Strange times and indeed a strange world
Yesterday (7th May) I followed my habitual Sunday morning routine of watching the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 from 9.00am followed immediately by Nicky Campbell’s weekly audience debate show The Big Questions an hour later – whilst flicking through The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday.
The Marr Show reflected my impression of the weird ‘zombie’ state of the nation at the moment as we endure the local and general election campaigns which – if the polls and analysis thus far are correct – appear to herald an inevitable Tory victory on 8th June. Even the media pundits seem affected by temporary paralysis.
Marr did his best to inject some backbone into proceedings by probing the political rhino skins of John McDonnell (Labour’s Shadow Chancellor) and Jeremy Hunt (if the rumours are correct the soon-for-the-chop Tory Health Minister) in a failed attempt to uncover some insight or realism.
Of the two McDonnell performed rather better, remaining calm under fire when accused of being a Marxist but, when asked about what most observers regard as an impending Labour slow motion car crash, reverting to default politico-speak by playing a straight bat and repeatedly trotting out the message that there were still five weeks to go and he was fighting for a Labour victory.
When his turn came – to continue the cricketing analogy – Hunt, looking like a startled faun, most resembled a lower order batsmen sent out to face the media at tea on the third day of a Lords Test Match in which the opposition had just been skittled out for 180 in reply to an England first innings total of 504 for 4 declared and the big issue of the moment was whether his captain was about to enforce the follow on or bat again, a question to which nobody had given him the answer.
The Big Questions featured a deviation from its normal format in which three different ‘moral’ questions are addressed (in twenty minute segments each) in that the whole hour was devoted to the issue of whether or not Western First World humanitarian interventions in Third World countries are a force for good or not.
(I should perhaps add the caveat here that I was not fully concentrating upon the programme and therefore quite possibly failed to register some of both the nuances of the themes that emerged and indeed which audience contributors represented which organisations or pressure groups).
Nevertheless, most of the traditional issues that you might expect came to the surface. Was the First World doing enough? Was it doing too little? Was it doing the right thing, but not in the right way? What did the Third World most need from the West – education and infrastructure support, or just help with the ability to ‘do its own thing’? Were the First World’s efforts patronising and therefore to a degree worthless, or quite the opposite?
There were competing views given out – some of them contradictory in the extreme.
In my view, host Nicky Campbell – a bit of a Marmite figure to some – does an okay job on this programme as regards chairing the chaos, ensuring contributors get a fair chance to speak and raising new issues from time to time.
At least one speaker (Peter Tatchell) criticised the West for failing to understand, respect or respond to ‘local cultures’. His picture of Western do-gooders tending to arrive in Africa with a “You’re in a total mess, we’ve come to sort it out” attitude was supported by several audience members who held to the opinion that UK staple initiatives like Comic Relief were totally ineffectual or worse.
Firstly, the whole Comic Relief concept was naff – essentially a vehicle designed exclusively for the Western World both to assuage its guilt at being so well off and to give its ordinary punters the false notion that they were contributing to a better world as long as they donated £20 from the sofa after eating their unhealthy takeaway fast-food TV dinners, after which they could then forget about the subject with a clear conscience … at least until the project came around again this time next year.
Secondly, the ‘bleeding heart liberal, tear-jerking filmed segments transmitted between the stars making asses of themselves in order to draw donations from the punters’ were a travesty in that they gave a totally false impression of what was actually going on in the Third World – and indeed, worse, of what was actually needed.
Things didn’t just stop there. A lady on the front row defended Comic Relief (it later turned out she represented an organisation that worked with it) and various others pitched in on both the excesses of colonial rule – and the reparations that still should be paid for it – and the fact that even the notion of ‘respecting local cultures’ was wrong, not only because it implied that time-honoured ancient tribal and other rituals or hierarchies were perfect, but because ‘local culture’ is constantly evolving anyway (and in many Third World countries becoming rapidly 21st Century).
And then what about Third World, particularly African, corruption generally and indeed the concentration of power in certain ruling elites that stashed billions of Western aid money away in tax havens and Switzerland whilst building themselves gilded castles at the expense of the downtrodden masses?
At the end of the programme I had reached no conclusions are to what the answers were but felt – again here probably a Western liberal conceit – that I understood the issues a little better than before.
Ironically, over the weekend, I had enjoyed a meal in the company of a now-retired family relation-by-marriage who had spent most of his life working in sales and marketing of leading manufacturers of farm tractors around the world, mainly in the Far East and parts of Africa.
Our conversation encompassed some of the First World/Third World issues covered in The Big Questions yesterday, not least corruption, but also safety and security.
Another guest present, whose son had married a Nigerian girl a few years back, reported that he and his wife had considered visiting the country but had recently been put off the idea by the bride’s parents, who still had many relations in the country and said that it was far too unsafe at the moment.
My ‘tractor man’ commented that this didn’t surprise him in the slightest.
Even twenty-odd years ago, when he had last been to Nigeria on business, all visiting company executives were advised never to go out in the streets and, when it came to retiring for the night, were locked into their bedrooms behind a series of Fort Knox-type steel bars, barriers and the like.
This was despite armed guards being posted in every corridor, because (like everyone else in Nigeria) armed guards could always be bribed.
He summarised travelling on business around the African continent in those days as akin to being transported back to the Wild West circa about 1885.
[I feel I should add in concluding that I would not regard the speaker as remotely anti-Third World and/or racist. He always speaks fondly of the umpteen countries he visited in the course of his sales career and indeed for over ten years at different times lived in Singapore and/or Africa.]
He was just matter-of-factly telling it like it is. Or rather was. Or indeed still may be.
