In a world that seems miserable sometimes folk just snap!

‘Across the Celtic countries..discontent over fuel and food poverty, housing and income inequality is now...endemic and a growing problem’

Sometimes small events can have dramatic and far reaching consequences. I was thinking about this when the ‘great debate’ was reactivated last week on the Isle of Man about a handful of refugees. Where did the Syrian refugee problem come from?

It was actually an apparently random event in a small town in Tunisia that sparked a series of incidents which led to the toppling of regimes across the Arab world that in some instances had been in power for half a century.

A poor street vendor tired of the daily humiliation heaped on him by petty officialdom self immolated. Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi could not have foreseen what his actions would lead to he had just had enough of the petty bureaucracy, corruption and self interest he saw all around him and snapped. Almost a decade later the consequences of his actions are still rocking the Arab world and have moved on into Europe.

I suppose few in the Tunisia hierarchy who were riding high on the hog while others suffered thought anything would shatter the idyll they had enjoyed for decades after all ‘little people don’t matter’ or they didn’t until that day in January 2011.

It's easy to see the Tunisia episode as being solely a Arab phenomena but of course it wasn’t eventually the flow of refugees from both North Africa and the Middle East which the instability led to caused a political rupture in Europe which is still being felt with the rise of populism. Even we were not untouched as arguably the adverse reaction to accommodating a handful of refugees was a consequence of what people perceived or thought was happening in wider Europe.

It goes to show that you don’t have to be a HNWI or one of the two ronnies with their billions to rock the world sometimes change can come from the most unexpected corners - Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi proved that!

Resentment is also not simply a factor confined to poor third world countries. I study the news each week from across the Celtic countries and discontent over fuel and food poverty, housing and income inequality is now more endemic and a growing problem in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Mann and Cornwall. At the same time the disadvantaged see the greedy business class and corrupt political systems that compound their despair prosper. To complement this the media - for the most part - are compliant ‘slugs’ that reflects the status quo rather than challenge injustice.

Image: French protest over Bouazizi

Bernard Moffatt