WRITING in a national newspaper ahead of the publication of the Government’s Digital Britain report yesterday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown asserted that broadband access was one of life’s bare necessities.
Advocating the obviously untrue, the Prime Minister compared high-speed internet provision to vital services such as water and electricity. It makes you wonder how we all coped without broadband until it was introduced just a few years ago. Indeed, a quarter of all British adults remain unconnected to the internet – without it having any observable adverse impact on life expectancy.
Broadband, plainly, is not in the same category as Mr Brown's hyperbole suggests. Access to broadband most certainly isn’t any type of “right”. If broadband is a right, then so is an annual foreign holiday, a new family car and a detached house. Desirable as they may be, these are all things that have to be earned. While water is a necessity, even a right, broadband and the associated PC hardware is in this desirable but has to be earned category.
For this reason, Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor, is wrong to think the internet can replace text books. While providing educational materials online would save a fortune for the state, such a policy would place the burden of cost onto families, who must buy computer equipment and subscribe to a broadband service provider. Not all households can afford to do that.
There are also parts of Britain which are so remote that broadband provision would be too costly to make it viable to lay the cable infrastructure. Indeed, the Prime Minister may be interested to know that there are even one or two homes in the more remote parts Britain that are not connected to mains water. I stayed in a village in Argyll two years ago, where the water was piped from a local stream, virtually untreated and discoloured by peat, straight into local kitchens (needless to say, we townies lived off bottled water).
What is more, Mr Brown, there are plenty of people in Britain, possibly roughly 25% of the adult population, who don't want broadband and would not use it even if it was free of charge.
The internet is a wonderful thing, a powerful and enfranchising tool. It can be used to disseminate knowledge and is an efficient way to trade. Its widespread use should be encouraged and computer literacy should be taught in schools.
Arguably, in this day and age, computer skills are at least as important as learning to write. Touch typing skills should be a key Stage Two target for all 11-year-olds. Government should encourage internet use in deprived communities. However, that is a very different matter from deeming it a right.
Nor is universal broadband provision cheap. To achieve its own aspiration of providing two megabytes of broadband to every home in the country, the Government would have to shell out billions to make good the investment that the private sector won’t be wanting to put into the Highlands and Islands and parts of West Wales.
But the country is strapped for cash. Mr Brown has spent it all on an over-inflated public sector and propping up Britain’s beleaguered banks.
