Through the eye of the reporter

 One of the distinguishing features listening to the BBC reportage of the plight of the boat people is the tone of the people reporting the scene. These reporters are descriptive of the society we have produced over the last decade or two and compared to the life hardened people in the boats one is struck by the naivety of the questions and the incomprehensible sense of disconnect between the scene they are reporting on and the secure, padded upbringing that people growing up in Britain have, especially their assumption of rights.

There is a bleating romanticism about what should be done and what we should expect to be done. The images are all about the plight of the children and how these children are being thrust into a situation not of their own making and therefore our compassion towards them and our hopes for their safety and a successful conclusion is unambiguous and not open to question.

Escaping from the carnage of Aleppo these children and their parents come from a different world, a world where living and dying was on the turn of a dice. These kids, never mind their parents are years older in experience than the reporter, who fresh out of university, raised in suburbia, protected from any sort of hostility by a pleather of laws is out of their depth. Its plainly clear from their inane questions which reflect their cosseted upbringing that they have no right being there.

We seem to have become a nation where the ordinary struggle, which ordinary people have in their lives is not represented by the employees of the media companies through which we see our view of the world. The people in charge, the producers and the presenters represent a swath of Middle England who hold views that are as stratified and cemented in a world in which they 'wish existed'.

Reality is somewhat different and the reportage of calamity, be it on the sea around Greece or in the farthest flung corners of the earth have little in common with this anomalous nation where self congratulatory Political Correctness has cut off any reasoned interrogation into how people really live.