Nando’s has come under fire for reducing its corporate tax bill by up to a third through the legal use of offshore tax havens. The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage comments that he would boycott Nando’s for its tax avoidance if it wasn’t for the fact that eating chicken with his hands makes him feel “like a medieval king”.
Source: The Guardian
We’re sorry. This news story isn’t news; and as stories go, ‘journalist exaggerates fickleness over restaurant food for dramatic effect’ isn’t exactly a page-turner. (Well it is, in the sense that it’s all on one page and we wanted to turn to a different one almost as soon as we’d started reading.)
Maybe it’s because it’s a Monday morning, but we find Stuart’s article (linked above) difficult to follow. He ‘secretly’ feels like a king when he eats Nando’s chicken, but this is not especially secret when it headlines the article. He suggests that sitting in Nando’s puts him into a medieval mind-set while also noting the ubiquity of phone speakers: one of many faults he declares that the restaurants have. Wait, it’s not Monday morning? Then we really are confused. There’s no convincing basis for Stuart to eat at Nando’s, there’s no firm basis for Stuart not to eat at Nando’s, and yet there’s an entire article about all this?
The piece would seem to be an extended exploration of what it means to be a hypocrite in modern society. We are not sure that such ramblings on a national newspaper’s website are necessary, and here’s why: it goes without saying (well, without saying at length) it’s nearly impossible to live without hypocrisy. Take Stuart Heritage himself. Last month he was a guest on Knightmare Live, a stage show which has nostalgically revived a cult children’s TV series, then he spun out a Guardian article decrying children’s TV nostalgia less than a fortnight later. We might at this point question Stu’s apparent lack of consistency and whether a reader might find this insulting, but we’re not journalists by trade so maybe we are missing the subtleties of his craft.
In our craft, we come across the word ‘balance’ quite a lot. If things don’t balance, we’re not content. So here, for the sake of balance, is the Nando’s response to the Guardian’s reporting of its tax practices via Accountancy Age.
Enjoy your dinner. We don’t really need to know where you’re going for it.