Death: at least make it profitable

Occasionally, you see a publicity stunt so inept, so tone-deaf, that you wonder how it got through the planning stage. Here's a humdinger folks.

This morning I got an invitation to the university's Macmillan Cancer Coffee Morning. I decided to  go along, if I'm free. I'm largely against death in general and I've had enough friends and relatives die of cancer in recent years for me to be against the misery and suffering of that particular diseases for me to want to support efforts to prevent or cure it.

Then this Tweet caught my eye:

Isn't that sweet? A massive engineering firm helping its employees contribute to curing cancer in a fun and cute way.

Hold on a minute. BAe Systems Air? I'm sure that rings a bell. I know that 'Systems' is a nice bland word that doesn't give much away but there's something nagging away at the back of my mind.

Ah, yes, that's it. BAe Systems is British Aerospace as was, and BAe Systems Air makes big fast stuff.

What kind of big fast stuff? Well, Typhoon fighter-bombers and Paveway IV bombs, amongst other things. Just for you students of Anglo-Saxon literature there's also a Beowulf all-terrain vehicle, described as 'poetry in motion': Auden apocryphally said that 'poetry makes nothing happen' but the Beowulf can insert heavily-armed killers into any crowd of pesky protestors in minutes.

And they don't just make this stuff: they 'support' their own customers just like football teams have sponsors. BAe Systems has picked the cutest underdogs in the league: the Sultanate of Oman, a violent dictatorship rated by Freedom House as 'not free'.

So that's BAe Systems. I guess their PR department knows that it needs all the love it can get, between the core business of providing mass death to any customer, no questions asked, and the awkward business of all those bribery and corruption allegations and convictions. A coffee morning for charity, heavily promoted on social media is just the ticket.

But what of Macmillan Cancer Care? I know it's hard to say no to eager volunteers, but did nobody at HQ wonder if a charity working hard to prevent suffering, misery and death might look a teensy bit hypocritical hosting an event and taking money from a company whose whole raison d'être is the aforesaid suffering, misery and death. Perhaps they had a big banner hanging above the coffee and cakes: 'Death From Above, Not From Within'. Perhaps they can have a little competition like the Great British Bake-Off?

Ah yes. The Bombe Surprise. It's hard to pick just one winner when your normal method is to kill them all and let God sort them out.

Oh look: double points for this one as it manages to promote the company, grovel to its customers and threaten death from above, all the while polluting the timeline of a cancer charity.

Perhaps there's a perfectly rational way of looking at it. From BAe's perspective, every cancer victim is a potential target lost. It is clearly not against premature and piteous deaths, it just wants to find the profit in it, and quite frankly carpet-bombing is far more efficient than cancer (and besides, quite a few munitions are subsequently carcinogenic to the inhabitants of the unfortunate lands visited by their customers). So if Macmillan cares to open an outlet in say Syria, it's guaranteed some repeat customers. Everyone's a winner!

Joking aside, this is a superb case study for PR students. For Macmillan a nice idea has become appropriated by a major arms manufacturer to whitewash its reputation: for both BAe and Macmillan it's an object lesson in giving a moment's thought to the credibility of your activities. If this story grows, they'll have a representative on the airwaves trying to normalise what it does, and claiming that events like the cancer coffee morning demonstrate what a good corporate citizen it is: we see the same thing when Labour MPs in places like Barrow defend the retention of nuclear weapons because it 'provides employment': in the short term, it does. In the long term, as Keynes put it, we are all dead, and I guess the survivors of a nuclear exchange can find fresh employment burying the remains and decontaminating the scorched earth.

As for me: I think I'll find a cancer charity that doesn't think it's OK to be used as part of a PR campaign. Though weirdly, this happened:

People or puppies?

We all got an email last week from some do-gooder on the staff. She'd like us to donate to keep the nice little doggie-woggies warm this Christmas.

Now, I like puppies as much as the next man. Providing the next man prefers his canines casseroled. They bite your children and shit on your duvet. But I understand that some people find this kind of behaviour endearing. However, I'm far from convinced that the best thing the well-paid employees of a university could do to alleviate suffering this winter is to pamper some pooches.

I'm not sure if my kind colleague is aware that we're in the middle of an appalling recession. That the unemployment rate is currently over 8%. That the city has a food bank (one local MP Emma Reynolds has visited, but not Paul Uppal MP, who is the local representative of the political and economic forces responsible for its existence).

People are hungry and homeless in this town. Pets are cute, but they're not essential and they're not the prime victims of the recession or the government. The usual argument is that animals are speechless victims of human cruelty. Very true. But they're still not as important as vulnerable humans. Until everybody has a home and a decent meal inside them, or you want to help humans in other ways, I suggest you direct your cash to a food bank (I haven't located a non-religious one yet) or to any of these charities in the absence of any political parties prepared to fundamentally restructure the economy for the benefit of all.

Shelter
Women's Aid
Crisis
National Literacy Trust
Liter of Light
North Staffordshire Special Adventure Playground

My siblings are all richer than me, so they'll be getting donations to these charities as Christmas presents… whether they like it or not.

Kidneys… or kids? Kids… or Kidneys

Presumably they mean well, but this horrified me on moral grounds.

I visited a friend last night, and called in to Waitrose near his house (yes, well off my beat). After paying, I was given a green token, and told it related to charity. By the exit was this:

Each compartment was for a particular charity, and shoppers placed the token in the charity of their choice - Waitrose hands over some £1000 according to votes cast. It horrified me - the idea that somebody's future health depended on whether I preferred a renal charity over a bloody dogs' home or whatever the third organisation was. I don't want charity to exist at all - governments exist to solve these problems - but the Darwinian ruthlessness of this game-show scheme made me very uncomfortable. What's next? Cancer v. AIDS: who deserves to survive?

I put my token in the renal slot - balls to the animals until we've got decent healthcare.

Send us your money

Because we live in a decadent culture in which medical research is seen as a luxury extra while nuclear weapons and Michael Gove are essential items for government expenditure, charities have to find increasingly odd ways simply to attract the attention of you lot.

My friend Emma has taken up the burden and is doing a night-time marathon walk ('The Moonwalk') in aid of breast cancer research with thousands of other people and I think you should send her some of your money.

You'll only spend it on Kinder Eggs and smack otherwise, so cough up here.

Charity begins at home

You may be familiar with the ONE foundation, which features endless whining from Bono - it looks like a vanity project populated by rock stars and rich capitalists after some decent PR. Like many celebrity outfits (and sports charities), it doesn't actually do anything charitable, it lobbies for clean water, being nice to everyone and similar unobjectionable things.

One thing it's very good at is ending poverty. More specifically, it's put an end to poverty in the New York executive and marketing communities.

Bono's ONE campaign had blitzed the New York media with fancy gift boxes. These contained several items, from designer water bottles to $15 bags of Starbucks coffee, as well as information explaining that poverty-stricken African children live on less than $1.25 a day – "about the cost of the cookie in this box".

in 2008, the most recent year for which tax records are available, ONE took $14,993,873 in donations from philanthropists, of which a thrifty $184,732 was distributed to charity. More than $8m was spent on executive and employee salaries.

An admirable achievement, I'm sure you'll agree.