Patronising and insulting prejudice
HOW far has the UK declined, not in economic or political terms, but in morality, humanity and supposed Christian values?
In his weekly opinion piece (November 24th) Mr Anton Coaker shows the most arrant prejudice which deserves no place in any newspaper.
Money, sent by the West to aid the nations that are suffering the worst effects of the climate crisis, he says “when given to most poor countries is used by the President and his henchmen to wage war on their neighbours or minorities in the country”. Alternatively, he states the money “will evaporate and re-appear in a Swiss bank account in the name of the President”.
Thus he makes gross generalisations from several examples of corruption in recipient countries. His is the sort of patronising and insulting prejudice that you would expect in publications on the racist edge of right-wing “journalism”. He goes further in the footsteps of
19th century empire builders and suggests that (superior white men) “should go there ourselves” and sort them out.
Apart from this throwback to the Great British attitudes of our grandparents’ generation he also ignores the burden of hypocrisy in these lamentable paragraphs.
As just one example London, known sometimes as Londongrad, is judged by economists and financial journalists of all political affiliations inside and outside the UK (and “City” workers themselves) to be the global capital of international money laundering. Until recently, Russian oligarchs could move their billions through our financial systems to invest in the drug universe and, no doubt, in the international trade in Kalashnikov rifles which Mr Coaker makes light of.
How totally lost is the Biblical teaching that the person who casts the first stone of criticism must not be guilty of the moral crimes he accuses others of.
Mr Coaker, presumably employed as an “influencer” of the older generation, rounds off his article with, “I don’t care very much how many migrant labourers they kill in Qatar (in building World Cup infrastructure)... that’s their affair”.
Martin Luther King said that the line of human progress was not steadily upwards, there would be downturns along the way. How right he was.
Jeremy Hall Exeter, Devon