Dear Mr Blair,

I’ve just read your speech to the Labour Party Conference and am positively impressed by much of what you say. However, there is one, fundamental and hugely important point that I would like to pick up on, where you say that “. . . [developing economies such as China and India] will attract capital as it moves, trillions of dollars of it . . . , to find the best return”.

Now tell me: How and where does private capital find the best returns?

By exploiting human and natural resources for all they are worth, as it always has done, as the system (our socio-economic order) and human nature (or rather, our more animal than human nature) demands.

There is more (far more) money to be made from exploiting human and natural resources than there is from cultivating and conserving them. That is the fundamental problem that you and many other well-meaning people are not facing up to.

You obviously believe that we can create a just, humane and sustainable world through “enlightened government”, such as your own, creaming off a large proportion of the material wealth created by an inherently unjust, inhumane and unsustainable economy, rooted - naturally enough, in view of what Darwin taught us about human origins - in our primitive animal nature, and using it for socially and environmentally desirable ends.

It won’t (cannot) work, and is leading us towards terrible catastrophe.

Yours sincerely

www.spaceship-earth.org