Douglas Carswell

Technological innovation needs protecting from politicians

There is nothing inevitable about innovation. In fact, for most of human history there has been a striking lack of it. For most of the past hundred thousand years, one generation of Homo Sapiens lived with the same misery-inducing level of technology as the one before.

When new technologies do come along, what stands out is how often attempts are made to suppress their wider application.

Ming China restricted the use of printing technology to official texts. Efforts were made to curb the use of new spinning machines during the industrial revolution in England.

Often it is not so much an outright ban that is the problem, but regulatory restriction. 

Rather than welcoming newly invented motor cars, MPs in the late nineteenth century passed the Locomotives on Highways Acts. Amongst other things, this required a man with a red flag to walk in front of any motorised vehicle on the grounds of what we would today call "health and safety".

It's a relief to think that we are far to sophisticated and tech-savvy today to go in for any of that sort of reactionary nonsense. Except we are not.

We have been putting lots of men with red flags in front of technological innovation to slow it down.

Yesterday, councillors in Lancashire voted against a fracking development.  A new technology that would enable us to access billions of cubic feet of gas trapped in rock beneath our feet, cannot be applied because government has put in place dozens of regulatory obstacles.  

Of course, no one has actually banned shale gas extraction.  Instead we have created a red flag regulatory system that makes it practically impossible to get any of the stuff out of the ground.  

Medical science is making some extraordinary advances. A whole new range of drugs, based on our understanding of genetics, are being developed. Yet EU clinical trial rules and data protection insanity have put a series of red flags in front of their practical application.

Technological innovation means that cheap air travel is increasingly accessible to millions. Yet we put red flags ahead of aviation capacity.

In France yesterday it wasn't just a case of red flags slowing down innovation.  French officials actually arrested a couple of executives working for the taxi app Uber. (How is that new, competitive dynamic Europe thing coming along, by the way?)

Ours may be the most technologically advanced generation to have ever existed.  If we want innovation to keep happening, we need to ensure that politicians and vested interests are not able to prevent its further application.

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