Started well, then faded
In the keynote speech at Google’s third annual Zeitgeist Europe conference, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the Meteorological Office and the British Antarctic Survey would collaborate with Google Earth to track “all the great climate changes of our time.”
Among those present at the luxurious Grove Resort Hotel at Chandler’s Cross, in Hertfordshire, were Google CEO Eric Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Before announcing the joint venture with Google Earth, the Prime Minister addressed his opening remarks to them.
“Can I begin by congratulating Google,” he said, “an expert in social innovation – Google Labs, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Tutors - making great strides in putting services to the people of this country and many other countries.””
“Your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation,” he continued. “The lessons from the success of this industry are the lessons we have all to learn if we are going to make globalisation work for the future, and that we can also learn lessons about how we build not simply a successful global economy but a global society.”
Self-medication
Having disclaimed any intention of making a political speech, things moved in a depressingly inevitable direction as Brown described how he had “created the opportunities” for the mobile phone and broadband market to develop, pioneered the release of audio visual spectrum, and that “we are moving in on the broadband and trying to make it more available to people.” Moving in on? That does not sound good.
The most fanatical regulator in British history concluded his list of achievements by saying “we have got a light touch regulatory system.” One could wish the camera had swung around to capture the audience’s reaction to that one.
After telling a rather laboured joke about repetitiousness, the Prime Minister pronounced his stale old rap about how much more wonderful the massive public sector he has created in Britain will become through greater use of web technology.
In an unfortunate choice of words, he spoke of empowering “people in healthcare with greater access to information for self-medication and everything else.” We thought the official line was that there were altogether too many people self-medicating already. Good to be put straight on that.
Going to the heart of Britain’s more obvious social failures, Brown spoke of people using the internet to study, and also “to map the areas where crime is happening.” Having done so, citizens might well conclude that they should study at home. And self-medicate.
Talking the talk
The rest of the speech was admirably forthright in attacking growing protectionist sentiment in the US and in Europe. “We know that the only way we can have a successful globalisation is following the principles of your industry – open, flexible, inclusive, empowering,” he said. “We know also that public sentiment, just as at other times of rapid change, is moving to be protectionist.”
The Prime Minister closed with a rousing call to combat the pessimistic assumptions that moved people to be protectionist. “It was said in ancient Rome that when Cicero spoke people said, ‘great speech’. But it was said in ancient Greece that when Demosthenes spoke, and he too was eloquent about what should be done, the public then said ‘let's march.’”
That was another own-goal by Brown’s speech-writers. Cicero was notorious for his inept opportunism, while Demosthenes had to take his own life after inspiring a failed revolt against Alexander the Great’s regent in Athens.
Getting down with the yoof
Also on Monday, the Prime Minister reached out to the community he praised so fulsomely at the Zeitgeist conference with an “Ask the PM” feature on the Downing Street YouTube website, where he will reply to the most popular questions submitted by the YouTube community.
The man has far more substance than his predecessor ever did, but the New Labour project was always smoke and mirrors, and it just doesn’t work anymore. What’s more, if Gordon Brown truly believes that his tightly controlling style of government has anything, at all, in common with the creative anarchy of the web, he has lost touch with reality.
