Richard Townend comments on the western capitalist culture

Richard Townend

'It's not fair,' cries a man earning almost £100,000 a week for kicking a modern equivalent of a pig's bladder around a field. 'I want more or else I am leaving', he tells his employers. 'Now listen Wayne' says the manager, 'No player is bigger than this club. That said, I will double your salary.' A fair deal?

'It's not fair' cries a man earning peanuts on a Costa Rican pineapple plantation. 'My pay has been halved and I can no longer send money home to my family. I can barely survive myself', he pleads with his paymasters. 'We don't make up the prices, the western supermarkets do. If you don't like it, go and find a job elsewhere - there are plenty of people to take your place.' Fair deal?

There's a lot of talk about fairness at the moment. In the recent Spending Review, Chancellor George Osborne used the term 24 times. Around the country, millions of people are rising up to challenge that this is anything but fair. Less police on our streets; increases in tuition fees; half a million jobs to be axed in the public sector; pensions hit; benefits stopped; higher taxes. The list goes on.

Thankfully, not all departments have been affected. There will be an increase in funding for the NHS; the education budget remains unchanged and International Development will increase by almost 50%. Hang on a minute, run that by me again?

'FOREIGN AID FURY' screamed the headline on the front of the Daily Express.

We are about to witness redundancies on a monumental scale in this country and the Government wants to send more money abroad? What kind of planet are our politicians living on?

Sadly the planet they are living on is one full of inequality, where a footballer in England can be paid £230,000 a week whilst a labourer in the Congo, the world's poorest country has to get by on an average of £300 per YEAR.

In Exodus, God commands the Israelites, 'Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.'

While we may not directly oppress foreigners today, we turn a blind eye whilst the capitalist culture we are part of uses power to preserve privilege at the expense of the weak. In Costa Rica, for example, the price of pineapples has been drastically reduced as a result of western supermarket price wars. This has led to brutal deterioration in working conditions and huge cuts in already modest wage packets.

So with this in mind, perhaps we should rejoice that our country has a moral compass that points towards equality across the globe.

However unfair we think the Spending Review has been for us, we can still count on God's blessings and provision as 850 million people will go to bed hungry tonight.

Our definition of fairness revolves around ourselves. Is this fair for me? That is the problem with capitalism. The dictionary definition would be at odds with this: 'equitable and just to all parties.' The Bible goes further still:

• After encountering Jesus, Zacchaeus paid back everything he had cheated people out of four times over and pledged to give half of his possessions to the poor.


• The early church lived in close fellowship, 'selling their property and possessions, and distributing the money among all, according to what each one needed'.


• Jesus used the parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate that 'love thy neighbour' means helping people in need, in this case a foreigner, until they can become self-sufficient.

The Bible teaches us that to understand fairness, we need to look outwards, not inwards. We need to break free from the shackles of capitalism and consumerism and allow ourselves to be liberated by generous living. We should count our blessings every day and share them with a broken world that needs them more and more. We need to share the wealth.

That is the way to a fairer world; a more equal world; a world where the man on the pineapple plantation has enough to feed his family - the world that God desires.