Cummings has left behind a No 10 deluded that Britain could be the next Silicon Valley

David Edgerton

Talk of ‘moonshots’ is typical of the belief that the UK is an innovative state – but it’s far from it

The Science Museum, London. Photograph: Luke Peters/Alamy

Wed 18 Nov 2020 10.00 GMT

T

hough many have speculated on what Dominic Cummings’s “legacy” might be, one of the more significant contributions he made to No 10 was his thinking about science and technology. Prime ministerial speeches have been peppered with passé futuristic slogans about how Britain leads the world in quantum computing, genomics and AI, and promises that the country can be a “science superpower” – notions that Cummings made a central part of the Brexit project.

Like many a macho innovation guru, Cummings is an amateur not a professional, an artless nerd and not an expert. That his policies and prescriptions have been taken seriously is a measure of our collective credulity about Britain’s place in the world of innovation. But whether this foolishness will leave with the fool is another matter.

We have known for some months that the UK is to have a new research agency. As so often, this government’s policies are not set out in a green or white paper but are rather suggested to selected journalists. The basic idea is to replicate something called Darpa (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which was supposedly at the forefront of successful innovation in the US. The British “Arpa” (“defense” is dropped) is very much Cummings’ baby, and it is a measure of his former power that its proposed budget is some £800m. The essence of this idea is that a new non-bureaucratic body with visionary leadership will help launch the UK on its new course as a creator of the industries of the future.

It is easy to make fun of this grandiose plan, but a milder version of the same idea has dominated innovation policy for decades, animated by the belief that British strength in research can be turned into economic growth if it is given sufficient backing. Indeed, at a recent select committee hearing, former science minister Jo Johnson and former chief scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport argued that the recently formed UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) already fulfils many of these responsibilities.

Brexiteers have turbocharged the idea that Britain’s innovative genius is a source of national strength. As the prime minister presiding over Brexit negotiations, Theresa May went as far as to say that this country would lead the world into the fourth industrial revolution, as it had led it into the first. Similar references to world-beating British systems have mostly turned out to be braggadocio.

But there is more to this than mere bombast. The argument that no-deal Brexit is a price worth paying for the freedom to violate EU state aid rules relies on the notion that massive subsidies to new technology will yield new firms and groundbreaking innovations. According to this fantastical vision, given the freedom to regulate itself, the UK will set new global standards. Again that is the story dripped out in the press, reinforced by prime ministerial references to digital electrictaxis, zero-carbon aeroplanes and hydrogen-powered trains.

The essential problem with the UK’s existing science and innovation policies and the ramped-up Arpa version is that both assume that the UK is a technological frontier whose brilliant innovations could be harnessed to determine the world’s technological future. That it has not done so yet is blamed on failures of policy and culture, hence this government’s focus on administrative innovations such as Arpa and the reform of the civil service. This is analogous to the idea that the UK will become a global power again, its sails puffed up with entrepreneurial energy.

Yet believing the UK will succeed in innovation if it tries hard enough is like believing the UK will be more powerful after freeing itself from the EU. Both ignore the reality that there are other, better-equipped players in the game. For all its bluster, the UK will continue to be a customer of others’ innovations, not an inventor of its own.

Copying administrative models without paying attention to the brute realities of innovation is a poor model for research policy. The United States that created Darpa was at the peak of its relative industrial and military power. It spent huge amounts on research and development, through multiple agencies, not least the Department of Defense. Darpa (then called Arpa) was tasked with finding radical solutions to particular defence problems. And, not surprisingly, since the defence department was the largest purchaser of such innovations anywhere in the world, Arpa made significant contributions to technology; in 1969 it launched Arpanet, the packet-switching network that would become the technical foundation for the modern internet.

By contrast, the UK’s total expenditure on research ranks it behind countries such as India, South Korea and Germany. Britain uses many more important technologies made elsewhere than it provides to the world. Its defence budget is a tiny fraction of that of the Pentagon. From a low position in the innovation power ranking, the UK is pursuing a top-dog policy. In an interconnected, nearly free-trading world, it is much less shaping the future than having its future shaped by others.

Listening to the advocates of an entrepreneurial state, you would be forgiven for assuming the UK had never been one in the past. In fact, the country was a significant innovative power in the years after the second world war, and invested massively in jet engines, nuclear power, antibiotics and hydrogen fuel cells. It nurtured not only these innovations, but entire industries and visionary British boffins, who were supported to an extraordinary degree. Yet even though the UK was a greater player than it could hope to be today, these programmes had very mixed results. Great national programmes such as Concorde and the British nuclear reactors hardly conquered the world. This was a difficult lesson that many still refuse to accept, preferring the comforting notion that, in the past, the old timers never really tried.

The delusions of Brexiteer revivalists have helped sustain a fundamentally misconceived innovation policy, now visible in retro-futurist talk of “moonshots”. It is a telling indicator of the declining capacities of the British state that while Cummings was lodged at the centre of power, his great antecedent CP Snow, the author of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), was a mere junior minister of technology in Harold Wilson’s 1964 government, as well as being treated with deserved contempt by the experts in his own corridors of power. In the classic British way, both are amateurs complaining about the amateurism of others. The mystery is why their gross misunderstandings were ever taken seriously and allowed to shape public discourse.

It is time to have a grown-up conversation about innovation that fits within a workable national industrial and social strategy. Though Arpa’s champion has now left office, our Brexiteer government will likely still continue to pursue this fantasy vision. The first and vitally necessary step towards innovation policies that work, and make our lives better, is to dump these delusions of grandeur.

• David Edgerton is Hans Rausing professor of the history of science and technology and professor of modern British history at King’s College London. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth Century History

• This article was amended on 18 November 2020. Arpa launched a packet-switching network, not a package-switching network, in 1969.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/18/cummings-no-10-britain-silicon-valley-moonshot