A few words on Comic Relief

So - it's not my style to venture into the world of politics*, but seeing as this has been such an eventful few weeks, I guess I'll have to.

Comic Relief

First off, Comic Relief. Did you donate? If so, then good - you mave have saved a couple of lives in Africa, or helped some needy people in our own green and pleasant land (the latter, as only Russell Brand had the balls to point out, the government should be doing.) What you have not done, however, is helped the general situation of things in Africa in any way. The effect of all the millions England donated this year will be minor, at best, because aid is not the answer. The reason that people in Africa continue to starve to death, and to die from HIV/AIDS and other preventable diseases, comes down to two things: debt and trade. Countries all across Africa owe the Western world thousands of millions of pounds, if not billions, and our governments continue to demand payment of these debts from countries in which vast swathes of the population live in abject poverty. By one simple act - cancelling that debt - we in the developed world could help those in need more than all the TV appeals, concerts and poor-quality comedy sketches in the world.
As for trade - have you ever looked at fair-trade products and thought, "fuck, why is this coffee/sugar/chocolate so expensive?" I'll tell you why - because that's how much coffee/sugar/chocolate costs. That is a fair price (hence the name) that covers the cost of production and allows the producers to make a decent profit. The suffering inflicted on the farmers of the developing world by Western companies more than undoes all the good we do with aid.

And that brings us to my big problem with Comic Relief. This is a program with an audience of millions, with dozens of celebrities, and a considerable amount of respectability. People will listen to what they say on that yearly broadcast. If they said - "Look, here's what the problems are, and here's how to solve them," then most of their viewers would do nothing. But a fair few would act - and when we're talking about a program with as large an audience as Comic Relief, "a fair few" means a hell of a fucking lot. So come on, Lenny Henry/Dawn French/etc - locate your testicles and speak the fuck up.


*it's funny, because it's not true