Land of Hope and Technology February 2016 | Page 16

ISSUE 1

Conclusion
In June of 2014, a report entitled ‘London:
Digital city on the rise’ stated: “In recent
years, something new has been happening
in London. As more and more knowledge
becomes digital, the city’s deep base of
professional expertise has helped fuel a
thriving urban tech scene in the East End,
Soho and areas across the city. Increasing
numbers of tech start-ups are receiving
national and international attention, and tech
giants such as Google and Facebook have
been bolstering their presence in London.”
At the launch of London technology week
2015, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales
said: “I meet people around London and they
ask ‘when do you go back to San Francisco?’
assuming I’m here for a few days, but I live in
London.
“There’s always this bit of British selfdeprecation about ‘oh well, things are so
great in Silicon Valley’. But I can tell you,
things aren’t that great in Silicon Valley.
London has all these incredible advantages
of a tech scene, but it’s also a place people
want to live. Nobody wants to live in Silicon
Valley – it’s dreadful out there.

“London is this incredible cultural city, it’s at
the crossroads of the world. In the US you
have San Francisco for tech, Los Angeles
for movies and Washington for politics. In
London you have all these things. It’s a great
place to do business.”
Back in 1983, I was in central London,
navigating the Underground as a fresh faced
graduate on my way to a job interview. As I
stood in the queue to buy a ticket at a tube
station, two Americans stood behind me
with very loud voices. It was difficult not to
hear their conversation. One said: “What a
dump…what a dump.”
The other nodded his assent, and said
“To think this used to be one of the most
advanced countries in the world.”
But things have changed since then,
they have changed radically. If those two
Americans could have somehow been
transported from that tube station queue in
1983 to London in the summer of 2015, once
they had got over the shock of time travel,
they would, I think, have been quite amazed
at how London has transformed itself.

London is no longer a dump, it is one of the
most extraordinary, vibrant and dynamic
cities on Earth.
From this hub, the UK can spread out, and
we can see the emergence of other clusters,
maybe they will feed off London to begin
with, maybe they can be quite independent.
What is clear is that the final result can be
something special. The UK can stand at
the centre of the world’s new technological
revolution, creating wealth, not only for
UK plc, but contributing towards the global
economy too, creating innovations and new
business ideas that may help end poverty
and extend lives.
Our ability to mess up, is still there. The rest
of this book will drill down, attempt to correct
myths, try and balance the British sense of
self-deprecation (modesty is good, but not
if it comes at the expense of talking yourself
into defeatism), and shed light on what can
make the new British economy great, in
part by refusing to pander to waves of selfdefeating hysterical populism.
There is hope for the UK, and that hope
lies in this land learning to take its many
advantages and master the bold game of
entrepreneurism and of technology.