To someone of my great age (85) and conservative disposition, modern British life contains many irritations and one of them is technological overkill. The motorcar, for example, has been brought to such a high degree of perfection that its manufacturers strain to improve it, and sometimes seek to do so through the addition of electronic gadgets of very dubious value. I remember the push-button handbrake of the Audi A6 I drove some years ago. It worked – more or less – but was not an improvement on the straightforward mechanical arrangement. A lot of cost and complication had been added to no great purpose.
If only this trend was confined to cars, but when I leave my vehicle (a Ford now) parked in the front drive and sit in my study I may be confronted with one of those endless Windows updates that add ever more arcane and obscure improvements while fouling up connections to the other programmes on my computer. If the system already works well, for heaven’s sake leave it alone. It it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the current proposal to introduce a 5G mobile phone network on the back of technology produced by the Chinese company Huawei is just another example of technological overkill. It will certainly cut delays and allow data to be transmitted at much higher speeds – so that an HD movie could be downloaded in a minute, for instance. (Jolly good!) But most people seem satisfied with the current 4G system and the new one will do little to improve coverage in low-signal rural areas.
In many ways it seems that 5G is aimed more at the system operators and equipment manufacturers than consumers. It will help to satisfy the steadily increasing demand for smartphone traffic in urban areas – fair enough – but will require new 5G-compatible phones, some of them costing as much as £1,100 each. It’s a bit like a railway company putting on more trains but giving the fares a hike at the same time. And like everything that has its roots in Silicon Valley, the campaign to promote it is full of extravagant science-fiction hype about the way in which it will enable enhanced ‘connectivity’ between systems and objects in the future.
But while all this is merely tedious, the acceptance of Huawei- which in effect is an agent of the Chinese government – as a major player in our systems infrastructure represents another kind of trend altogether, and one that its deeply pernicious. This is gormless globalisation, a lazy policy which for decades has infected our government and civil service and dictates that everything that is both important and expensive should be bought from abroad. As a result Hinkley Point is being rebuilt by a French company using Chinese money; Heathrow is largely owned by a Spanish group; some of our water companies are also foreign-owned and we have recently sold a controlling share in a company building military vehicles, including tanks, to a German company.
The utter folly of such a policy, is plain to everyone except the moronic mandarins of Whitehall, It’s an extension of a crazed belief in the virtues of free markets, but that’s another story. It should be resisted, reversed and replaced by a Buy British industrial strategy, but that’s another story, too.
Grumpy Greybeard 