the gobbledegook of Western political correctness. A tin with a slot on a pub counter might not be the perfect answer to solving the world’s problems, but surely it’s got to be better than that.
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
What are guys?
From The Oldie
Turn up at Chez Bruce, voted by Observer readers as the best restaurant the country, second-best by Harden’s restaurant guide, and the maitre d’ will more than likely greet you with, “Hi guys, how are you doing this evening?” In just about any restaurant you care to mention, the waiter breezes up to your table and says with rising southern hemisphere enunciation, “Can I get you guys some water?” (being a waiter, he probably can) and later barges in to your conversation to ask, “Is everything all right for you tonight, guys?”
The word “guys” – always in the plural – is the latest example of the Americanisation of our language permeating modern civic life: Arrive at the check-in, “Hi guys, how are you this morning?”; stroll into a fashionable kitchen shop, “Can I help you guys with anything?”; listen to the nation’s children being told to “Dig in guys,” on the sports field.
In fact, teachers use the word habitually and non-discriminately. Their charges are never referred to as pupils or, God forbid, children. Teacher will now exclaim: “Will you guys be quiet, please!” as if that somehow puts them on a level with the “kids”.
So what are guys? They are certainly not the gang of burly men the word used to connote. Can a group of women be “guys”? Is there an age limit? Does the Maitre d’ at Chez Bruce eye his customers up and down and, upon the sight of walking stick and a decent coat, amend his welcome?
He does not. Increasingly this horrid catch-all appellation is replacing the trusted honorifics of Mr and Mrs, sir and madam.
Guys are what used to be gentlemen, women, children. Now they have involuntarily become part of a club that spans the Anglophone world. Those who use the word guys do so in the belief that it makes them at ease in Sydney, Cape Town or LA. It is meant to imply a classless mateyness that says they are part of a modern, tolerant, thrusting, unisex global village.
It is not, though, an expression of being working class. Tony Blair used the word not in the way that he used the glottal stop to ingratiate himself with his working class constituents, but as the informally formal parlance of the new professional class – the wonks, say, who inhabit his department of spin as well as the Washington offices of his grown-up friend George W, who of course is just a regular guy.
But it is, of course, ultimately selfish. And bogus. Whereas manners are meant to make the beneficiary of those manners feel at ease, the use of the word guys is for their benefit, not yours. By saying “Hi guys” they are telling you that they are cool internationalists. Even worse, guys is a word that forms part of the vernacular of a generation convinced that it is more enlightened than it really is.
Turn up at Chez Bruce, voted by Observer readers as the best restaurant the country, second-best by Harden’s restaurant guide, and the maitre d’ will more than likely greet you with, “Hi guys, how are you doing this evening?” In just about any restaurant you care to mention, the waiter breezes up to your table and says with rising southern hemisphere enunciation, “Can I get you guys some water?” (being a waiter, he probably can) and later barges in to your conversation to ask, “Is everything all right for you tonight, guys?”
The word “guys” – always in the plural – is the latest example of the Americanisation of our language permeating modern civic life: Arrive at the check-in, “Hi guys, how are you this morning?”; stroll into a fashionable kitchen shop, “Can I help you guys with anything?”; listen to the nation’s children being told to “Dig in guys,” on the sports field.
In fact, teachers use the word habitually and non-discriminately. Their charges are never referred to as pupils or, God forbid, children. Teacher will now exclaim: “Will you guys be quiet, please!” as if that somehow puts them on a level with the “kids”.
So what are guys? They are certainly not the gang of burly men the word used to connote. Can a group of women be “guys”? Is there an age limit? Does the Maitre d’ at Chez Bruce eye his customers up and down and, upon the sight of walking stick and a decent coat, amend his welcome?
He does not. Increasingly this horrid catch-all appellation is replacing the trusted honorifics of Mr and Mrs, sir and madam.
Guys are what used to be gentlemen, women, children. Now they have involuntarily become part of a club that spans the Anglophone world. Those who use the word guys do so in the belief that it makes them at ease in Sydney, Cape Town or LA. It is meant to imply a classless mateyness that says they are part of a modern, tolerant, thrusting, unisex global village.
It is not, though, an expression of being working class. Tony Blair used the word not in the way that he used the glottal stop to ingratiate himself with his working class constituents, but as the informally formal parlance of the new professional class – the wonks, say, who inhabit his department of spin as well as the Washington offices of his grown-up friend George W, who of course is just a regular guy.
But it is, of course, ultimately selfish. And bogus. Whereas manners are meant to make the beneficiary of those manners feel at ease, the use of the word guys is for their benefit, not yours. By saying “Hi guys” they are telling you that they are cool internationalists. Even worse, guys is a word that forms part of the vernacular of a generation convinced that it is more enlightened than it really is.
Sunday, 11 November 2007
Someone to watch over you
From Compass magazine
Earlier this year it was revealed that Haringey Council in East London had taken it upon itself to spend its residents’ money to spy upon them.
This impoverished borough lashed out £21,000 on an aeroplane with a camera to buzz its tax-payers’ houses at an altitude of 1,500 feet. Was the reason to improve traffic flow? A look-out to find litter hotspots perhaps? No. Haringey had decided that it should appoint itself a guardian of the planet; the aeroplane ported heat-seeking cameras to find out which homes wasted the most energy.
“This single study will play a key role in helping us address three of the biggest issues currently facing Haringey – climate change, fuel poverty and housing waiting lists,” claimed Labour councillor Isidoros Diakides. This can only lead surely to an army of bullying council workers bashing your door down and asking you to explain the draught coming from the bedroom window.
The UK is the most looked over nation on earth. We are spied upon by more than four million cameras and photographed on average 300 times a day. We don’t know the exact figure, because anyone is free to spy upon anyone else. The police, business, transport networks, private detectives and of course nannying councils can – and do – set up thousands of them to keep us on a righteous civic path.
Amazingly, we seem to find this acceptable.
But why? We would be horrified if as we walked to work we were surrounded by masked figures panning around us with the latest digicams, if they sat next to us on the bus zooming in on the book we were reading, or trotted along behind us as we walked through the corridors of our offices. This is in effect what is happening. Yet we seem not to be bothered by this gross intrusion into our private lives.
In the London borough of Camden there are Flashcams which, triggered by “suspicious” behaviour automatically go off with a vivid flash and a voice shouts “Stop! If you are engaged in an illegal activity, your photograph will be taken and used to prosecute you. Please leave the area.”
There is an argument in favour of cameras, of course. Who can argue when the grainy image of some thug on caught on CCTV is called up in a court of law as he sticks his boot into a hapless passerby and condemns him to a few years behind bars (or, at least reinforced glass with only a colour TV and a few drug-dealing friends for company)? Who of us has not thought, when the disappearance of a child such as Madeleine McCann is reported, if only there were a few more cameras around?
The truth is, though, that cameras do little to prevent crime. Research from the Scottish Centre for Criminology, for example found that the year following the introduction of CCTV in Glasgow recorded crime rates rose by 9 per cent and detection fell by 4 per cent. In the 10 or so years since the explosion of spy cameras, our streets are hardly safer or more civilised. On the contrary, our town centres have become no-go areas for anyone not of a mind for a fight or being subject to boorish drunken abuse.
But the authorities cling on to the idea that they should be scrutinising us ever more carefully. It is what people in power do.
Police minister Ton McNulty revealed in May that the Home Office was considering using “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs) to watch over towns and cities. Yes, more spyplanes. Housing estates are now built with CCTV as standard; instead of patrons of the local pub, the shop, the park and even the local nick – remember police stations? – keeping an eye out for our wellbeing, monitoring low-level crime is now entrusted to a functionary who sits in front of a rack of television screens.
But what have these cameras achieved so far? Inevitably their most notable effect is in raising money for the government by policing those willing to be policed.
Drivers caught speeding through motorway roadworks were fined £5 million last year. On the M2 in Kent, cameras snapped 16,078 drivers flouting temporary limits – usually set at a self-righteous 40 miles an hour – generating £1 million in fines; 15,813 were caught on the M40 and 13,697 on the M1.
You could argue, of course, that if you are on the right side of the law, then you have nothing to fear. But when it becomes a crime to live in an old Victorian house with draughty windows, we should surely be very frightened indeed.
Earlier this year it was revealed that Haringey Council in East London had taken it upon itself to spend its residents’ money to spy upon them.
This impoverished borough lashed out £21,000 on an aeroplane with a camera to buzz its tax-payers’ houses at an altitude of 1,500 feet. Was the reason to improve traffic flow? A look-out to find litter hotspots perhaps? No. Haringey had decided that it should appoint itself a guardian of the planet; the aeroplane ported heat-seeking cameras to find out which homes wasted the most energy.
“This single study will play a key role in helping us address three of the biggest issues currently facing Haringey – climate change, fuel poverty and housing waiting lists,” claimed Labour councillor Isidoros Diakides. This can only lead surely to an army of bullying council workers bashing your door down and asking you to explain the draught coming from the bedroom window.
The UK is the most looked over nation on earth. We are spied upon by more than four million cameras and photographed on average 300 times a day. We don’t know the exact figure, because anyone is free to spy upon anyone else. The police, business, transport networks, private detectives and of course nannying councils can – and do – set up thousands of them to keep us on a righteous civic path.
Amazingly, we seem to find this acceptable.
But why? We would be horrified if as we walked to work we were surrounded by masked figures panning around us with the latest digicams, if they sat next to us on the bus zooming in on the book we were reading, or trotted along behind us as we walked through the corridors of our offices. This is in effect what is happening. Yet we seem not to be bothered by this gross intrusion into our private lives.
In the London borough of Camden there are Flashcams which, triggered by “suspicious” behaviour automatically go off with a vivid flash and a voice shouts “Stop! If you are engaged in an illegal activity, your photograph will be taken and used to prosecute you. Please leave the area.”
There is an argument in favour of cameras, of course. Who can argue when the grainy image of some thug on caught on CCTV is called up in a court of law as he sticks his boot into a hapless passerby and condemns him to a few years behind bars (or, at least reinforced glass with only a colour TV and a few drug-dealing friends for company)? Who of us has not thought, when the disappearance of a child such as Madeleine McCann is reported, if only there were a few more cameras around?
The truth is, though, that cameras do little to prevent crime. Research from the Scottish Centre for Criminology, for example found that the year following the introduction of CCTV in Glasgow recorded crime rates rose by 9 per cent and detection fell by 4 per cent. In the 10 or so years since the explosion of spy cameras, our streets are hardly safer or more civilised. On the contrary, our town centres have become no-go areas for anyone not of a mind for a fight or being subject to boorish drunken abuse.
But the authorities cling on to the idea that they should be scrutinising us ever more carefully. It is what people in power do.
Police minister Ton McNulty revealed in May that the Home Office was considering using “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs) to watch over towns and cities. Yes, more spyplanes. Housing estates are now built with CCTV as standard; instead of patrons of the local pub, the shop, the park and even the local nick – remember police stations? – keeping an eye out for our wellbeing, monitoring low-level crime is now entrusted to a functionary who sits in front of a rack of television screens.
But what have these cameras achieved so far? Inevitably their most notable effect is in raising money for the government by policing those willing to be policed.
Drivers caught speeding through motorway roadworks were fined £5 million last year. On the M2 in Kent, cameras snapped 16,078 drivers flouting temporary limits – usually set at a self-righteous 40 miles an hour – generating £1 million in fines; 15,813 were caught on the M40 and 13,697 on the M1.
You could argue, of course, that if you are on the right side of the law, then you have nothing to fear. But when it becomes a crime to live in an old Victorian house with draughty windows, we should surely be very frightened indeed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
