No more British support for coal, oil and gas projects around the world. No more cheap energy for developing countries, at least not if Britain has anything to do with it.
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.
Are we to deny to Indians, or to Chinese, or to Brazilians, the same progress that we ourselves have made, and instead leave them defecating in communal pits while waiting to die of cholera or typhus?
Are we to have the women of Africa continue to die, as the women of Europe did for thousands of years, from the fumes emitted by the open fires over which they cooked?
This has nothing to do with post-imperial guilt, which is contestable. This has everything to do with common humanity, which is not.
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