Jack MacRoary's Fairtrade Adventure
Episode Four
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: March 3rd – You have to be Fair to be Free.
Swearwords: None.
Description: March 3rd – You have to be Fair to be Free.
The first thing to think about, when you’re thinking about what Free and what Fair means, is that you’ve got to be Fair before you can be Free. That’s our Fairtrade group’s manifesto, if you like.
It doesn’t matter which country you live in. If the way you buy and sell things isn’t fair then calling it free isn’t going to make it any better for the people who are making and producing the things to sell. Surely everyone is entitled to a living wage and to being paid fairly for what they produce, whether that be dairy farmers in Scotland or coffee growers in Latin America or banana growers in the Windward Isles.
I know people like Mr Smith don’t like to hear it, but most of the time Free isn’t Fair. And Free Trade certainly isn’t Fairtrade but the people who like Free Trade as an idea will tell you that anything else is UnFair. Which is just wrong. It’s unfair to them, because they want to be able to ‘profit’ out of everyone else lower down the food chain, or the production chain, but if you look at the world with real eyes, like real people living real lives have to, it’s hard to believe that people with power being able to control things and make life unfair for millions of others is a good thing. I think if more people in Scotland realised that we, the ordinary people, have a lot more in common with the ordinary people in every other country of the world, we’d get a better version of Globalisation.
When I was young there was this thing called Make Poverty History. That was in 2005 and they haven’t done it yet. Mainly because the people who could do this are the ones who want FREE FOR ALL (which means free for them to set prices as cheap as they like, irrespective of cost to others). The only way to make poverty history would be to make the world more equal and that would happen by being Fair, not by following ‘Free Market’ policies.
I know it’s all very complicated, but sometimes you have to strip away all that and come down to the simple fact that TO BE FREE YOU HAVE TO BE FAIR. And that the word ‘free’ means many things in many different contexts and if you are told something is ‘free’ for you, you need to ask who else is paying for it.
These are the questions we’ve been grappling with at DrumTumshie Academy this year as we tried to set up our Fairtrade Group so that we could become a Fairtrade School. I never thought there would be any resistance to this idea as it seems a simple one to me – Freedom through Fairness – but actually there are a lot of people who don’t like this idea. Mr Smith calls me an ‘idealist’ and my year tutor has said on occasion that I’m becoming ‘radicalised’ on this issue, which apparently is not a good thing.
It was part of the rules of setting up a Fairtrade group that we have some teachers on board. And most of the other teachers, I’m afraid to say, turned the other cheek. Even Mrs Lovall, the Religious Studies teacher. But our Geography teacher, Miss Direction (of course that’s not her proper name, you’ve surely realised by now that I’m giving people names to protect their identities – but not Mr Smith because he doesn’t deserve to have his name protected. He should be named and shamed as all the other Mr Smiths in Scotland who share his view should!). Anyway, Miss Direction said she thought it was a really good idea and agreed to be our teacher mentor. But we needed another ‘adult’ – I’m glad they didn’t say ‘appropriate adult’ because the other teacher we got on board was – wait for it – Mr Smith. And for my money he was the least appropriate teacher we could have.
Now you might be suspicious of that, and I was too. Brian said the reason was that he was coming in as a mole. An agent provocateur if you like. A traitor. Someone trying to stop us being fair by exerting his ‘free’ choice in taking part. We were worried he might take over and stop us from our goal. And I’m sure he would if he could BUT there is more to it than first meets the eye.
I’ll tell you this, though it should be a secret, that Mr Smith fancies Miss Direction. And he wanted to get into her good books, and probably give her a lift home after our Fairtrade group meetings, so he joined the Fairtrade Group. He said it was important for us to have a ‘balanced view’ of things but the tables have turned on him over time, because it turns out Miss Direction is pretty passionate about Fairtrade herself, and since Mr Smith is passionate about Miss Direction, if he knows what’s good for him he has to at least pay lip service to our way of thinking. I still don’t trust him, though.
Anyway, this meant that we had two teachers. Mr (Adam) Smith and Miss Direction. Stage One completed. Then we had to form a committee.
There are lots of rules to become a Fairtrade School. You might think it’s hoops to jump through, but then again, they can’t just let anyone say they are Fairtrade now, can they, so I understand that we have to ‘play by the rules’. The committee has to be made up of pupils. And here is our committee: There’s me, Brian the Brain, Melissa Ricketts, Odoyo Ashebe and Jimmy Wong. That’s only five of us in the whole school. We didn’t think it was enough. As Brian pointed out, Jesus has twelve disciples and we want to be bigger than Jesus. No, I said, it was the Beatles who wanted to be bigger than Jesus, more specifically John Lennon and he got shot. And we don’t want to end up like that. So maybe we don’t want to be as big or bigger than Jesus, but we did want to be big enough to become a recognised Fairtrade School. We didn’t want to stop there. Once we were a Fairtrade school we wanted to make DrumTumshie a Fairtrade town. We want to be proud of DrumTumshie. But that means getting the adults interested and adults seem even less bothered about it than kids, which is strange if you ask my opinion because you’d think that they were more understanding and understood more about fairness.
If the teachers at DrumTumshie Academy are anything to go by, that’s not the case. At the beginning when we were trying to set up the Fairtrade Group, they all said they’d drink Fairtrade Tea and Coffee in the staff room if it was free and they didn’t seem as committed to the cause as we are. As Miss Direction pointed out – they privilege FREE over FAIR. And that’s what we’ve got to change. She said we have to ‘win hearts and minds’ and my dad said ‘that’s a sair fecht in modern Scotland.’ He’s never really got over the Independence Referendum. I don’t blame him. It seems that not enough people in Scotland understand what Free means. Freedom as in the Arbroath Declaration is not the same as the ‘Enlightenment’ sort of freedom which is all about Free Markets. And I’ve said plenty about that already.
It doesn’t matter which country you live in. If the way you buy and sell things isn’t fair then calling it free isn’t going to make it any better for the people who are making and producing the things to sell. Surely everyone is entitled to a living wage and to being paid fairly for what they produce, whether that be dairy farmers in Scotland or coffee growers in Latin America or banana growers in the Windward Isles.
I know people like Mr Smith don’t like to hear it, but most of the time Free isn’t Fair. And Free Trade certainly isn’t Fairtrade but the people who like Free Trade as an idea will tell you that anything else is UnFair. Which is just wrong. It’s unfair to them, because they want to be able to ‘profit’ out of everyone else lower down the food chain, or the production chain, but if you look at the world with real eyes, like real people living real lives have to, it’s hard to believe that people with power being able to control things and make life unfair for millions of others is a good thing. I think if more people in Scotland realised that we, the ordinary people, have a lot more in common with the ordinary people in every other country of the world, we’d get a better version of Globalisation.
When I was young there was this thing called Make Poverty History. That was in 2005 and they haven’t done it yet. Mainly because the people who could do this are the ones who want FREE FOR ALL (which means free for them to set prices as cheap as they like, irrespective of cost to others). The only way to make poverty history would be to make the world more equal and that would happen by being Fair, not by following ‘Free Market’ policies.
I know it’s all very complicated, but sometimes you have to strip away all that and come down to the simple fact that TO BE FREE YOU HAVE TO BE FAIR. And that the word ‘free’ means many things in many different contexts and if you are told something is ‘free’ for you, you need to ask who else is paying for it.
These are the questions we’ve been grappling with at DrumTumshie Academy this year as we tried to set up our Fairtrade Group so that we could become a Fairtrade School. I never thought there would be any resistance to this idea as it seems a simple one to me – Freedom through Fairness – but actually there are a lot of people who don’t like this idea. Mr Smith calls me an ‘idealist’ and my year tutor has said on occasion that I’m becoming ‘radicalised’ on this issue, which apparently is not a good thing.
It was part of the rules of setting up a Fairtrade group that we have some teachers on board. And most of the other teachers, I’m afraid to say, turned the other cheek. Even Mrs Lovall, the Religious Studies teacher. But our Geography teacher, Miss Direction (of course that’s not her proper name, you’ve surely realised by now that I’m giving people names to protect their identities – but not Mr Smith because he doesn’t deserve to have his name protected. He should be named and shamed as all the other Mr Smiths in Scotland who share his view should!). Anyway, Miss Direction said she thought it was a really good idea and agreed to be our teacher mentor. But we needed another ‘adult’ – I’m glad they didn’t say ‘appropriate adult’ because the other teacher we got on board was – wait for it – Mr Smith. And for my money he was the least appropriate teacher we could have.
Now you might be suspicious of that, and I was too. Brian said the reason was that he was coming in as a mole. An agent provocateur if you like. A traitor. Someone trying to stop us being fair by exerting his ‘free’ choice in taking part. We were worried he might take over and stop us from our goal. And I’m sure he would if he could BUT there is more to it than first meets the eye.
I’ll tell you this, though it should be a secret, that Mr Smith fancies Miss Direction. And he wanted to get into her good books, and probably give her a lift home after our Fairtrade group meetings, so he joined the Fairtrade Group. He said it was important for us to have a ‘balanced view’ of things but the tables have turned on him over time, because it turns out Miss Direction is pretty passionate about Fairtrade herself, and since Mr Smith is passionate about Miss Direction, if he knows what’s good for him he has to at least pay lip service to our way of thinking. I still don’t trust him, though.
Anyway, this meant that we had two teachers. Mr (Adam) Smith and Miss Direction. Stage One completed. Then we had to form a committee.
There are lots of rules to become a Fairtrade School. You might think it’s hoops to jump through, but then again, they can’t just let anyone say they are Fairtrade now, can they, so I understand that we have to ‘play by the rules’. The committee has to be made up of pupils. And here is our committee: There’s me, Brian the Brain, Melissa Ricketts, Odoyo Ashebe and Jimmy Wong. That’s only five of us in the whole school. We didn’t think it was enough. As Brian pointed out, Jesus has twelve disciples and we want to be bigger than Jesus. No, I said, it was the Beatles who wanted to be bigger than Jesus, more specifically John Lennon and he got shot. And we don’t want to end up like that. So maybe we don’t want to be as big or bigger than Jesus, but we did want to be big enough to become a recognised Fairtrade School. We didn’t want to stop there. Once we were a Fairtrade school we wanted to make DrumTumshie a Fairtrade town. We want to be proud of DrumTumshie. But that means getting the adults interested and adults seem even less bothered about it than kids, which is strange if you ask my opinion because you’d think that they were more understanding and understood more about fairness.
If the teachers at DrumTumshie Academy are anything to go by, that’s not the case. At the beginning when we were trying to set up the Fairtrade Group, they all said they’d drink Fairtrade Tea and Coffee in the staff room if it was free and they didn’t seem as committed to the cause as we are. As Miss Direction pointed out – they privilege FREE over FAIR. And that’s what we’ve got to change. She said we have to ‘win hearts and minds’ and my dad said ‘that’s a sair fecht in modern Scotland.’ He’s never really got over the Independence Referendum. I don’t blame him. It seems that not enough people in Scotland understand what Free means. Freedom as in the Arbroath Declaration is not the same as the ‘Enlightenment’ sort of freedom which is all about Free Markets. And I’ve said plenty about that already.
About the Author
Jack MacRoary, also known locally as the Bard of DrumTumshie, comes from the small farming community of TattyBogle, which he has singlehandedly put on the map through his fame. After bursting onto the Scottish literary cultural scene in August 2012, when he appeared at the inaugural Edinburgh eBook Festival, Jack now attends DrumTumshie Academy.
During his brief but eventful literary career so far, Jack has been a blogger, providing an insightful commentary on rural life and Scots culture; a short story writer; and most recently a political commentator through his McSerial contributions to the McStorytellers website.
The Complete TattyBogle, Jack's first “real book” published by McStorytellers in 2015, brings together in a handy compendium all of his musings, commentaries and stories to date.
During his brief but eventful literary career so far, Jack has been a blogger, providing an insightful commentary on rural life and Scots culture; a short story writer; and most recently a political commentator through his McSerial contributions to the McStorytellers website.
The Complete TattyBogle, Jack's first “real book” published by McStorytellers in 2015, brings together in a handy compendium all of his musings, commentaries and stories to date.