Erstellt am: 18. 3. 2013 - 17:47 Uhr

My Inner Brecht

How austerity and charity go together – Comic Relief in 2013.

Last Friday was non-uniform day at most British schools, complete with the usual £1 charity donation given in return for sartorial freedom. Which makes the whole idea a bit less libertarian, really, especially considering the social pressure towards a different kind of uniformity.

Children of the sixties to eighties will understand what I mean by saying that last Friday my daughter's school looked much like a Bhagwan commune. Everyone had to wear red in honour of that biannual British festival known as Red Nose Day, not to be confused with the identically named celebration of clown doctors in Central Europe.

Terrorising people with jollity in the name of a good cause might be nothing new, but it probably was back in the eighties when Lenny Henry launched Comic Relief.

Robert Rotifer

My daughter showing off this year's Red Nose Day mascots

The Brits seem to be world leaders in the field of charity dos, maybe because they invented them, a bit like the welfare state, which enjoys much less approval these days.

Funnily enough, Comic Relief's list of People & Issues We Support reads much like the sort of things the welfare state was set up to deal with:

Young people and mental health, young people and alcohol, sexually exploited and traficked young people, helping older people with managing their money, helping victims of domestic and sexual abuse, refuge and asylum seeking women, young carers, and projects in local communities – all of the above issues heavily affected by the government cuts of the last three years.

In the very week that Britain's TV audience coughed up a record £75m for Comic Relief, five disabled people had to take the government to Court for breach of their right to a dignified life as guaranteed by the UN Convention through abolishing the Independent Living Fund worth £320m per year.

That's just 20m more than four times the amount that Friday's much-hyped telethon would achieve in donations sacrificed in the name of the thrift (or a thousandth of the amount of money funnelled into the banking sector through Quantitative Easing).

Predictably, the BBC had nothing to say about this while pestering its viewers with endless repeats of Rowan Atkinson demanding to “give us your bleeding wonga”. So on Friday evening I was about to let my inner Brecht shoot off a polemic against this vague discrepancy. But then, as usual, I didn't get it finished in time and ended up watching some Comic Relief instead. It only took a few minutes of Bill Nighy in an African children's hospital to unmask my routine arguments against the concept of bourgeois charity as pure unfeeling cold-heartedness. After all, in its depiction of all this outrage, a film like Nighy's had the potential to reach an audience that otherwise wouldn't give a toss.
And yet it can't just be a measure of my stupidity that three days later I have no recollection of which country Nighy was reporting from.

My unsuccessful attempts to google the answer speak for themselves*. At least they have led me to the Daily Telegraph chronicling the evening's televised events. This is what it says:

22.37 Bill Nighy's slow husky interviewing is gentle and sad.
"If anything happens to you, what will happen to your children?"
For the mother it is too difficult to answer.

What they don't tell us is which mother, in which country, and what is it that is supposed to happen to her. You only need to imagine the same live blog substituting the word “celeb” for all the big names it mentions while not mentioning any of the specifics of the causes they were supposed to support to realise just how absurd all this is.
I suppose you might argue that it doesn't matter whether people know what they donate for as long as Comic Relief uses the money for the right kinds of causes.

But then this is exactly how the tax system is supposed to work, with the big difference that we all have a say in who we would rather trust with selecting the deserving causes that our taxes will go to.

Strangely, according to the polls, in this case it is popular to cut exactly in those areas (social welfare, foreign aid) that Comic Relief supports. Which doesn't seem to make any sense.

Unless, maybe, my inner Brecht is right after all.