Labour promised a national plan run by a separate department of economic affairs under George Brown. It would make Britain grow by a quarter in just six years … But Labour had come to power just as the boom the Conservatives had begun was overheating. Imports were flooding in and wages were rising. ibid.
The economists who had began to realise the economy was far beyond their control; they were being used. ibid.
The attempt to plan growth had failed. Britain was left with little expansion and political disaster. Most economists blamed it on the government’s failure to devalue. ibid.
In the early 1970s many economists began to find they no longer understood how money behaved … Prices and unemployment began to rise together: people called it stagflation. ibid.
Monetarism offered an attractive technical explanation for the problem of inflation but from it would come in less than ten years another scheme for Britain’s salvation: a set of scientific rules which if the politicians followed them correctly would create the right conditions for economic growth … The time was right for the monetarists. ibid.
Then in March 1976 Britain fell into the abyss. Foreign investors led by American bankers panicked. The Pound began to slide against the Dollar and nothing would stop it. Britain faced bankruptcy. In desperation Labour turned to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. An IMF team came to London. ibid.
The supply of money was to be reduced by increasing interest rates and cutting public spending. Inflation would fall and enterprise flourish. ibid.
But the economy did not behave in the way the monetarists had predicted … Even more mystifying was the behaviour of the money supply. ibid.
In the budget of 1981 public borrowing was cut by a fifth; 364 leading economists wrote to The Times and the prime minister accusing her of virtually destroying the economy. That summer there were riots in English cities. ibid.
35 years ago one man set out to turn this country into a modern industrial utopia – he was Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of a newly independent black African state. His aim was to transform Ghana into a society shaped and driven by the power of science. At the heart of Kwame Nkrumah’s plan was a giant dam that would produce vast quantities of cheap electricity. Enough power to build a modern industrial state in the heart of Africa within a generation. But what Nkrumah did not foresee was that with the dam would come other more dangerous forms of power which he could not control – political and economic forces that would tear apart his vision of using science and technology to create a model for the new Africa. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box V: Black Power, BBC 1992
Power meant electricity and the source was to be the Giant Volta River that flowed through the eastern heart of the country. Ever since the 1920s the British had planned to build a dam there ... In the early ’50s Britain was desperate for a cheap source of aluminium. And Nkrumah joined with the British to resuscitate the scheme. The British authorities saw the power from the dam simply as a means to boost the empire’s supply of aluminium. But for Nkrumah it was much more. He saw it as the key to fulfilling his country’s destiny. ibid.
The Dam was now a hostage in the vicious confrontations of the Cold War. A year before, the Congo had been torn apart by a brutal civil war. America and the Soviet Union backed opposite sides. The policy of the new Kennedy administration was to fight the spread of communism in Africa. In 1960 Brezhnev, the President of the Soviet Union, had visited Ghana. It frightened America’s leaders. They were determined that Nkrumah, despite his brand of African socialism, would be their man. Nkrumah though wanted to keep Ghana and Africa out of the Cold War. ibid.
In the early sixties Ghana became a Mecca for European industrialists eager to win large contracts from Nkrumah’s government. They began to discover that the easiest way was to offer officials from Nkrumah’s party a bribe. This soon became the accepted way of doing business in Accra. What resulted was a rush to sell Ghana anything, no matter now inappropriate for an emerging African nation. Vast sums of Ghana’s precious foreign currency were spent on these projects. Then in 1964 Nkrumah’s industrial experiment received another body-blow: the world price of cocoa which had been falling for four years finally crashed. It was Ghana’s main source of foreign exchange. The millions of pounds needed to pay for the new factories began to dry up. Ghana, once one of the richest countries in Africa, began to slide into debt. Nkrumah turned to help to the European industrialists … Nkruma was an increasingly isolated figure on the world stage. What had once been seen as visionary ideas were now perceived as dangerous megalomania, and his country was sinking ever deeper into debt. ibid.
The military coup won enormous popular support. Nkrumah had failed to deliver the modern Ghana he had promised. ibid.
Rawlings became a popular figure on a par with Nkrumah; his main aim was to lift the burden of debt. ibid.
In 1945 in the aftermath of War scientists were heroes, particularly the physicists who had built the atomic bomb. ‘They are men,’ said Life magazine, ‘who wear the tunics of supermen and stand in the spotlight of a thousand suns’. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box VI: A is for Atom, BBC 1992
In the late ’40s there was a growing belief that scientific methods could be used to solve social problems. ibid.
They had found that the closer they peered into the structure of the world the more complex and unpredictable it became. ibid.
Politicians began to look to Atomic power as more than just cheap electricity. It became the way to a better world. ibid.
Then in October 1957 there was a major accident in Britain. The core of the [Calder Hall] reactor caught fire and spewed high levels of radioactivity across north-west England. The radioactivity released was far worse than the public was told. ibid.
The idyllic picture of a nuclear Eden masked a [Soviet] reality in which safety was barely even considered. The reactors were built at great speed to cut costs and to fulfil the Soviet plan. Some had no protective containment at all despite the higher pressures of steam. ibid.
‘Under [Leonid] Brezhnev things started to fall apart. Theft and negligence were rife. In the late seventies the Brezhnev era reached new heights of corruption just as we were building more atomic plants than ever. Our efforts to solve this problem internally failed completely so we went public.’ ibid. nuclear scientist
In America the enormous nuclear plants ordered in the sixties were nearing completion. The engineers in charge were beginning to discover the trap they had set themselves by failing to redesign the containment. If a molten core could not be contained then the emergency systems to prevent a meltdown would have to work whatever happened. ibid.
On March 28th 1979 a series of human and mechanical errors at the Three-Mile Island plant exposed the core. It reacted with steam and produced hydrogen which exploded. None of the emergency teams could understand what was going on inside the reactor. ibid.
There were protests against nuclear power throughout the world. In the public’s imagination it was transformed from something good to something bad. Much of the anger was turned on the nuclear scientists. It emerged they had deliberately concealed many of the risks and uncertainties they had discovered. ibid.
What if we were to discover that the attitudes of these professionals have taken a turn toward the darker side … where the consumer is the unwitting guinea pig for the testing of profit-making pharmaceuticals? Phenomenon: The Lost Archives: Science Fraud: Is the Tail Wagging the Dog? 1999
In a gravel bed near Lewis, England, what appears to be the skull of an ancient human being … The discovery of the Piltdown man … One of the greatest deceptions of all time. ibid.
One group of industry-sponsored scientists stands behind their shameless ‘conclusive research’ that cigarette smoking is in no way harmful to human health. ibid.
Farewell (not fond) to cold fusion ibid. Nature vol 344 article
In the case of Cold Fusion the fraud perpetrated against Pons and Fleischmann by the scientific community has cost the people of the world fifteen years of the development of a technology that would mean a virtually unlimited source of clean free energy. ibid.
We’re looking tonight at the appalling hazards of irresponsible weapons research. Brass Eye s1e3: Science, Channel 4 1997
Tonight on Brass Eye – has science gone too far? ibid.
Is it right for scientists to play with Time? ibid.
Cloud-damage is dramatically on the increase. ibid.
What can be done to keep bad science at bay? All too often it’s left to the little people. ibid.
You stick to the science. I’ll handle the politics. Doppleganger aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun 1969 starring Roy Thinnes & Ian Hendry & Lynn Loring & Patrick Wymark & George Sewell & Loni von Friedl & Herbert Lom & Ed Bishop & Norma Ronald & Franco de Rosa et al, director Robert Parrish, big cheese
There was no beginning of the universe. Past, present, future. The universe has always existed and it always will. It stays the same. Hawking 2004 starring Benedict Cumberbatch & Michael Brandon & Tom Hodgkins & Lisa Dillon & Phoebe Nicholls & Adam Godley & Peter Firth & Tom Ward & John Sessions & Matthew Marsh & Alice Eve & Rohan Siva et al, director, Fred Hoyle on the box
There’s nothing wrong with feeling in science. Feeling matters. ibid. Hawking
It’s gradual paralysis. ibid. doctor