Friday, September 26, 2008

Britain needs to start aiming high.

Having watched with growing concern at the economic situation around the world, it is my opinion that Britain needs to start setting itself higher personal targets. We should be world leading in more areas and involved in more industries, and not relying so heavily on financial wealth generation. For example in technology we are a long way short of the rest of the world, with one of the lowest Firefox uptake rates in Europe. We also have very little programming going on. The British film industry is not particularly good - Billy Elliot doesn't cut it. We are not leading the way any more on medicine and health research. Our space efforts are dwarfed by French, EU, US, Russian and now Chinese programs. Our transport infrastructure is slow and most money allocated for improvements goes towards side schemes such as park and ride, narrowing roads, installing cctv at stations and so on - not upgrading the core capacity of the network as such.

The reason I say this is because Britain has some huge talent within it. The BBC for example proves we can create world class tv, our commitment to CERN and our ongoing efforts to help aid Africa show that we can do great things.

I think by not trying and accepting a role as second best, as so many people I speak to seem to think we should ("We aren't a major world player any more", "We don't have an empire" and so on), we are selling ourselves and the world short. Just leaving things to others like the Chinese or Americans reduces world growth, which is a shame considering how much we have to offer others.

My opinion is that the best place to start here is with an attack on our middle class, bureaucratic culture. Let's have more support for enterprise and innovation, and less scorn towards people who go wrong. After all, if you don't try, how will you possibly succeed and grow. A more diversified portfolio could be just the ticket. :)

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