No story is too old to be exhumed by this blog, and so here is another outing for the sad case of the UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom, forced to apologise for referring to countries in receipt of UK foreign aid as Bongo Bongo Land.
I wouldn't use the term myself, for reasons I'll come back to. But is it racist? People like Mr Bloom use the term as a derogatory epitethet for, generally, African countries (although he apparently doesn't like Pakistan much either). The only racist construction I can attribute to it is the suggestion - implicit at best - that the inhabitants of the countries he has in mind do nothing but sit around all day playing Bongos.
But where does this inference come from? Not from Mr Bloom. He suggested that UK aid went into the pockets of government officials in foreign countries. Undoubtedly sometimes this is true. He also suggested that it was immoral to pay money to foreigners when we had people going to food banks in the UK. It's a point of view. Nowhere did he say, "And by the way, these people are doing it because they're black, and that's the kind of thing black people do".
Not for the first time, the racial stereotypes come from the critics rather from Bloom himself.
But even if it isn't racist, is it right to use a derogatory term like this about another country at all? I don't often refer to Frogs and Krauts personally, but I'd quite like to retain the option if the need arose. Where do we draw the line? Can we no longer use the word Yanks? Jocks? Taffs? Ockers? Or if for some reason I don't like another country (for example because its people carry out female genital mutilation) and wish to speak derogatorily about it, is that OK just provided I use its proper name?
I said I wouldn't use the term Bongo Bongo Land myself. It's crass and unspecific, and, as Bloom has discovered, makes things easy for people who'd rather attack the messenger rather than discuss the message.
There is a case to be made against foreign aid. Some of it is stolen. In some cases it puts sticking plaster on problems which would otherwise have to be addressed directly by indigenous people. Some countries have a lower top rate of tax than we do (Pakistan). Some countries have a nuclear weapons programme (Pakistan). Every penny we spend in aid has to be borrowed by the Government on the wholesale money markets. We have plenty of people who don't have enough in the UK. Ringfencing the Aid budget has tightened the squeeze on other government departments.
Bloom might have been better couching his tirade in moderate terms; but then the Guardian would never have run the story or the BBC picked up on it.
The monstering of Bloom, coming on a slow news day in the silly season, seems to me just another in a long line of insidious failures, firstly, to think carefully about words and what they mean, and secondly, to consider what is the cumulative effect of compiling a kind of Thesaurus of words you're allowed to use and opinions you're allowed to hold.
At the moment we seem to be arguing about what the Thesaurus should contain. In my book we shouldn't have a Thesaurus at all.
