Why our culture is priceless

Last week I got talking to a friend about a popular Twitter feed I’ve starting following.

MetPoliceCO11 isn’t a real life crime fighting message board. Instead the spoof account tweets about amusing and often implausible incidents.

After guffawing at the genius of a tweet about catching a drunk Brian Blessed with a large net, my friend replied, ‘But what’s the point of it?’.

At first I wasn’t sure how to respond.

Because it’s funny, I thought.  It lights up my otherwise dull day.

Then I got thinking. You could ask that question about almost anything.

What’s the point of music, of poetry, or fine dining? Why go to the cinema, play sport or watch the X Factor?

Whatever your views on reality TV these things exist because in one way or another they give us pleasure.

From watching a play that moves you to tears, to listening to an Adam and Joe podcast, none of these things are strictly ‘necessary’ but they’re what make life interesting.

While a joke twitter feed or a televised karaoke contest aren’t exactly Orwell, most people get that art has a vital role to play in our society.

The UK Government however doesn’t seem to share this opinion.

Its cuts to arts council funding and humanities education feel like an attack on the desire to create something beautiful or imaginative. (OK I know this is a bit of a jump but bear with me.)

According to most politicians it seems the only thing that matters is business and making money. Who cares if university courses in the likes of philosophy, English literature or history have to close or ramp up their fees to survive?

The Government seems to have forgotten that for every £1 invested in arts and culture £3.50 is put back into the UK economy.

Despite this more than 200 organisations up and down the country are losing Arts Council Funding.

At the same time universities only offering courses in arts and humanities will have their funding cut to zero.

I’m not saying cutting cultural funding will somehow stop people from creating funny and whimsical twitter feeds.

But it’s this attack on the idea of creating something just for the sake of creating it that I find depressing.

The impression that if something doesn’t have a strict purpose and isn’t there purely to make money, it’s somehow redundant or unnecessary.

This view is short-sighted and simply untrue. We should be embracing our diverse and colourful culture, not stifling it.

So next time you find yourself wondering why on earth someone has bothered to build a life-size bear out of Lego, or painstakingly hand-make millions of ceramic sunflower seeds, give yourself a mental kick and embrace it.

Go on, open your mind.

11.11.11

This week thousands of people across Britain paid tribute to those who have died in conflicts all over the world since WWI.

Either through attending a remembrance service, watching TV coverage or by simply wearing a poppy, nearly everyone in the UK marks the anniversary in their own way.

And this year was the first time services were held since the world’s last known WWI combat veteran Claude Choules died in May.

That makes my generation the last to have any real living connection with the two wars.

Many people my age will remember sitting down with their grandparents to hear tales from the front line.

A couple of years ago, working as a freelance journalist for a local paper in North London I interviewed Donald Wilson, an 89-year-old WWII veteran.

He was there during the D-Day landings and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

I remember the interview well; he spoke proudly of his fellow troops, describing them as “good blokes” who faced head-on the fearsome tasks at hand.

Describing the scene as he arrived at the notorious death camp, he said: “We fed the prisoners because they’d been living on potato soup and they were starving.

“We had 2,000 under our control and we managed to evacuate 400 of them to Switzerland but the rest died.  It was very hard.”

The Second World War left such a gaping hole in Donald’s generation, they became defined by it.

They had experienced an unprecedented moment in history and the overwhelming need to make sure it was never repeated left its mark.

Today in 2011 war has mutated for us here in the UK. The country isn’t caught in the grip of air raids, rationing and black-outs.

The so-called war on terror is really only felt by the families of the servicemen or women fighting in Afghanistan.

It’s only Remembrance Sunday that reminds us of the loss inflicted by war.

We are detached from war – a distant reality only experienced through our TV screens.

Remembrance Day is a way for us to feel connected to today’s conflicts, and more so the events of the 20^th century.

And even when the last veterans from WWII have left us, marking the 11^th hour of the 11th day of the 11^th month will always bring home the sacrifice made by the generations before us.

Feeding the world

The world’s population hit seven billion this week, pushing our planet’s resources to the limit.

As the West’s obesity epidemic grows, around one billion people are starving, with the famine in Somalia expected to kill up to one million.

Something somewhere has gone horribly wrong.

The balance has been badly tipped in favour of rich Western nations scoffing their faces with what is often factory-farmed, low quality meat.

Meanwhile those in Africa and the developing world are struggling to feed their families at all.

The New Internationalist magazine pointed to food market speculators in its feature The Food Rush as those gambling with hunger.

In the piece by Hazel Healy it explains how the rise of commodity trading is seeing banks and hedge funds bet on the price of crops like wheat and corn – the staples of the world’s poorest.

This is pushing food prices up to the point where one in seven people can’t afford to eat.

She writes: “There is something particularly sick about wealthy and unaccountable elites increasing their fortunes in a way that stunts – and starves – children. This is raw-edged capitalism at its worst.”

And as land to grow food for multiplying mouths shrinks, feeding the world gets even more complicated.

Sadly intensive farming – where animals rarely see the light of day and are bred to the point where they can no longer stand, let alone reproduce – is playing its part.

Precious space that could be used to grow crops for the starving is instead being used to produce enough animal feed to fuel the West’s obsession with cheap meat.

According to Compassion in Word Farming chief exec Philip Lymbery’s blog, it takes six tonnes of plant protein to produce just one tonne of animal protein.

If that space was used to grow plant crops there would be more to go around.

And while big farms would argue there’s a demand for this meat, the fact is, we don’t need it.

If everyone cut out meat from just one meal a week it would make a huge difference to the world’s health, as well as the environment.

In the end this global problem is being caused by greed.

From the banks gambling on hunger, to farmers sacrificing welfare for profit, the West’s greed only serves to exacerbate the plight of the poor.

And with the population set to rise by a further two billion by 2050, unless something changes, this will only get worse.