The United Kingdom ought indeed to increase its subscription to the European Space Agency. This Government gets almost nothing right, but its enthusiasm for space exploration is an important, if rare, exception.
Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth. Thus is human mastery of nuclear processes beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day.
The technologies that will bring us to that day have always been impossible without public funding, and they always will be. As much for that reason as for any other, outer space is the province of all humanity, the property of us all. In fact faithful to the principles set out by President Eienhower when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly on 22nd September 1960, Britain and others must insist on this common ownership against American, increasingly also Asian, and other corporate interests.
And that is where confidence in this Government breaks down. But what of the other lot?
Look back to 1870, to each of what were to become the New Deal United States, Social Democratic Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc. Then look at each of those in 1970. Neither laissez-faire economics, nor caring overly much about the fate of rare voles, had delivered electrification, or mass transportation, or decent accommodation, or proper sanitation, or universal vaccination, or space exploration. Meaning that these days, the ostensible heirs of those traditions would resist any and all of those developments. In parts of the world where they do not have to live, they actively do resist them.
The all-women shortlist system, of which Laura Pidcock is a beneficiary, has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 85 per cent Hard Right today. The changes to the British economy since 1977 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya.
A position of being anti-industrial at home but pro-war abroad is ridiculous in itself, and bespeaks a total lack of comprehension of how wars are fought. But those MPs are Thatcher’s Daughters, unable to understand the rage against deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars, and probably unaware of a growing number of young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, have been excluded from school and university curricula.
Mother Gaia reigns supreme, and we are expected to fight wars for Her even while, under Her petticoats, we shiver and starve in the dark. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
Look back to 1870, to each of what were to become the New Deal United States, Social Democratic Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc. Then look at each of those in 1970. Neither laissez-faire economics, nor caring overly much about the fate of rare voles, had delivered electrification, or mass transportation, or decent accommodation, or proper sanitation, or universal vaccination, or space exploration. Meaning that these days, the ostensible heirs of those traditions would resist any and all of those developments. In parts of the world where they do not have to live, they actively do resist them.
The all-women shortlist system, of which Laura Pidcock is a beneficiary, has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left in 1994 to 85 per cent Hard Right today. The changes to the British economy since 1977 have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars waged since 1997 have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya.
A position of being anti-industrial at home but pro-war abroad is ridiculous in itself, and bespeaks a total lack of comprehension of how wars are fought. But those MPs are Thatcher’s Daughters, unable to understand the rage against deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars, and probably unaware of a growing number of young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, have been excluded from school and university curricula.
Mother Gaia reigns supreme, and we are expected to fight wars for Her even while, under Her petticoats, we shiver and starve in the dark. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
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