Gordon Brown Doesn’t Inspire Much Hope For Digital Britain Paper

Lord Carter’s Digital Britain paper is getting slagged off even before it’s been published – the Times attacks both the paper and Gordon Brown’s statement on the paper, the latter of which they had printed themselves. It might seem like a strange thing to do, but when you read Brown’s statement, a little bit of you dies.

Brown, as the Labour government has been doing to a worrying degree recently, is all mouth and no trousers – there seems to be a belief that if enough hot air is spouted about the creative industries, then somehow they’ll lift Britain out of the recession. The lack of detail in Brown’s statement, and apparently in the report that’s being published this afternoon, suggests a lack of willingness to contribute funds, either directly or through tax breaks.

“A fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water”, Brown says. True dat, but currently most people’s internet connection is like having water that judders unpredictably out of the taps, and is sometimes muddy. Rather than focus on the frankly fairly crappy universal 2Mb broadband (which you can’t really describe as “fast”), Brown instead tries to bathe in the glow of fibre optics. “In our fibre optic and cable networks, which will provide the next generation of superfast broadband, the Government must also complement and assist the private sector to move farther and faster”. Could that be any less committal?

The Times says that this is going to translate into a few mild tax breaks for BT and Virgin to help roll out their fibre optic networks. Is this really going to be enough to encourage the kind of investment in the creative industries that Darling spoke about in his Budget speech? Once again the government wants the kudos of a creative Britain without directly investing in it, and the carrots they’re offering private investment aren’t looking that tempting. If they can’t even sort out the infrastructure, then we can expect the creative brain drain that’s happening in the video games industry to start being replicated across the entire industry.

Join us tomorrow for full analysis of the Digital Britain paper.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Sci-tech | June 16, 2009 11:03AM |