My Message to the 1%...

I'm struggling a bit this week, used as I am to my daily diet of Facebook, blogs and tweets from UKUncut about whichever Vodafone branch they have occupied today. My beautiful desktop computer, which is without doubt my closest friend bar none, failed me on Monday this week when the hard drive pitched out and I am now surviving by borrowing laptops for an hour here and there and licking batteries whenever I get bored - which is often.

On my rare forays onto the internet, there is a Facebook group I have seen this week which has made me sad. It is titled as follows: "Doesn't make sense does it?? Homeless go without eating. Elderly go without needed medicines. Mentally ill go without treatment. Troops go without proper equipment. Veterans go without the benefits they were promised. Yet we donate billions to other countries before helping our own first. 1% will re-post and 99% wont. Have... the guts to re-post this. I KNOW I'm in the 1%"

Now, there are a whole host of reasons why this upsets me. I'm going to go through them quickly, because I could rant about this for days, but here goes. Firstly, homeless people may go without eating, but primarily they go without a home. This is a simple inequality and true frustration should be aimed at people who have obtained obscene wealth and multiple homes through self-interest and duplicitous behaviour. Alternatively, you could pick on foreign aid organisations, who are only wasting money on such worthless projects as supplying clean water to fellow human beings. Choose the targets of your anger carefully.

Secondly, elderly people generally don't go without much needed medicines - in fact, quite the opposite. Many are abandoned in uncaring residential homes and medicated as an alternative to being socially stimulated. They are also given antibiotics by the bucketload that they simply don't need - this is why we have superbugs such as MRSA popping up in our hospitals. If you really care about the elderly, do something positive and write to your MP and David Cameron and demand that they increase spending in real terms on the NHS and social care. Believe me, this is a cause that really needs your support. Now, I'll be truly amazed if the '1% who post this message' actually strive to do something constructive.

The mentally-ill do sometimes go without treatment, it's true, but the argument for the increase in real-terms NHS-funding covers this as well, so I'm satisfied that we're all reading from the same hymnsheet. Let's move onto soldiers.

I struggle to see why the UK needs a standing army. We have no resources worth seizing and no enemies who would regard invasion as worth the effort. We continue to kid ourselves that the UK has a role to play in policing the world's fragile democracies, with the irony being that the money we waste on sending young men to be pointlessly killed would be far better spent on social projects to help those in need, increasing our diplomatic standing with the countries in question. Every pound we spend on trying to secure a supply of oil for the next decade could surely be better spent on developing alternative energy sources that could free us from our dependence on the whims of other countries.

This does not change the fact that our soldiers should expect high-quality equipment. However, the UK is no longer a major military player on the world stage, and with the stakes so high, intelligent youngsters considering joining the army should wonder if the country really has their best interests at heart.

This leads me onto the final point I would like to make - the group does not offer any mathematical basis for removing foreign aid. Billions of pounds were indeed spent on foreign aid last year - six billion, in fact. Consider the fact that the UK spends over £700 billion every year - and somehow found £800 billion more to bail out the banking system.

In the context of the world at large, will the six billion we spent on foreign aid last year make any difference? This does not even consider the ridiculous sums the UK makes from third world countries, providing loans and receiving debt interest through the World Bank and IMF, and without considering the social consequences thereof. Haiti is still suffering from the after-effects of the devastating earthquake there last year. Australia, Brazil and Sri Lanka have suffered hundreds of deaths due to flooding in the past few weeks alone. Are we truly saying that we are happy to spend £800 billion on compensating for the auspices of the world's wealthiest and least-deserving, but that we begrudge the £6 billion we give to the entire rest of the human race? Because if we are, we should truly be ashamed.

An interest in why

After yesterday's fairly heavy subject, I'm going to veer wildly today from the imponderable to the inconsequential. That is, if I can tear myself away from Bejewelled Blitz long enough. Apart from anything else, I need to leave this chair soon to buy biscuits.

Haiti is still on my mind, and there are still thankfully stories of survivors coming from the buildings in and around the capital. Each story has a certain poignancy attached, and they are all worthy of a read. However, I've been branching out today and looking at other news in and around the subject of disasters and came upon a story in the BBC online magazine that echoed something I'd considered myself in the interim - namely, why does God allow disasters to happen?

Please, don't panic. I have not suddenly rejected my atheist roots, and I still love to watch Richard Dawkins pin down fundamentalists and thrash them with irrefutable scientific evidence (if you've never seen him in action, I recommend it as compulsive viewing. The man is like a bad-tempered mongoose with a doctorate and a grudge against the universe.) But those of you that I have imparted a little bit of personal knowledge to will possibly be aware that I have a burgeoning interest in theology. Or perhaps, less religion itself than the history of religion, where they were formed and by whom, and the paths they took as they travelled across the old world via the spice trade routes.

Whatever my reason for finding this interesting, it was still fairly spooky to come across a BBC article immediately afterwards with the same sentiment, and it's written far more intelligently and succintly than I could do myself. The url, if you're interested, is: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8467755.stm. Despite the stance of the article, some of my best friends over the years have been staunch Christians and Catholics, and as followers are currently an easy target for ridicule, it's a good time to point out that I respect their position, even if I don't share it. I also have some comments to make about Buddhism, but I'll save those for another time.

Nearly finished here for today. Just a quick final word, which is an advert for the Hairy Bikers new show, which is on every Tuesday for the next few weeks at 8pm on BBC2.

Yes, it may be taglined 'Mums know best', they may spend all their time hanging out with members of the Womens' Institute and I would cheerfully nominate them as the Queen Mothers of the TV Chef set. But thanks to a considerate friend, I have a copy of their latest cookbook, and I think it's fantastic. They were filming in Norwich for a while shortly before Xmas, and I'm gutted that I didn't find out about it in time to go and see them.

I have no skills, but I really want to dig

I have had a very slow day.

Perhaps it's the knowledge that I'm not in work for the next three days that makes each hour that I have been there tick along with agonising slowness. Despite myself, there is something more than that, though. I'm a great reader of news in all shapes and sizes, and it will have escaped no-one's attention that the news for the last few days has been focusing on the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and this news inspires a little more attention from me than most.

Bear with me here. I'm keen that this blog will be a positive and light-hearted look at the world, rather than another means to vent my myriad frustrations about things. But this quake has been described by UN officials as the worst humanitarian disaster that they have ever had to deal with, and it is a subject that touches me for a good reason.

I am my local trade union branch's International Officer (I especially love the ironic way that I type the capitals there.) It would be fantastic if this was a highly responsible post that resulted in James Bond-style adventure and plenty of exotic foreign travel, but in practise, it means that I get my own in-tray which is filled monthly with letters from different charities from around the world. It falls to me to research these charities, pick out the worthiest and then attempt to persuade a large number of sceptical union stewards to make small donations towards them from a central fund.

Make no mistake, it's a worthy job and I enjoy it very much. I may not get paid, but I constantly learn new things and I like to think that in some small ways, the money that we donate makes a difference. But as I crawled through my day job today with my usual listlessness, it occurred to me that with each passing minute, the chance of finding live people under the rubble of Port-au-Prince dwindles. An incident of this magnitude really brings home our impotence in the face of the world, and in that context, no donation of money really cuts to the quick for me.

I know that conducting rescues in itself is a highly skilled job, that it requires specialised equipment and training or the would-be rescuer is at best a hindrance and at worst a danger to themselves and others. But this isn't a rational feeling, one that reflects common sense and good judgement. I joined my trade union for no more reason than I wanted to help people, and I am feeling that same way now as I look at the pictures on the TV. I may have no skills, but I really want to dig.