Some sense in the "Swindle"

I had the repeat of that "Great Global Warming Swindle" on in the background last night. I didn't really watch it last week when it was on, and I only caught bits of it again last night (I know - I should turn the thing off if I'm not really watching it!). But there was one bit in particular, towards the end, with which I agreed, and whicih has been a bee in my bonnet for a long time.

It was not about the science. It was about social and development policy towards the developing/undeveloped world. All too often, the point was made, the developing world is sitting on piles of natural wealth and energy sources we want to use. We happily take it from them, but then tell them they shouldn't be using those same resources because they'll destroy the planet, as if somehow we are not.

But assuming we accept that humanity is causing global warming (even as the scientists on that program seemed not to be), one of the biggest factors in that has been the rampant replication of that Gaia destroying super-virus, homo sapiens, over the past few decades in particular. Chris Huhne made the point at a talk of his I heard in October that the global population growth is a big part of the problem, and that economic development was a way to reduce it.

Yet "The Great Global Warming Swindle" sounded about right when it said that we seemed to be saying that because of the potential to increase global warming we didn't really actually want those billions of people to develop their way out of the economic strife that tends to make people recoil to the security of breeding lots of children. Or at least we are putting massive obstacles in the way of such development.

Which brings me to my idea...that we should put the Commonwealth, far more so than either Europe or transatlantic polity, at the core of our foreign and international development policy for the twenty-first century. Nearly sixty years ago, Churchill suggested that Britain's post-war role in the world ought to be as a link between Europe, America and the Commonwealth. We seem to have put a lot of emphasis on the former two, but for a variety of reasons seem to have quietly dropped the latter.

Yes, the intervening decades have seen many upheavals of independence from Empire and those newly "emancipated" nations struggling and jostling to find their position in the world. But let's face it, we are only where we are because of them. Because of the way we colonised them and took from them what we wanted, what would make us materially rich.

The Commonwealth could be a model, modern community of nations, with members from every continent and from every stratum of economic development on the planet, from the very richest to the very poorest, working together under a common aim of redistributing the common wealth within it to ensure that all its peoples attain their full potential.

And not only for ecological ends, but also for global security ends. Just as it appears that the underprivileged on urban sink estates are more likely to drift into criminality (I know, that sounds so patronisingly Victorian but I hope you get what I mean), so those whole nations and peoples that see the imbalances in the world's wealth, and, moreoever believe resentfully that they are poor because we are rich, and that we have taken our riches from them over decades and centuries, are potentially more likely to want easy ways, such as nuclear weapons, to punch above their weight in the world.

So, let's have at it - without it becoming another resented imperial venture, how can we put those nations to whom we owe so very much of our own successes at the heart of our economic development strategies and help them overleap the pains of industrialisation that could further jeopardise the planet and in the process give them the economic security they need to stop helter skelter population growth exacerbating the problems? Ironically, of course, if we heed the calls to reduce our carbon footprint, it is likely that we will set back the economic development of many of those same countries because we are no longer willing to buy our Kenyan vegetables and so on. Our reduction is such consumption has to be replaced with other ways for those countries to develop. Imagine the great wealth of the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and the developing wealth of the likes of India and Malaysia, being brought to bear to address the abject poverty of the likes of Zimbabwe, Tanzania or Bangaladesh. We could create a beautiful common wealth together.