With the Sunday trading laws in the government's crosshairs following last week's budget, pious moralising chumps like the Guardian's Giles Fraser are falling over themselves to tell us how this move is all part of the Tories' grand plan to turn us all into consumerist drones who worship at the feet of big corporations and simply live from one opportunity to spend money to the next.
Fraser says 'Money is the only god the Tories want you to worship on Sunday' – but this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what deregulation is (or, at least, should be!) about. This move is not about pushing people in one direction or another; unlike those who want to keep the strict regulations on Sunday trading, the government is not using this to try and encourage people to make certain lifestyle choices over others. Instead, it is about government stepping back, and letting people make those choices for themselves.
The Tories don't want you to 'worship' money on a Sunday. They don't much care what you do, I expect. What they want is for you to be free to do whatever you please – on a Sunday, or on any other day – rather than having those choices made for you by the government.
Fraser says that Sunday is 'special' to him 'because it is a day when we are not forced to worship the market'. He misses the point that nobody is 'forced' to 'worship' anything, on any day – but that intelligent adults should be allowed to make their own choices about how, and when, to spend their money, rather than being nannied by a government which thinks it knows best.
Perhaps Fraser thinks people are too stupid, or too immoral, to make those choices for themselves? Perhaps he doesn't care that other people might not want their Sundays to be 'special', or that for some people with certain lifestyles or certain jobs, Sunday might be the only time they have available to go shopping? That is a short-sighted, egotistical approach.
Giles Fraser might not want to go shopping on a Sunday – but even with the trading laws relaxed, he still won't have to. Nobody will force him to go shopping on a Sunday, if he doesn't want to; he can still keep Sundays 'special', distinct from the shallow consumerism of the rest of the week, if that is his choice. So why is he so keen to force people who would want to go shopping on a Sunday not to? Fraser and his ilk should stop trying to impose his own morals and views on the rest of us, who may have different priorities, and different lives to lead.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 July 2015
Friday, 28 November 2014
What has Christmas become?
Christmas is changing. I don't think I really recognise it any more. There are so many things that it wouldn't be Christmas without – but half of them have only come into being at all in the past five years (or so it seems)!
Today is Black Friday. I don't really know what that is. It's like the after Christmas sales – but, weirdly, before Christmas. I remember people talking about it last year, and I'm pretty sure somebody died (really?! Somebody check that for me…), but before last year I'd never heard of it, and I'm still not sure where it came from. There are so many sales, seasonal events, one-day brand events, or whatever, now that the really special occasion is when the products are full-price – most products spend more time on special offer than at full price, and shops should really give up the pretence and just admit that the 'reduced' prices are actually the real prices. Whatever the price is, though, it's pretty unedifying to fight someone in a supermarket over who gets the last George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Grilling Machine on the shelf. What are you people thinking of?! It's madness!
Christmas adverts have evolved until now there's an obligation to make an advert which doesn't just shamelessly flog worthless tat to Christmas shoppers but is practically a miniature motion picture with a raft of characters with complex backstories, an unexpected plot twist and an uplifting yet thoughtful moral message. A few years back, adverts were just a thing which happened when you were watching TV – a good opportunity to get up and make a cup of coffee or find the cat. Now, people eagerly await the smug, kitschy Christmas adverts the way they look forward to the next episode of their favourite television programmes.
For some reason, supermarkets have now entered into a competition to see who can stuff as many animals one inside the other. The lower budget the supermarket, the more different animals they try to cram in there. When I was growing up, you had your roast goose or your roast turkey, with potatoes, vegetables, gravy, whatever – these days, you can head down to your local Nisa Today and pick up a gorgeous roasted goat stuffed with a monkey stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a chicken stuffed with an otter stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a shrew (serves 4) for only a tenner. I suppose the next step is to start doing the same thing with vegetables? Roast potatoes stuffed with parsnips stuffed with carrots stuffed with sprouts stuffed with peas?
We don't even call it Christmas now, do we? It's the holiday season – or, worse, the party season. Y'see, we have to give the impression that the entire period of time after the end of the Bonfire Night celebrations up until the bitter, throbbing regrets of New Year's Day is one long string of end-to-end parties and social occasions – each filled to bursting with laughter, jollity, scintillating conversations, exciting sex, memories to cherish forever, and tiny little cocktail sausages which other people have touched. The party season, where everyone always look incredible, and no one is ever unhappy. Yeah, right!
Christmas used to be a time of worship – for those of a particular religious bent – or else a time to see family, catch up with old friends, relax, and enjoy yourself. Recently it seems to have become a parade of saccharine clichés, each rooted in hollow, mindless consumerism instead of anything meaningful or personal.
The changes I've written about are all very, very recent. But Tom Lehrer summed up the spirit of it all, long before 'Black Friday' or any of this other stuff existed:
Christmas! What happened to you?
Today is Black Friday. I don't really know what that is. It's like the after Christmas sales – but, weirdly, before Christmas. I remember people talking about it last year, and I'm pretty sure somebody died (really?! Somebody check that for me…), but before last year I'd never heard of it, and I'm still not sure where it came from. There are so many sales, seasonal events, one-day brand events, or whatever, now that the really special occasion is when the products are full-price – most products spend more time on special offer than at full price, and shops should really give up the pretence and just admit that the 'reduced' prices are actually the real prices. Whatever the price is, though, it's pretty unedifying to fight someone in a supermarket over who gets the last George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Grilling Machine on the shelf. What are you people thinking of?! It's madness!
Christmas adverts have evolved until now there's an obligation to make an advert which doesn't just shamelessly flog worthless tat to Christmas shoppers but is practically a miniature motion picture with a raft of characters with complex backstories, an unexpected plot twist and an uplifting yet thoughtful moral message. A few years back, adverts were just a thing which happened when you were watching TV – a good opportunity to get up and make a cup of coffee or find the cat. Now, people eagerly await the smug, kitschy Christmas adverts the way they look forward to the next episode of their favourite television programmes.
For some reason, supermarkets have now entered into a competition to see who can stuff as many animals one inside the other. The lower budget the supermarket, the more different animals they try to cram in there. When I was growing up, you had your roast goose or your roast turkey, with potatoes, vegetables, gravy, whatever – these days, you can head down to your local Nisa Today and pick up a gorgeous roasted goat stuffed with a monkey stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a chicken stuffed with an otter stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a shrew (serves 4) for only a tenner. I suppose the next step is to start doing the same thing with vegetables? Roast potatoes stuffed with parsnips stuffed with carrots stuffed with sprouts stuffed with peas?
We don't even call it Christmas now, do we? It's the holiday season – or, worse, the party season. Y'see, we have to give the impression that the entire period of time after the end of the Bonfire Night celebrations up until the bitter, throbbing regrets of New Year's Day is one long string of end-to-end parties and social occasions – each filled to bursting with laughter, jollity, scintillating conversations, exciting sex, memories to cherish forever, and tiny little cocktail sausages which other people have touched. The party season, where everyone always look incredible, and no one is ever unhappy. Yeah, right!
Christmas used to be a time of worship – for those of a particular religious bent – or else a time to see family, catch up with old friends, relax, and enjoy yourself. Recently it seems to have become a parade of saccharine clichés, each rooted in hollow, mindless consumerism instead of anything meaningful or personal.
The changes I've written about are all very, very recent. But Tom Lehrer summed up the spirit of it all, long before 'Black Friday' or any of this other stuff existed:
Christmas! What happened to you?
Thursday, 8 May 2014
We're all going on a Summer Halal-iday
Well, here we are again! Just two days after I wrote about the massive overreaction to the news that Subway would be converting many of its UK sandwich shops to an entirely Halal menu, in response from demand from Muslim customers, this so-called 'scandal' keeps on growing and growing.
Yesterday, The Sun newspaper broke the news that common high-street restaurants like Pizza Express have been using exclusively Halal meat for years. (Pizza Express later pointed out that this information has actually been freely available for some time.)
Naturally, everybody was outraged. ('Outraged' has become the standard national response to any news story, no matter what it says.) People were outraged that they were being fed Halal meat without their knowledge; they were outraged that national restaurant chains were kowtowing to a minority religious group; other people were outraged that the first group of people were outraged, claiming that their outrage was the result of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim racism - and still more outraged that this story had been printed in The Sun.
But if people calm down and think for a moment, instead of either spewing knee-jerk racist prejudice, or knee-jerkily accusing others of racism, we can see this is a story about food, and food labelling, as much as it is about religion or ethnic minorities.
To many people, where their food comes from, and how it's been prepared, matters. Like, really matters. People want to know whether their vegetables are organic or not; whether their eggs are free-range, or from a 'battery' farm; whether their meat has been grass-fed or, um, fed with other stuff. Likewise, they might want to know how their meat has been slaughtered.
Over past decade or so, Britain has seen a huge increase in concern over welfare in farming, and the origins and provenance of food. Celebrities chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have emphasised the importance of quality produce, and quality of life, alongside initiatives like the RSPCA's Freedom Foods campaign, and the Red Tractor scheme.
And it is not just on the basis of animal welfare that people will want to know how their food has been prepared. As political writer and journalist Sunny Hundal mentioned on Twitter, Sikhs are traditionally forbidden from eating Halal meat because of the process. A sikh's right to be able to eat only non-Halal meat on religious grounds is surely no less important than a muslim's right to be able to eat Halal meat for the same reasons.
There is little doubt that at least some of the furore surrounding the latest Halal meat 'scandal' is racially and Islamophobically motivated. People who dislike Muslims on principle will try to use this story as an excuse to spread fear about immigrants 'coming over here' and turning Britain into 'an Islamic state' - that is the divisive, anti-immigrant rhetoric of racist groups like the English Defence League, and is both hateful and wrong. But it is not racist to care about food provenance, and many people's objections will be not to Halal meat itself, nor to Islam in general, but simply to the fact that what they were buying was not labelled as such.
Yesterday, The Sun newspaper broke the news that common high-street restaurants like Pizza Express have been using exclusively Halal meat for years. (Pizza Express later pointed out that this information has actually been freely available for some time.)
Naturally, everybody was outraged. ('Outraged' has become the standard national response to any news story, no matter what it says.) People were outraged that they were being fed Halal meat without their knowledge; they were outraged that national restaurant chains were kowtowing to a minority religious group; other people were outraged that the first group of people were outraged, claiming that their outrage was the result of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim racism - and still more outraged that this story had been printed in The Sun.
But if people calm down and think for a moment, instead of either spewing knee-jerk racist prejudice, or knee-jerkily accusing others of racism, we can see this is a story about food, and food labelling, as much as it is about religion or ethnic minorities.
To many people, where their food comes from, and how it's been prepared, matters. Like, really matters. People want to know whether their vegetables are organic or not; whether their eggs are free-range, or from a 'battery' farm; whether their meat has been grass-fed or, um, fed with other stuff. Likewise, they might want to know how their meat has been slaughtered.
Over past decade or so, Britain has seen a huge increase in concern over welfare in farming, and the origins and provenance of food. Celebrities chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have emphasised the importance of quality produce, and quality of life, alongside initiatives like the RSPCA's Freedom Foods campaign, and the Red Tractor scheme.
And it is not just on the basis of animal welfare that people will want to know how their food has been prepared. As political writer and journalist Sunny Hundal mentioned on Twitter, Sikhs are traditionally forbidden from eating Halal meat because of the process. A sikh's right to be able to eat only non-Halal meat on religious grounds is surely no less important than a muslim's right to be able to eat Halal meat for the same reasons.
There is little doubt that at least some of the furore surrounding the latest Halal meat 'scandal' is racially and Islamophobically motivated. People who dislike Muslims on principle will try to use this story as an excuse to spread fear about immigrants 'coming over here' and turning Britain into 'an Islamic state' - that is the divisive, anti-immigrant rhetoric of racist groups like the English Defence League, and is both hateful and wrong. But it is not racist to care about food provenance, and many people's objections will be not to Halal meat itself, nor to Islam in general, but simply to the fact that what they were buying was not labelled as such.
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