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Mon, 11 Jul 2005

I don’t normally do this

but some things you just have to respond to. Councillor Terry Kelly from Renfrewshire council felt the need to write to the Guardian’s letter page to say this:

“Congratulations to the scientific community…. Back in January they fired a bullet on to a 280m-mile space journey, and it has now smashed through a comet travelling at 23,000 miles a minute. Now they can try something really difficult, like feeding a starving third world child.”

Coming from anyone else, I would have just shook my head at the naivety. But from a wannabe politician this was too much, so I had to email him:

Dear Cllr Terry,

I read your letter in today’s Guardian with interest. I know how easy it is to be shocked by spending in one field of human activity when one perceives a need in another; I frequently find myself in the same position*. However, you surely can’t believe that the existence of starving people in the Third World is the result of scientists lacking the necessary knowledge or desire to help.

If children are starving in Africa then this is the result of politicians’ decisions: they are the ones who not only impose trade restrictions and subsidies and do little to calm the continent’s conflicts, but who also hold the strings of the scientific purse in the West. There are any number of crop scientists and irrigation experts who would gladly feed the starving, but politicians feel that the money is better spent elsewhere; the world’s scientists didn’t sit down around a table and choose between investigating a comet or feeding the poor, you know.

You might remember the importance of politicians in choosing the direction of scientific activity if you ever rise to a position of proper power in the political world. I suspect you might go far; you have, after all, already mastered the delicate art of scapegoating.

Yours,

Ian Walker

*For example, I’m currently staggered that we’re prepared merrily to fritter away billions on hosting the Olympics when with only a tiny amount of that money I could carry out research that would save people’s lives.

I will be interested to see if he replies.

Update: He did reply, which was nice given that I’m not in his constituency and so bothering with my opinions is outside his balliwick, as it were. His reply said that despite my “jaundiced” view of politicians, I shared his concerns. He went on to say that his letter was not an attack on the scientific community but was instead saying there was no technical reason we cannot solve the problems of the planet, which rather makes it sound as if he hadn’t read his own letter. “Whether you like it or not it is the politicians who will solve this” he informed me leadenly, which was precisely my point in the first place and so it was nice to see he had come round to my way of thinking; I must be a more persuasive writer than I give myself credit for.

I turned down his kind offer to send me a Labour Party membership form.

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