This article was taken from the January issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
The UK's export policy should promote international security abroad and economic well-being at home. It does neither. Instead it subsidises arms production and global warming. And it misses out on a huge opportunity to create green jobs at home.
Military goods make up 1.5p in every pound of the UK's export earnings and the arms trade accounts for one out of every 500 jobs in this country. Yet almost one in every two people employed by UK Trade & Investment, the government department that promotes overseas trade, works for the benefit of the defence industries.
And, according to the Campaign Against The Arms Trade, in 2004 the UK gave £900 million in subsidies to the arms trade.
In 2005 the Ministry of Defence concluded that the economic arguments for promoting exports were chimerical and that the subsidies were intended to allow for "defence diplomacy"'. In other words, we have chosen as a country to buy influence abroad by subsidising the militarisation of foreign countries.
Global warming, in turn, is advanced by the actions of the Export Credits Guarantee Department, which encourages trade by paying British manufacturers if foreign buyers default. In 2008-9, about 70 per cent of its guarantees were accounted for by exports of about 100 Airbus aircraft. The ECGD considers the environmental impact of all its activities - except for defence and aerospace, the main sectors it in fact supports. The UK government is promoting global warming and not bothering to document its culpability.
We know we must retool for a greener economy. We know we must address global warming. Let's use our export policies to promote green jobs at home and green diplomacy abroad.
Gerry Kearns is the author of Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford University Press)
Read other articles from the Rebooting Britain series - Tax people back into the cities
Teach kids to see in four dimensions
Open democracy to the online masses
Reinvent the way we live together
Live life as a lottery
Pull the plug on broadcast regulation
Enact beta versions of new laws
Make carbon emissions hurt
Slash the universities and go virtual
Make policy using prediction markets
Transform cities into green jungles
Promote another crash
Ditch Twitter: it's dangerous for democracy
Encourage failure
Make education more flexible
Set government data (radically) free
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
