Make Poverty History
June 6, 2005 at 9:28 AM
by Ashleigh
Another person jumped into the conversation and said that she didn't understand why the African nations' poverty was of such interest to the rest of the world when people are starving everywhere and how Sir Bob Geldof makes her angry (mostly because of his hair apparently).
Basically, her argument (although she says her entire family earns no salary and lives on the benefits provided by the UK govt and paid for by the taxes of people like us) is that the Make Poverty History campaign makes her feel bad because she feels that she is being forced to participate on the grounds of guilt.
This was my response (edited for grammar):
Hmm, I think you actually have to see the level of poverty in Africa to be able to grasp exactly how bad it is. Its not just not having enough money to be able to go and buy a pint of milk or being close to or below the breadline - there *is* no breadline. There is nothing and no hope of getting anything. It is so far removed from anything that any Westerner could experience that there is no way to describe it. I'm sorry but I have lived in Africa and I have seen first hand exactly what its like for people there. I agree, Sir Bob Geldof probably shouldn't be descending on Edinburgh with 1 million people but one of the points of the entire effort is to get the western countries to cancel the debt burden of the African nations. Most of them can't even face any sort of recovery because they pay so much in interest to the IMF and World Bank. The Make Poverty History campaign consists of three main points - to cancel debt, to make trade fairer and to provide better and more efficient aid. I doubt any of these will make any significant difference to the life of an average Westerner. Perhaps we should come back to the point that the G8 summit shouldn't have been held at Gleneagles after all - everywhere its been held there have been problems. Look at when it was held at Evian in 2003. Every time the G8 nations meet they do it in a more isolated area to avoid activism, but perhaps if the G8 countries had to host their summits in poorer nations they would be more sympathetic to the plight of ordinary people.To which she replied that 99% of the aid never gets to the African people, have you ever seen a starving government official etc etc, blah blah. As though no-one else has ever worked this out. Duh.
Don't people have any kind of responsibility? Or is that just the province of the middle classes? Does being lower class and living on benefits entitle you to have no feelings of responsibility toward people less fortunate than yourself?
If the post WW2 government in the UK hadn't set the wheels in motion for the welfare state back in the 1940s/1950s with the creation of the NHS, benefit system and so on, people living on benefits in the UK would be in the same situation as those in Africa now. Its just a short step from one to another. It would be good for people to remember that.
PS. Excuse the rant. This blog will return to its usual cross stitching programming once I am over my current PMS, sleep-deprived, Ikea-induced grump.