Earth Hour: A Real Turn-Off

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven"

(Matthew 5: 16)

Earth Hour, invented almost two thousand years after these words were written, seems to take us back to a darkness even darker than that which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, when men retreated from the bright open spaces of the poltical arena and cowered in the shadows of the churches and monasteries. But even the Christian-inspired Dark Ages paid lip service to the idea of light. Earth Hour sees light as the problem, if you can talk about its organisers 'seeing the light' at all.

Earth Hour wouldn't be so bad a campaign if it had a clear idea of what it wanted and was therefore able to shine a light on some kind of goal at which people could aim. But what did people actually do during Earth Hour? What inspirational acts are we to emulate? Well, in New Zealand they held a candle-lit concert (why not a pitch-black concert?), and the Earth Hour website shows crowds from around the world gathering to see the dark. The effort involved in this is minuscule - roughly the equivalent of lying down in a darkened room somewhere. Indeed, that is more or less what Boris Johnson said he would be doing during Earth Hour. So much for our political leaders.

Of course, the real effort all took place well before Earth Hour itself, behind the scenes as officials from the World Wildlife Fund met with civic officials and invited them to display their green credentials for the kids. Uppermost on the "Get Involved" page of the New Zealand Earth Hour website is the corporate pack geared not towards the likes of you and me but at businesses who want the publicity. The involvement of 'the people' comes much, much later, if at all. The people are as active in this campaign as pawns are in a game of chess. Sorry, St Matthew, there are no "good works" here.

I am in half a mind to organise a "Power Hour" to coincide with next year's Earth Hour, when the people can get together in the most brightly lit building in the city, and listen to loud music, with chilled or hot drinks, and with the standby buttons on every piece of electrical equipment switched on. We need to emerge from the darkness and shine a light on power, both electrical and political.

My Preferred Bid

A friend of mine has sent me an email requesting that I sign a petition on the number10 website registering discontent with the Government’s decision to award a £7.5bn Intercity Express contract to the Japanese rail consortium Agility (which includes Hitachi Rail) rather than to the UK-based firm Bombardier. As ‘an internationalist’ my gut reaction was “Why should I support the UK over Japan?” But things turned out to be a little more complicated…

Bombardier is not a UK firm at all; it’s Canadian. But it does manufacture trains in my hometown Derby. And the Japanese consortium apparently is “British led” according to major partner John Laing, and its bid includes plans to build “a world class rolling stock manufacturing facility” in either Ashby de la Zouch (Leicestershire), Sheffield or Gateshead (but disappointingly not all three). So what we have is not a fight between Britain and Japan, but an argument between two provincial towns about where the jobs should be based. Notwithstanding the pedantic and unproven point being made by the RMT union - that more UK jobs would have been secured if the contract had been awarded to Bombardier – this seems to be a parochial matter, beneath the loftier concerns of internationalists.

OK, lofty or not, it still seems to matter to some people. The friend who forwarded me the email containing the number10 link for one. In fact I daresay that quite a few of my friends and acquaintances have friends and acquaintances of their own who work for Bombardier in Derby, and for whom the Intercity Express contract would have meant better job security. And in a previous entry on this blog I said that charity begins at home, so doesn’t the fraternal spirit on which internationalism rests begin locally, with friend helping friend, always willing to lend a hand and sign a petition on each other’s behalf?

Actually, no. But it’s not the locality that puts me off – I’m probably more ready to support the actual workforce at Bombardier, Derby than the potential workforce at Ashby De La Zouch. And I think we’d all be a lot better off if we got to know a friend of a friend. The thing that turns me off the whole idea of supporting Bombardier is actually the petition itself. The words - composed by some news editor at the Derby Evening Telegraph - are hardly inspiring:

We believe that the Government should change its mind on its decision to select Japanese-led consortium Agility ahead of Derby train-maker Bombardier as the preferred bidder for a £7.5bn contract to build new Intercity trains.

Such a polite request, expressed in New Labour management-speak, directed at our man in Number Ten! Let us sincerely hope he reads it and has a Pauline conversion about the DoT officials’ preferred bidder. Or rather let us not waste our valuable time in trying to engender such abject parochialism initiated by that champion of abject parochialism the local paper. If instead we want to forge new ties with fellow workers in our home town then why not do it direct? Why not visit them at their workplace and get to know them personally instead of mediating the whole relationship with a brief missive on abject parochialism directed to Gordon Brown?

I work for a local authority where job cuts have been announced. This potentially gives me something in common with the Bombardier workers whose managers doubtless now have their excuse at the ready when at some future point in time they announce reductions. A real bread-and-butter issue like this could foster stronger ties which would not necessarily stop at the city boundary – they could reach into Ashby De La Zouch, AND Sheffield AND Gateshead. It is a little early to be saying workers of the world unite, but surely any burgeoning internationalist spirit we have could stretch this far?

The Selfless Giant

In my local paper (Derby Evening Telegraph) tonight there are two letters that more or less sum up the prevailing attitude to the economic crisis and the prospect of job losses. The first is a letter in the form of poem entitled "Looming cloud of redundancy". It begins "Redundancy is in the air, the chopper is ready to fall", and it ends poignantly with the words "No thought for our future - who cares?" Aww, poor thing.

The second is signed by public sector union Unison (among others) and goes by the heading "Global public health care plea". It urges readers to sign a pledge demanding that the World Bank insist that private healthcare provision be extended to people in the world's poorest countries. What a noble gesture!

It's easy to be angry at Unison, an organisation that gets a large chunk of its funding from ordinary people who expect it to concentrate on defending their living standards, for choosing instead to promote the rights of complete (though no doubt thoroughly likeable) strangers in the furthest corners of the Earth. But before we all start clamouring for "British jobs for Britishers" let us recall how hard it is these days to appear in the least bit selfish. Unison might be paid to defend its members pay and working conditions, but putting this into practice and actually asking for something for its members is not a straightforward task for union reps, which is why I am not a member.

Then again, not being a member of a collective organisation is no solution to this problem. Writing poetry to send to the local newspaper might at best win you some sympathy (similar to the heartfelt feeling I expressed at the end of the first paragraph), but can you eat sympathy? Can you impress the neighbours with sympathy? Can you get Sky Sports on sympathy?

Whatever happened to selfishness? Not the sort that gets condemned in soap operas and Tonight with Trevor MacDonald, but the sort that identifies the interests of one's own family and friends as one's own (wait a minute - that is the sort that gets condemned on Trevor MacDonald, especially when a builder is involved). Not so long ago, this sort of selfishness was known as charity-that-begins-at-home. It was assumed that community interests might be served if people first looked after themselves and their immediate neighbours, like ripples spreading across a pond. That's the sort of thing promoted by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (pictured) in his book Cosmopolitanism - a sort of universalism that grows through people responding to each other through immediate connexions unhampered by cultural barriers.

Appiah's philosophy is by no means perfect but at least it avoids the abstract universalism expressed by Unison, wherein we accept without question that the complete stranger is more of a brother to us than our own brother.

Where does it leave us when facing job cuts? Well, first thing is not to assume that just because you might want to keep your job, defend your pay, or even ask for more, you are somehow being immoral. In pushing for these things you might find that you end up forming immediate ties with people whom you previously thought existed only beyond some cultural barrier. And forming a handful of these ties will probably do more good morally than all the business plans put together by your employer for surviving the credit crunch. Universalism - the view that all men are my brothers, and that all old people are my granny and grandpa, etc - begins with a bit of selfishness.

We don't need poetry. We don't need to think of those less fortunate on the other side of the world. Let us talk to our neighbour, and let him talk to his, about the problems we face here and now. And let us rediscover the chain that links us to our neighbours across the globe.

Great Scott! You want how much?

I doubt that, when Captain Robert Falcon Scott (pictured left) was seeking sponsorship for the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910, any of the industrialists he approached said to him “Oh, so you’re doing it sponsored? Who for?” Today when I see on the BBC website that a group of celebrities are seeking sponsorship for their assault on Mount Kilimanjaro, I suspect that the meaning of the word ‘sponsorship’ has significantly changed over the past 100 years.

Of course, the sponsorship that goes on nowadays is so much more worthwhile – it provides income for that multi-million pound industry called “charity”; it gives the BBC and ITV something to film; and it makes a lot of fund-raisers feel good about themselves. I daresay it even sometimes helps homeless kids and starving Africans and the like, but these are, naturally, of lesser concern. From the BBC website it is clear that the main focus of the event is not the malaria bed nets (don't get me started on those) for Tanzanian tots, but the sheer celebrity of those grizzled adventurers Chris Moyles, Ronan Keating, and Denise Van Outen. Not having the Edwardian equivalents of these aboard the Terra Nova when it set sail was, I suppose, Captain Scott’s first and costliest mistake.

I don’t object to fund-raising; I don’t object to helping other people (whether or not they are ‘less fortunate’ than I); I don’t even object to people entering fun runs, walking the Great Wall of China or having their heads shaved. But put all this together into a filmed (and doubtless podcast) charity event and it all becomes so bloody objectionable.

Lately a new – and particularly morbid – ingredient has been added to this mix: doing it ‘in memory’ (why not ‘in remembrance’?) of someone. Every year thousands of women throughout the UK ‘race’ a distance of 5km, few of them gunning for Tirunesh Dibaba's 14:11.15 world record, but most of them wearing a picture of a dead person on their T-shirt. This is the women-only ‘Race for Life’ organised by Cancer Research UK. Now, I wouldn’t knock cancer research – more money should be poured into this. But I would knock Cancer Research for the way the whole Race for Life has been promoted. The aim seems not to be the raising of funds so that more scientists can peer through more microscopes at more cells; the aim is to get women to take part in a shared experience of grief. But grief won’t cure cancer.

The event-sponsorship-celebrity-grief cocktail is mixed in bad taste, and it fuzzes the focus that we once had on what we consider worthwhile human achievements. The meaning of sponsorship needs to be reclaimed as the provision of cash that enables any of these worthwhile human achievements to be undertaken. If you want to be charitable, then help someone you know (charity does begin at home), or just make a straightforward donation yourself, but don't go asking me for 'sponsorship'. We need to sponsor genuine exploration, whether this be of Mount Kilimanjaro, the South Pole or of the nuclei of human cells.