First things first. It’s somewhere beyond obvious that it would be preferable if U2 had not moved some part of their business to the Netherlands in order to avoid paying tax on royalties in Ireland. It would be significantly better for what I am about to write if Bono had not been named in the Paradise Papers for engaging in a (wholly legal) investment in a Lithuanian shopping centre, via the tax haven that is Malta. In fact, there are about a million things Bono could do that would make it easier to stick up for him. He could make the many and varied charities he is involved in devote more of their resources to aid than to the sometimes nebulous concept of “raising consciousness”. He could perhaps not describe those working in the aid sector as “cranks carping from the sidelines” when they raise concerns about the practical problems of his campaigns bypassing African entrepreneurs to work directly with assorted kleptocracies.
Above all, he could stop being quite so pious all the time. He could stop making his own good deeds seem like something the rest of us should aspire to, because it makes people resent him all the more. But, blimey, I felt sorry for him this week after he and The Edge took part in an annual charity event in Dublin, busking for the homeless. Just type Bono and hypocrite into Twitter and see the stream of bile emerge. Damian Rice and Glen Hansard, who also participated, didn’t get it in the neck for daring to ask people for money for the homeless. Just Bono.
The problem for Bono is that once you align yourself so publicly with the side of social justice, people – unreasonably, perhaps – demand perfection. And if you happen to be the singer of a rock’n’roll band while aligning yourself publicly with social justice, people also expect you to be a revolutionary, rather than someone who employs diligent tax advisers. But anyone who participates in capitalist economies ceases to be perfect with respect to social justice: pretty much all of us have treasured possessions whose existence is contingent on the exploitation of labour. Pretty much all of us are the beneficiaries in some way of some awful degradation of the world. Those of us who work for ourselves ask financial experts to find some way to minimise our tax exposure: can we offset some of our utility bills, our phone bills and so on? We don’t go to the Inland Revenue offering them our bank accounts and a suggestion they take what they want.
Instead we make trade-offs. Buy a pair of trainers made in some appalling factory in east Asia but feel happy we have a direct debit to a child poverty charity. Eat some crappy burger from a takeaway, but buy some organic veg from the shop. Maybe it’s worth thinking of Bono as living life in some hugely inflated scale of that. The shabby things U2 and Bono do (and which are, one can be sure, far from unique among the super-rich of music) are balanced in the ledger against the worthwhile things.
Let’s not forget that the list of worthwhile things Bono and U2 have done over their career – whether or not you like their music, whether or not you think Bono is an arse – far outstrips what the vast majority of their contemporaries do. He has campaigned for debt relief. Not just by shouting slogans from a stage, but by engaging with the right to persuade them to the cause. He has campaigned for Aids awareness. He has set up fairtrade companies. He has toured for Amnesty. He’s supported, variously, Chernobyl Children International, the Clinton Global Initiative, Every Mother Counts, Keep a Child Alive, Make Poverty History, Millennium Villages, Not On Our Watch, the Red Cross, the Lunchbox Fund, Unicef, War Child, Water.org, Witness and more (according to Inside Philanthropy). He’s helped establish three different campaigning organisations: Red, One and DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa). This is not an insignificant list. It speaks of serious and genuine commitment.
The sad thing is that if he had just sat on his backside in his mansion counting his money, mumbling the odd platitude in interviews, but never doing anything, no one would care. His views on social activism would be unworthy of comment. No one would complain about his hypocrisy, criticise U2’s tax arrangements, or sneer at him for busking for the homeless. Everyone would just assume it was business as usual for a rock star, and not raise an eyebrow. But once you try to be good, you can never be good enough.
That strikes me as a terrible shame. It’s not that I want the world to hail Bono – I feel no great urge to do so myself – but I don’t understand the visceral reaction that causes people to look for excuses to despise him. Sure, pull him up when he missteps. But why pull him up when he’s sincerely trying to do the right thing? Unless people really would prefer stars who think the world is worthy neither of engagement nor improvement. In which case, that’s your loss.
