[Anthony Butcher]

Originally Posted by Astrocat

How would you define 'race' ?

Black, white, asian etc.

Not at all to be confused with nationality such as British, French etc.

I actually think that race should be removed from the English language. It should never feature as part of anything. The CRE should be scrapped, all mention of race in employment forms, government databases etc should be deleted. It is the most divisive concept in our country today.

Originally Posted by Astrocat

I think that it's inappropriate to have opinions and state them as fact while declaring that those who opine otherwise are incorrect, and criticising or chastising them without any back-up, if you wish to have a constructive debate in the process.

I am sorry if I caused you some distress. That wasn't my intention. Everything I write is my opinion, and not meant to be regarded as 'fact'.

However, you have already seen how dangerous it is to confuse nationality and race. You thought that I was accusing you of 'racism', when I talked about imperialism.

I have been in politics for a few years now, and discussion about race never achieves anything and only gets peoples' backs up.

Originally Posted by Astrocat

If you feel that social perception of race should be based on how people look and the country of origin of their ancient ancestors (scientists have discovered that there is no apparent deviation of genetics which would distinguish between different nationalities of people) , then please consider -

It doesn't matter how I think race should be regarded; it is absolutely irrelevant. If you say 'race' to someone, 99.9% of people will assume it to mean white, black, asian, etc. That is the accepted use of the term. If we vary from that and then use alternative meanings in discussions like this it is bound to cause confusion.

I would suggest never bringing up the issue of race again, since it has absolutely no use whatsoever. Race has nothing to do with Fair Trade, international finances, supermarkets or anything else in this thread and for the life of me I can't work out why you keep discussing it!

Originally Posted by Astrocat

If there is a person whose great-great-great-great-grandparents lived in Africa, whose family has lived in the UK for a century, interbreeding with other similarly African-descent families resulting in African-looking kids being produced by each generation, then why would that person necessarily have any more ability (or right) to comment on a situation in Africa, than i would be ?

I have no idea. You have constructed that situation entirely on your own. I haven't brought up ancestry or race at all. Unless you are a citizen of a country, then your opinions are, without meaning to be rude, just interference in other people's affairs. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and intervention is required sometimes, but it is something to bear in mind.

As I have said, I support the idea of 'Fair Trade', I just don't think that it is fair to blame the supermarkets for everything when there are so many other groups involved, including consumers, governments, local workers and so on.

Originally Posted by Astrocat

Or would you feel better knowing that UK citizens are concerned about the predicament, are urging their governments to stop nurturing policies which simply increase the desperation of the African government while bringing them deeper into debt, if you knew that UK citizens were encouraging change in UK law to prevent supermarkets from mindfully decimating local economies in poverty-wracked locations, and if they were encouraging the African government to instate a minimum wage which allows full-time employees to at least be able to afford minimum basic food for survival ?

You see I just don't believe that this is happening. You use incredibly emotive words like "decimating", yet I have seen no evidence of this. It is a very bold claim to make. There may be local issues, but providing high emplyment (albeit on low wages) in an area is hardly decimating the local economy. I am not justifying it, merely suggesting that using such emotive words actually makes your argument less believable to me.

I would need to see evidence of a particular region of a particular African country that can demonstrate that the local economy has been significantly damaged by direct interference from a supermarket chain. I find it highly unlikely that such evidence exists. That doesn't prove that your theory is wrong, merely that it is very hard to prove beyond circumstantial evidence.

You also understand that there are dozens of African governments (not just one as your posting appears to suggest), and forcing them to impose minimum wages would be impossible at this stage? And what's more it doesn't necessarily follow that minimum wage improves the quality of life. In areas where the margins are extremely tight, the minimum wage may make people unemployable and the business will fold. Then everyone is unemployed instead of having low paid work. A national minimum wage only makes sense when all the businesses can actually afford to pay that level of salary.

Imagine for instance that one African country introduced a minimum wage. This would almost certainly push up the costs for farming businesses, thus increasing the prices they have to charge the supermarkets. The supermarkets would then just move elsewhere, where the products are cheaper.The only reason that the farms in the thrid world have the supermarket business is because they are dirt cheap. If they weren't cheap, we would just import the food from Europe or America instead.

The minimum wage was only introduced into Britain a few years ago. I hardly think that we are in a position to dictate to other nations how they should be governing their economies. We are right back to the patronising imperialism of us assuming that our governmental system is better than theirs and they should be forced to copy ours.