Lost in space and a broken energy market: blame it on the obsession with a small state
Twenty-two years in and it’s already obvious that this century is demanding challenges and responses for which the British Tory mindset, with one or two honourable exceptions, is wholly unprepared. This century does not require a small state – it requires an agile state. More years of denial and the UK will be in very serious economic and social trouble.
Last week came a vignette of small-state stupidity, ceding a major area of 21st-century economic activity to France and undermining our national security – with close observers believing that no minister even knew the magnitude of their crassness. I speak of the merger, on French terms, of the formerly British-controlled space company OneWeb with France’s Eutelsat, turbo-boosting the EU space effort. These Brexiters are remarkably incompetent at doing Brexit. But then incompetence comes with the territory.
OneWeb was Britain’s opportunistic way of recovering the ground we lost in space because of Brexit and the consequent forced exit from the EU’s Galileo and Copernicus programmes. Rescued from insolvency by a daring £500m bid by the UK government two years ago, OneWeb owns valuable allocated orbit “shells” and spectrum rights, reckoned to represent an astounding 15% of all space available for service delivery to Earth. This spatial real estate is the basis for a unique constellation of satellites and for the next phase of commercial space development and sophisticated communications – worth in the decades ahead tens of billions. Last week, Tory ministers let it slip through our fingers.
The Ukraine war had forced OneWeb to reschedule its satellite launch programme, at some expense. Every shareholder agreed except the British: tax cuts were more important, the state must be
Read more on theguardian.com
