Comic Relief & Red Nose Day – Do we give enough?

Like so many of you I watched much of last night’s Comic Relief on TV.  Like so many of you I also shed a tear as I watched harrowing videos of suffering and dying children in Africa.  But there are some things about the evening I found much more shocking and have to share these with you.  I appreciate this is not necessarily part of the Green Debate but this issue needs all the publicity it can get, so bear with me and read on.

Firstly, one of the statements that stuck was that “most people who watch comic relief don’t donate”.  Yes, you heard that right.  More than 50% of people who sit and watch the programme do not give any money.  Zilch, nothing, zero, not one penny.  Are you shocked by that?  I find it unbelievable.  Surely they must see the suffering as we did, or did they go and have a tea-break on every information clip?  That can’t be possible.  No-one can drink that much tea.  So if they are not drinking tea, then they must have watched the same videos we did.  They must have seen a doctor describe how he had to choose which 3 out of 4 babies should live and which should die just because of a lack of equipment; they must have seen babies being resuscitated and brought back from the point of death by incredibly overworked medical teams; they must have learnt as we did that 2,000 children die each day (yes EACH DAY!) from Malaria in Africa; they must have seen children who were literally starving to death; and yet they gave nothing.

No matter how hard I try, and I am the ultimate diplomat, always able to see an alternate point of view, but I cannot understand this at all.  I thought I understood people.  But more than half of the population are capable of watching these scenes, presumably laughing at the free entertainment, and donate nothing to stop this insane, shocking and completely solvable disaster.

My 10-year-old son was watching with me and asked about how much we had given.  I said we had given £100 plus a few other donations.  He very plainly said “That’s not enough.” 

How true.  Of course it’s not enough!  And whilst we sit in our centrally heated homes, with our snacks, beers and glasses of wine, watching unimaginable suffering on our High Definition TV’s with full surround sound of the crying and screaming children, we are not giving anywhere near enough.

Now I don’t want to give the impression that the donations made are insignificant.  On the night the total money raised was reported as a staggering £70million.  Excellent!  Fantastic!  That is a lot of money indeed.  Now think that a fair amount of that money came from corporate sponsorship.  Consider also the UK population is some 60 million, over 50 million are adults.  So on average we gave around £1 per person.

To those of you who gave, great for you, but you are the minority.  Further, if you gave a substantial sum, then you are a small minority.  I ended up donating a lot more last night than my original sum, and I do not say that to earn any brownie points or be some kind of hero, I just felt whatever I was giving it was not enough.  If I look at how much money I spend on trivial things like watching movies, dining out, or even take-away snacks, and add it up for a year it is substantial.  That money is all wasted, and Comic Relief gives us the perfect opportunity to put some of our money to good use. 

I will leave you to think about how much money we all waste on unnecessary luxuries and compare that to how much we give to stop suffering and loss of life, and what is quite frankly a biblical scale.  I am sure there are some exceptions but I reckon even for those who gave money, we gave nowhere near enough.

On another point, I remember watching Live Aid back in 1980 something.  Those of you with grey hair and spreading beer bellies may also remember.  I was then, as now, deeply shocked by the videos and gave what I could, although as a student at the time that was not a lot.  But we are nearly 30 years on, and still we see the same images.  The names and locations have changed, but the expressions, the pain, the suffering continues, on the same continent and sometimes even in the same countries, and for the same reasons. 

I know a great deal has been done and I have to applaud the organisations that tirelessly campaign and work on improving the lives of those in the third world, but by now there shouldn’t be a third world.  We all need to give some more.  Whatever we are doing it just is nowhere near enough.

My last point and I hate to climb on a bandwagon here, but it is the bankers, and no, that is not a misspelling, but if the cap fits…

You probably heard as I did that RBS pays its top 300 risk-takers an average of over £1million each.  However we are assured this is showing considerable restraint as Barclays pays their top risk takers an average of £2.4million each.  We are told that if these sums were not paid these extraordinary staff would simply go somewhere else and we would all lose out.

Well, maybe, but I have a couple of issues with this.  Firstly these sums dwarf the total donations of comic relief, plus this is just for one institution and only the UK, and for fewer than 500 staff, and the staff in question are not even the banks top earners.  These institutions and their wealthy staff could easily make the £70million raised for comic relief look like small change.  How many of them do you think watched comic relief?  And how many of them donated?  And how much do you think they donated?

Sadly we don’t know, this is idle speculation, but I would guess the sums given by the above were somewhat paltry in the scheme of things.  They just have to be otherwise the total would have been a lot more than £70million. 

Still I am sure they have much more worthwhile things to spend their money on, like themselves for instance.  A while ago we ate out at a fantastic restaurant in London who shall remain nameless.  We were staggered by some of the wine costs and searched for the most expensive item on the menu (not that we were going to buy it mind you).  It was £10,000 for a bottle of whiskey.  We joked with the waiter about whether they had ever sold one, and we were surprised to hear they sold about one a month.  The waiter explained that “city types” come in all the time with their bonuses and order “the most expensive item on the menu” as a matter of principal.

Now I am not saying all bankers are like that and have zero social conscience.  But there are clearly enough people to spend £10k a month on single bottles of whiskey in just one restaurant.  How many more do you suppose and how much more money is spent on such ridiculous items.  And all the while, more children starve, and contract malaria.

The second issue with the bankers is that we have to pay these sums to attract and retain the best talent.  If we follow this argument then logically this means the best talent must have all agreed between themselves that none of them will work for less, and clearly there can be no-one else capable of doing this work, particularly for less money.  Well, these bankers may be extraordinarily talented, but perhaps, and this is just a suggestion, perhaps they are just ordinary people who are quite bright (bear with me), who don’t mind gambling with other people’s money and have had a few successes.  And here is another perhaps, (I am clearly on a roll with this, so here goes… ) what if we asked other people if they would be prepared to take on these jobs for less money.  In other words, let’s take one of the grossly underpaid (according to RBS) £1m + per year gamblers, sorry, I mean bankers.  Let’s find someone reasonably bright, who knows something about the basics of gambling, and let’s assume they are earning a miserable £50k a year.  We offer to give them some training – couple of months should do it, and they can take on the job in question and we will pay them £100k.  Surely everyone is happy?  Further, as opposed to these “bankers” holding everyone to ransom, why don’t the banks make everyone bid for these jobs?  Open them up internally, and within reason, the lowest bidder gets the job.  And the money they save (should easily be several hundred million) can go to Africa.  Now multiply that up by a few banks and we could actually eliminate third world poverty.

Well, I feel somewhat better now having ranted a little.  If you got to the end of this rather lengthy blog then I thank you, and hopefully you got just one message from this, ask yourself if you gave enough.  And ask the people you know if they think they gave enough.  This is our world and this problem is down to us, all of us, to sort it out.

Jerry Pett

MyEcoWorld

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