I tried to watch Comic Relief on Friday night, but couldn't stand it - something about all those vacuous, jolly celebs cheek by jowl with all that suffering; Fern Britton turning down the corners of her smile and saying, 'And now for a story that encapsulates the reason we're all here.'

I'd love to claim my discomfort was more than instinctive, but it
wasn't. Nonetheless, that's no reason not to trust it, so I've tried to
think it through.

Presumably, the justification for Comic Relief is that, however tasteless the juxtapositions and however insufferably smug the tone,
it’s raising money for ‘good causes’ and that’s unquestionably the
right thing to do. There is clearly a straightforward logic to this and
it’s reinforced on the day with all those inserts about successful
Comic Relief projects benefiting from the British public’s generosity.

But what if it’s not the right thing to do? Or rather, what if its rightness is mitigated by a more complex logic that ultimately produces an opposite result? After all, over the last half century the west has pumped more than $1 trillion in aid into Africa and yet the average African is poorer than they were in 1970. Of course, such figures don’t prove that aid doesn’t work, but they hardly provide a ringing endorsement of its success.

Statistics are notoriously untrustworthy. Last week, I saw my friend Jimmy who told me a lovely quote I’d not heard before: ‘Too often statistics are used like a drunk uses a lamppost; for support rather than illumination.’ But, if I risk such an accusation, so does Comic Relief. Throughout the evening, figure after figure was trotted out to justify the undertaking: ‘You have raised X amount of money, which has gone to Y number of projects, helping Z number of people.’

I’ve spent some longish spells in Southern Africa over the last 20 years and can certainly tell plenty of stories about flawed aid projects and failing aid workers. But, now I think about it, I realise that my real problem with Comic Relief is not the effect it has on Africa so much as the effect it has on us.

Personally, I have come to believe that aid, as it currently exists, is a corruption that propagates a mistaken worldview in both givers and receivers. However much the UN might (necessarily) try to create an absolute definition of poverty, wealth remains relative. Its inequitable distribution is a function of two things: chance and structure. Aid, by its nature, can only ever address the first of these two root causes. This, of itself, does not make aid a ‘bad thing’; but I now see too many ways in which it actually propagates the structural injustices and the mistaken worldview. And what would this say about British people? At best that they are naive, at worst, that they remain willfully ignorant to avoid more uncomfortable truths.

As a kid, I remember burning my hand at a friend’s house. In line with the old wives’ tale, my friend’s mum rubbed butter on it, which made it sting and blister. I don’t question her motivation in trying to treat the burn any more than the fact that I now know she was going about it the wrong way.  And her efforts didn’t just fail to make it better, they made it worse.