No. 10’s approach doesn’t add up

I thought the last lot were a bunch of tossers, and they were, but the disillusion is just as strong with the current bunch.

Not only is Kier Starmer’s government getting the politics wrong, but it is also getting the science and technology wrong too.

Take the Online Safety Act. This has a worthwhile goal of protecting young people from some of the darker corners of the internet but has been implemented in such a cack-handed way as to make the UK a laughing stock.

Any motivated and fairly savvy 13 year old is able to bypass its idiotic proof-of-age procedures for any sites which might contain an element of adult content, while many perfectly innocent and valuable web locations are becoming unavailable – such dens of iniquity as Reddit and even Wikipedia are being forced to implement verification or deny UK visitors access.

Well strike me down with a pixel, VPN use soared by 2,000% in the days immediately following implementation of the law.

What about the frankly moronic attempt to demand so-called back doors into Apple systems? This can never be done in a secure way, as anybody with the first clue about online security would know. As I write, it seems the UK is backing down from this unachievable challenge, although the government department has not yet had the good grace to admit this.

Well strike me down with a pixel, VPN use soared by 2,000% in the days immediately following implementation of the law

But all of that is OK, because the geniuses in Whitehall have a handle on the Next Big Thing and it’s going to make government better, faster, more efficient, and save the taxpayer gazillions of currency units on the way. This is, of course, its completely unfounded and blind faith in AI: let’s build lots of energyand water-hungry data centres in this energy-poor drought-ridden land and that’ll be great.

The government’s latest stumble is the dissolving of the UK Space Agency. This despite the fact that more than 70 nations worldwide have their own independent space agencies, including all major European nations and every dynamic economy on the planet (Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, you name it).

The Department of Science (surely soon to be renamed the Department of Idiocy) even has the nerve to issue a press release claiming that its absorption of UKSA will ‘bolster’ the space sector and cut red tape, while making Whitehall more agile and efficient. Excuse me while I laugh until I cry.

I can’t help thinking that the fundamental error was made when the agency was, ahem, launched as recently as 2010. It’s supposed to be in the business of rockets, and yet the golden opportunity to rekindle the glory days of our industrial might was missed. Had it been named the British Space Agency, the famous BSA brand and one of its finest motorcycles the BSA Rocket could have taken the organisation to the stars.