The Politics of Dancing

LIVE8...

Piss poor coverage by the BBC. Very poor sound quality for the first half of the gig. Digital coverage also poor. Too much time spent wasting music time talking to B list celebs or idiots in the crowd who had no idea what G8 was. Lots of other great concerts from other countries that could have had highlights slotted in between the 10 to 15 minute wait between many of the acts on the first half of the day.

I'm not an evil man, I work in the voluntary sector in the UK. I absolutely hate the fact that there are millions of people all over this world that are dying or are facing death through a host of things. But it isn't our problem, is it? Not you or me. If someone had to be blamed you'd point accusatory fingers at the heads of the richest countries, but you'd also point fingers at the corrupt and ruthless leaders of these African countries, who take the aid to bolster their own lives and who cares about the dying.

The problem is you can't just write off debts and increase aid to these places without policing it, and if you police it you are the USA and friends trying to take over the world. The only safe way to handle this would be to send the SAS and Navy Seals into these countries and wipe out all the insurgents and leave the countries to the people. Except, we all know that the people would become as corrupt as their former leaders and I'll bet you in 20 years most of somewhere on this planet will be up to its eyeballs in debt and living on the edge.

In a horrible and ironic way I'd love it to be the UK because perhaps we'd spend more time and money on the concerns of this country rather than trying to be one of the idiots on a pedestal trying to change it to further their own political ambitions. I have time and respect for these campaigners, but I fear that we live in a country where poverty and social underclass is growing - we might not have people starving to death, but we have a country where the actual infrastructure is falling apart and needs £50bn spent on it just to stop it from falling into more of a decline.

Our transport system is crap. Our utilities networks are archaic and in decay. Our roads are a collection of potholes and speed bumps, pleasing no one but the people who look after our roads revenue or fix our cars. We have drugs problems in urban areas, we have gun problems as well, we have a future generation that is growing to be uninterested in their own futures and therefore are going to be the people who help dismantle what's left of this country, because they have no desire to preserve it. Yet we can fill the streets with hundreds of thousands of people who give a shit about Africa, yet will turn a blind eye or ignore the soical injustices in this country. It isn't just us, we've seen what's happened in the USA and we're heading down the same path. Soon it will be safer to live in Lesotho or Ethiopia or even Zimbabwe than it will be to live in a major connurbation in the UK. It might be already...