I WANT to say "I get it", which I do. But I also want to say "this is unfair, in fact, it’s even cruel."

I understand - partially - why some are irked by the return of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas. What I don’t get is the casual collateral damage: a whole generation of decent kids shamed because they thought they were doing the right thing back in 1984. Actually, scrub that - we were doing the right thing.

Band Aid was re-released yesterday to a flood of denunciation: it’s "colonial", a "white saviour narrative", it’s inherently "racist".

For those who weren’t alive at the time, let me tell you a little about my generation. Explanation is incumbent, I feel, as I’m at an age which means many weren’t there, and so don’t understand. It was another century, evidently, when this happened.

Read more by Neil Mackay

Time doesn’t undo mistakes, but in the gulf of years which has passed a rather lumpen attitude has set in which takes recent history and subjects it to a crude stare. There’s an inability to see decades gone as anything other than a disgrace.

There was much in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s worth defending and celebrating. The freedoms many take for granted today wouldn’t exist if parents and grandparents hadn’t taken to the streets, or attempted to make the lives of others better.

Band Aid is an event worth championing; though it’s also worth reassessing, for there were naive errors in the song, certainly. The intention was faultless, though not the execution.

I recall the days after Michael Buerk’s report on the Ethiopian famine........

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