Category: International

A Live Aid for the 2020s?

Forty years on from the ground-breaking Live Aid concerts, what would another event or campaign focus on now? Global co-operation is under pressure, so no matter what issue most needs global attention, who could turn disparate worries into large-scale, well articulated public consensus?

Who wouldn’t want to go back just for one day? To 13 July 1985, when the nation’s coolest rock musicians came together and electrified the 72,000 people filling Wembley Stadium and millions more viewers at home, and galvanised the British public to give around £50m for victims of the Ethiopian famine.

There is a lot to celebrate in BBC2’s Live Aid at 40: When Rock ’n’ Roll Took on the World. The three-part series has pulled in an impressive run of interviewees that included organisers Bob Geldof and Bono, Sting, Midge Ure, Phil Collins; politicians George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair, the head of Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Dawit Giorgis, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obansanjo – and Birhan Woldu, the woman who as a near-dying young girl had become the face of the Ethiopian famine at Live Aid.

The series transports you to a time when our tiny island was doing what it loves doing best: punching above its weight

The interviewees and footage provide a multi-dimensional look at the event and its second punch, 2005’s Live 8, from British, American and crucially, African, perspectives. (Slightly awkward triangle of locations, mind – it rings a bell of some sort.) They built a picture of how the concert helped to raise the profile of aid in public awareness and foreign policy and how it was followed by an understanding of the need to articulate and address the causes of poverty.

Accompanied by a zinging soundtrack, it transports you to a time when our tiny island was doing what it loves doing best: punching above its weight. Geldof’s Live Aid concert inspired a similar concert in Philadelphia and more around the world, and leading efforts that ultimately raised a total of £150m.

Somewhat alarmingly the series is categorised as “history”. Then again, it did make history: technologically, socially and politically

Somewhat alarmingly the series is categorised as “history”. Then again, it did make history: technologically, socially and politically. The British public, today worn down by “scandal-hit” this and “broken” that, can look back to when quality BBC journalism led to the creation of a charity song that raised £8 million and pressured the Government of Margaret Thatcher to allocate food aid to a forgotten corner of a then-Marxist African nation.

Campaigners at the 2005 Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh called on G8 leaders to address Western-linked causes of poverty in Africa
Campaigners at the 2005 Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh called on G8 leaders to address Western-linked causes of poverty in Africa. Photo: One.org


In 2005 Geldof issued a new call to action for Live 8, the campaign focused on Western-linked causes of extreme poverty and on the G8 summit that the UK would chair that July. A-list musicians prepared for concerts in Wembley, Philadelphia and in the other G8 nations and an estimated 30 million viewers worldwide tuned in to watch. (We learnt that South Africa’s event, at which Nelson Mandela spoke, was an afterthought, to the organisers’ embarrassment.) Meanwhile public opinion was galvanised through the affiliated Make Poverty History campaign for which NGOs and their supporters marched for clear asks on trade, aid and debt. Some 225,000 people took part in the march in Edinburgh. G8 leaders – including Vladimir Putin – pledged to increase aid, cancel some debt and reduce trade barriers. The documentary shows Tony Blair reflecting that that was the last time that world leaders acted together for the common good.

What would a third event or campaign focus on now? What cause would it champion and who would it lobby?

The question it left me with was, what would a third event or campaign focus on now? Surely it would involve more artists of colour because there are more top-selling British artists of colour, and there would be little tolerance for a mostly white line-up. But what cause would it champion and who would it lobby?

After all, as the world begins to re-arm, areas for global co-operation are shrinking and, as aid budgets get funnelled to defence, ploughshares are being turned into swords.

Act now, change forever. Promotional text of the Mass Lobby encouraging people to speak to their MPs about climate change.

A big cause of suffering making headlines is linked to so-called “natural disasters” such as flooding and droughts. As I write, the death toll from the Texas flash floods stands at at least 109. We know such disasters are becoming more likely due to climate change. (Indeed, to the extent that they are caused by climate change, how much longer can we call them natural?) We can ask our leaders to re-commit to the Paris Agreement or hasten their nation’s path to Net Zero, share-holders can make their environemntal concerns known to companies, but a lot of the commitment comes back to individuals. Can anyone picture a stadium of 70,000 concert-goers waving their hands to show they commit to slashing their carbon footprint and boarding a plane only in emergencies?

Charities are urging the public to meet with their MPs today at an event called the Mass Lobby to assure their elected leaders that they still really want politicians to make choices to reduce the impact of climate change. Nearly 5,000 people have signed up to take part. I hope politicians will listen, with or without celebrity big guns. A greater push is needed to get from 5,000 to 70,000 or 225,000 – or indeed the millions needed to demonstrate widespread consensus and move the global dial.

Unlike a famine, which can be ended if the international community has the will, preventing the climate from breaking down is an ongoing commitment that costs more than the price of a record or a concert ticket or a one-off donation. Are we up to the challenge?

Top: The official Live Aid poster. Eil.com, fair use, via wikipedia

What happened when I tried to book a holiday without flying

My extended family are meeting up in central Italy this summer. “Aha,” I thought, after reading one too many reports about the contribution of air travel to an environmental apocalypse, “let’s see if we can avoid flying. It might be a challenge with a small child, but what a great way to see Europe.” Surely it couldn’t be that hard? Could it?

“Agatha Christie would be delighted,” declared Michael Binyon in The Times recently in an article about cross-Europe train travel, because, “The age of the sleeper is returning”.

Perhaps it has left the sidings and is chuntering towards us, but there is little sign of it yet. I am not a train nerd, but I am trying to avoid flying after reading one too many reports about the contribution of air travel to an environmental apocalypse.

My extended family are meeting up in central Italy this summer. “Aha,” I thought, “let’s see if we can avoid flying. It might be a challenge with a small child, but what a great way to see Europe,” and, I modestly said to myself, “And what an example we’ll set!”

In April I started with the ever-mysterious-sounding Seat61.com, but the routes highlighted were already selling for 15 times the €29 the site publicised. And the timings would have sliced through our little one’s daily routine, with the risk of causing pain to all of us.

I searched online for “no-fly travel” and found carefully curated tours of European idylls, accommodation included, but the photos were of wine glasses and sunsets, not swings and miniature trains.

I contacted a no-fly travel agent (there is such a thing), and spoke to the helpful Catherine Livesley, founder and director of the No-Fly Travel Club. For her to get us off the starting block, she required a one-year membership fee of £79 for an individual or £149 for a family which “includes up to 2 hours of support on the itineraries of your choice”. If we wanted her to book the tickets, that would cost extra.

This came as a shock after the ease of airline and domestic rail websites. But we were dealing with a business model that required work by a human rather than a search engine, and paid up. And it would be worth it – the aviation industry is responsible for around 5 per cent of global warming, after all. And what an achievement if we could steam in to our holiday destination flight-free and brimming with tales of rewarding French stopovers!

Livesley quickly came back to us with two routes: one via Paris and Milan, back on a sleeper train from Nice, and a second via the ever-picturesque Swiss countryside. A sleeper train from Paris to Nice was already booked up, so we could only take it on the way home. She had thoughtfully broken the journey up into short-ish chunks to suit a young child, but these would require more hotel stays than if we were prepared to travel at any hour for any length of time.

So we turned to the possibility of driving. Around 1,000 miles. We looked up tips for long distance driving with little ones and asked friends and family and the internet. We found exciting looking car-trains that had ceased running in the pandemic. We found a car train that for some reason offered to transport your car – a day or so after transporting the passengers. Then we found a Motorail service that reached Italy via Düsseldorf and would have transported our car as well. My husband called out as he scrolled through the timetable, “What does ‘Nicht verfügbar’ mean?” “Not available,” I replied with an increasing sense of resignation. There were technical problems on the line.

What if we did the drive by ourselves – surely it couldn’t be that hard? Au contraire: it would mean 19 hours’ (at least) driving on the unfamiliar right, with the risk of Little One getting fidgety or uttering the words, “I need a wee.” After we had begun our investigations and many evenings of discussions, we did a four-hour drive that was twice punctuated by those peace-shattering words. Both times, into action we flew, eyes peeled for the first sign of a service station, cartoonishly skidding in to race towards the facilities. The thought of executing this manoeuvre in a foreign country was not appealing.

Exhausted, we gave up. Reader, I apologise. We have booked air tickets. We are already paying for our weakness – a lack of weekend flights means that our already expensive tickets (more expensive than the train) will require several nights in a hotel. We had an option to carbon offset when we paid for them and I confess, I felt so sore to be paying more that I declined. (I’ve since made a donation to Friends of the Earth.) And yet any peace of mind about our journey was quickly swept away: the airline with which we booked has been cancelling flights.

So what to conclude? That for all our efforts we are – this year – contributing to the problem, and that our spending habits are no different from those of people who don’t care about the environment.

But also that the age of sleepers can’t come soon enough, and that car trains need to get up and running in sufficient volume; that governments may need to offer subsidies to help companies to scale up quickly so that even those with little concern for the environment are persuaded to avoid the airport. And that one way to reduce the carbon footprint of a holiday is to reduce the journey distance so that no-fly options are more feasible. In the mean time I wish Livesley and her ilk all the very best in weaning us off fast, child-friendly, easy-to-book, cheap-if-you-get-in-early, air travel.

Top image: via Queens University, Ontario