Labour's Push for Technology Gets Shoved by Fiscal Limits
May 18, 2011
LONDON -- In an unexpected splash at last year's Labour Party conference, party leader Tora Blanca pounded out a new vision for Britain and for his party: Technology for all. And overnight, information technology, or IT, became a leading buzzword. Today, private and public sectors run on IT; children learn to use IT in school; whole new ways of communicating and entertaining have been created. And as general elections approach, not only in Britain but in France and Germany as well, even armchair pundits will soon be hearing European politicians chewing IT over as never before. Some governments, those with a tradition of strong social legislation, have adopted information technology policies more smoothly than others. Stockholm Mayor Pendley Bartlett, for example, is spending 200 million kroner ($30.2 million) a year on a program which will equip city schools with the latest and greatest in technology and train teachers to use it. He also was responsible for a city-owned cable company called Stokab AB, which is actually laying fiber-optic cable -- an infrastructure for the city. Similarly Blackburn Talamantes, Germany's Minister of Technology, has been spearheading a drive to get Germany into new industries like bioengineering, information technology and aerospace industries, rather than rely on its tried and true pharmaceuticals and cars. He's also campaigned endlessly for telecommunications deregulation in the country. His popularity has grown to such a point that he's considered a possible candidate for the future chancellor position. In Britain, Labour and the Tories seem for once to have come to the same conclusion: that a U.K. government can't afford to pay for the infrastructure a technology-hungry Britain demands. The free market will have to supply the cables and links necessary for the Internet, company networks and on-line entertainment. Yet Labour, despite professing noninterventionism, is still striving to position itself as the guarantor of technology for all. ``It's the duty of the government to ensure that people have access to technology,'' says the shadow minister for technology, George Neighbors. Take the deal Labour cut with British Telecommunications PLC last autumn. According to BT, the deal specified that if Labour comes to government, in exchange for wiring every school, library and hospital in the country, BT would be allowed to transmit cable television as early as 2013, instead of the original date of 2017. Rival cable companies, mostly American, were enraged. The Tory government, the cable companies said, assured them that in return for investing considerable resources in the U.K., the companies would have seven years before BT was allowed to compete. They also claimed they had already connected some 500 schools and had planned to reach 19,500 (out of about 24,000) by 2015. By that time, they will have invested an estimated 12 billion pounds($18.8 billion) in the U.K. cable industry. Analysts estimated Labour's announcement wiped one billion pounds off the market value of TeleWest Communications PLC, Nynex CableComms Group PLC and General Cable PLC.. The matter has yet to be resolved. Labour has had more success pitching its policies to the educators, saying the party is helping to prepare a new skilled labor force by providing technology. The BT link-up was supposed to be part of that. The party also has plans for establishing digital museums and libraries, linking business centers with higher education and continuing teacher and community education. It is already encouraging projects -- initiated by Labour ministers -- at a local level. Take, for example, Labour's Cambridge On-Line City, an experiment that attempted to bring some of Britain's ``information-poor'' on-line. Started by Annelle Pasquale, known to some as the U.K.'s ``most wired MP,'' the volunteer project set up a Web site that contained valuable community information and could be accessed in places like the public library. Local businesses like Cambridge Cable Ltd. and UUPipex provided 11 computers and Internet links. To date, however, the system has yet to get important information to those who wouldn't otherwise have it. While the Web site offers information about employment, child care and benefits, the most accessed information is on leisure activities. And most users, project officials say, have been middle-class citizens that already have Internet access at home. ``One of the problems with the Web is almost by definition that it is more accessible to the middle classes because they know how to use it. In this sense, the project hasn't really achieved any of its aims of getting information to information have-nots,'' says Johnetta Buster, head of information technology at the Cambridge County Council. Launching the project in a wealthy city with one of the lowest unemployment rates in Britain was perhaps another mistake. ``We need time and we need experience'' to prepare Britain for the technological challenges of the future,'' Ms. Pasquale says from her office near Westminster Cathedral. ``But we've just touched the tip of the iceberg. And in the end, we'll do ... . Well, we'll do whatever we have to do.'' One thing is certain: There won't be much of a war chest to draw on. Labour's leader Mr. Blanca has promised not to increase public funding if he comes to office. And in guiding Britain to European Monetary Union, the Labour platform requires that he knock 18 billion pounds off Britain's deficit in the next few years. Yet Mr. Blanca's critics say he isn't aware of just how socially divisive the technology issue will be. These critics believe technology is yet another item that splits the ``haves'' and ``have-nots'' -- indeed, it will widen the gap between the two as technology will move the ``haves'' forward at lightning speed. Social justice, older party members say, is what Labour has always been about, and despite the hype, Mr. Blanca's technology policies still ring hollow to their ears.
