40 years of Red Nose Day (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month was a special celebration for the children’s charity Comic Relief. It marked 40 years since the start of Red Nose Day. In the days leading up to March 21st, you could hardly switch on the radio or TV without being reminded that famous people, mainly showbiz celebrities, were going to disguise their normal features with red noses of various shapes and sizes to remind us that they were collecting money to improve the lives of poor children.

Endemic

And it does seem difficult not to see this as a positive thing given the fact that, as we are told by the charity Shelter, 120,000 children in the UK wake up homeless every day and many thousands more who may not be homeless have to suffer housing and living conditions that make it impossible for them to live comfortable and fulfilling lives. The Labour government’s new Homelessness Minister, Rusharana Ali, has herself referred to this as ‘a national disgrace’, pointing out that last year ‘more than 117,000 households, including over 150,000 children, were living in temporary accommodation’. Shelter also calls this an ‘outrage’, and understandably so, given that when it was founded in 1966, its promise was to get rid of homelessness within 10 years. Since then, organisations dedicated to solving homelessness have proliferated and Shelter now runs its own weekly lottery – a sure sign that the problem it campaigns about is endemic.

A further recent report by the Barnardo’s charity states that ‘more than a million children in the UK either sleep on the floor or share a bed with parents or siblings because their family cannot afford the “luxury” of replacing broken frames and mouldy linen’ and that ‘the rise in “bed poverty” reflects growing levels of destitution in which low-income families already struggling with soaring food or gas bills often find they are also unable to afford a comfortable night’s sleep’. And in a recent article in the Big Issue, John Bird, founder of that magazine and now a member of the House of Lords, summed up the embedded nature of poverty and homelessness by stating that ‘three decades of the same conversation is exhausting’. Other sources have reiterated the same thing. The centre-right think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, found that ‘the most disadvantaged people in Britain were no better off than they were 15 years ago, with around 13.4 million people living lives marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime’. And Greg Hurst of the Centre for Homeless Impact has expressed the view that ‘we are condemned to repeat the cycle of ebbs and flows of homelessness’.

Realm of fantasy

But why? After all, according to official figures, over a quarter of a million homes in England are classed as ‘long-term empty’, meaning that they have been left vacant for more than six months. Yet we all know that the way things work is that parents and children who need homes cannot simply walk into empty properties and live there. The kind of society we live in does not cater for such needs, basic as they may be, of those who do not have the money to pay for them. In the same way, no matter how technologically efficient food production has become, no matter how much food we are capable of producing, only people with enough money in their pockets will have access to it. In the context of capitalism, John Bird got it right, in one of his Big Issue articles, by stating that ‘ideas of ending poverty are stuck in the realm of fantasy’.

Scratching the surface

So can anything be done at all? It’s clear that Red Nose Day, coming back time after time as it does, can help a little but in the end it can do no more than offer a small amount of temporary relief to the poor or disadvantaged children it is aimed at. No matter how much time and energy is put into it by those involved and no matter how well-meaning they may be, their efforts can do no more than scratch the surface of the poverty problem. They can get nowhere near offering any kind of long-term solution. The Oxfam food policy director, Hanna Saarinen, recognised this recently when she stated: ‘We need to reimagine a new global food system to really end hunger; one that works for everyone.’ But the trouble – and the truth – is that such a food system is simply not feasible in the framework of the world we live in, where, at the end of the day, profit must always come before need. That is why, even in a country like Britain where food is manifestly plentiful, many people are still forced to have recourse to food banks, and charities like Comic Relief are still considered necessary. Of course, millions of workers do manage to keep their heads above water, some living reasonably comfortable lives, but even this is usually at the cost of working hard for an entire lifetime, never being truly free of financial insecurity and often at great cost to the quality of their lives.

Need not profit

And so it will remain until we not only, in the word used by Hanna Saarinen, ‘reimagine’ but also implement a wholly different organisation of society, one that is fully cooperative and human-centred and dedicated to catering for the needs of everyone not producing profit for the tiny minority – in other words designed to take care of everyone in a sustainable, inclusive way. Adequate resources to provide a decent life for all are available, but that decent life cannot be realised under the profit system. It can only be possible in the kind of moneyless, marketless society that we stand for, and that will render regular recourse to charities like Comic Relief and events like Red Nose Day unnecessary and superfluous.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a rather jaundiced article on Comic Relief. "More cold water, comrades . . . "

Comic Relief (1988)

From the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remember February 5th? — the momentous day we all donned our red noses, bow ties and other silly attire, for comic relief. Yet another day of activity to raise yet more funds for charities and worthwhile causes. Millions of people bought red noses; some walked backwards on pub crawls, others ate worms or threw jelly; all supposedly to alleviate suffering here and around the globe.

Working as I do from five in the morning at a newsagents, I had it all day. First half-a-dozen sleepy eyed, red nosed newsboys/ girls — then school kids in an assortment of madcap outfits, and later on even a horse paid a visit asking for donations. These brainwashed children from seven to seventy, convinced that this was the way to end famine and other needs, kept asking me “where is your red nose?” Charity, I replied, is futile as the problems are always recurring. I was told not to be a bore and asked what I would do about these problems.

Well, while Bob Geldof helped raise some one million pounds for famine relief over two years, the Common Market spends more than two million pounds every week on its unwanted food mountains. In Britain’s 248 grain stores there is enough wheat and barley to feed six million people for three years. There are 47,000 tons of beef, 23,000 tons of skimmed milk powder and 248,000 tons of butter, much of which is more than two years old and useless. According to This Week (TV 4 February) and other sources, it is the civil war in Ethiopia which prevents relief agency supplies from reaching areas stricken again by drought. Agonisingly the agencies are ready but they cannot transport the food to where an estimated five million people are at risk of starvation.

On top of this is the fact that over one million pounds is spent every minute on the most destructive, grotesque weapons ever created. “Well, that’s fair enough” the clowns reply, “so what do you propose?” What about a society where all the resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled — where factories, farms, offices, mines and media belong to the whole community regardless of race or sex? A world in which people have free access to all goods and services, giving according to their ability and taking according to their self-defined needs?

At the nearby library red nosed readers were served by red nosed librarians as cars passed by outside with red balloons on their bonnets. The school children dressed as penguins and peasants, threw jelly and streamers, the clowns joined the horse on the backwards walk to the pub. And they call socialists crazy.

Brian.

Action Replay: Comic Belief (2017)

The Action Replay column from the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Comic Relief is a British charity, founded in 1985 by the comedy scriptwriter Richard Curtis and comedian Lenny Henry in response to famine in Ethiopia. The highlight of Comic Relief's appeal is Red Nose Day, a biannual telethon held in March, alternating with sister project Sport Relief. The idea for Comic Relief came from the charity worker Jane Tewson, who established it as the operating name of Charity Projects, a registered charity based in England and Scotland.

Lenny Henry travelled to Ethiopia to celebrate the first Red Nose Day on the 8 February 1988. The event raised £15 million and attracted 30 million television viewers on BBC1. Richard Curtis and Lenny Henry are still active participants of the Red Nose Day Telethon which continues to raise funds for numerous charities that help children in need and tackle worldwide poverty.

The most prominent symbol of Comic Relief is a plastic/foam 'red nose', which is given in various supermarkets and charity shops such as Oxfam in exchange for a donation to the charity and to make others laugh. People are encouraged to wear the noses on Red Nose Day to help raise awareness of the charity. This year’s event took place on Friday 24 March and was broadcast live from Building Six at The O2 in London.

The charity’s clearly stated aim is to 'bring about positive and lasting change in the lives of poor and disadvantaged people, which requires investing in work that addresses people's immediate needs as well as tackling the root causes of poverty and injustice'. A fundamental principle operating at Comic Relief is the 'Golden Pound Principle' where every donated pound is spent on charitable projects. All operating costs, such as staff salaries, are covered by corporate sponsors, or interest earned on money waiting to be distributed.

Large amounts of money flow into Comic Relief, for example the July 2010 accounts for charity registration showed grant payments of ￡59 million, net assets of ￡135 million, with an investment portfolio held in managed pooled funds and fixed term deposits. The average full-time staffing complement was 214 (with 14 staff paid over ￡60,000). Remuneration for the year, excluding pensions, for Kevin Cahill, Chief Executive, was ￡120,410.

On the 13 March 2015, the Red Nose event took place at the London Palladium and raised £99,418,831. At the end of the 2015 Red Nose Day telethon it was announced that in its 30-year history, Comic Relief, the Red Nose Day and Sport Relief appeals had raised in excess of £1bn (£1,047,083,706).

Obviously this is a very well-meaning charity whose stated aim is to improve the lives of people at home and abroad. Many people will experience a sense of wellbeing from donating money to a good cause – feeling that they have made a contribution to ease the suffering of others, and this is, in a way, laudable.

However, one does not want to be perceived as a killjoy or to be lacking the ‘milk of human kindness’ but we might ask ourselves why a charity that has operated for over 30 years has not been able to remedy or overcome the problems of famine or bring about real change in the lives of poor and disadvantaged children.

These problems continue to persist despite large sums of money thrown at them. Could it be that well-meaning initiatives like Red Nose Day and their like, deal only with the symptoms of poverty and famine and not the causes? We live in a world where we could produce enough food for all and yet people still starve. We learn from Economics text books that ‘demand’ is identified as the ability to pay – so food, shelter and other necessaries of life will not be made available to the starving and dispossessed unless they have the money to purchase them. It’s a crazy system that needs to be replaced by socialism – a world without money where people democratically produce and share the goods and services they create. In a socialist society there will be no need for Red Nose Day, Sport Relief, Comic Relief or any other ‘sticking plaster’ initiative, however well-meaning to exist, because we will have created a society where these problems are firmly left in the past.

Kevin.