Somehow that combination tells us everything we need to know about where this government ( in it's various phases) sees technology.

Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Founded: 14 July 1997

Who was in power on the 14th of July 1997? Now you can blame them for not splitting it off to it's own department, but...

Fair point, but 25 years ago digital technology was still quite new, shiny and a bit of a novelty. More about surfing web sites than running businesses in "the cloud". The "digital" in the title was perceived in terms of Sky TV. The STEM bit was not really in politician's or the public's heads It was not seen as being the key to the entire nation's prosperity.

25 years ago, here's a calculator.

Typo- daughter born in 1995 is in her 20s. Corrected.

Re: 25 years ago:

i was running Linux at home and work and had a free login on the Telegraph website. Programmable calculators were at least 20 years older!

Time gets away with you. 25 years ago it was very obvious which way things were going. Maybe 35 people were still thinking in terms of mainframes and wireline phones but even then it was obvious that communications was going to be important.

Back then in the UK at least 'digital' meant Teletext for most people.

FWIW I bought my first proper PC 40 years ago. It was a CP/M machine (an Osborne) and it couid, and did, useful work.

Subsequent governments have been unable reorganise the DCMS because.....

no reason

Why break up "The Department of Fun"?

Indeed.

The Ministry of Tik Tok in charge of technology.

That'll go well . . .

The UK Chip Act ...

"Do you want salt and vinegar on that?"

But in the UK politicians are incapable of looking beyond the next general election.

or a future directorship with a company they sold off or had oversight of. Too many turn up on the payroll in dodgy titles jobs that have no real benefit or any physical work for a company except to pay a backhander, sorry I mean wage.

The UK's policy has long been it doesn't matter who owns it as long as they bring the money... that works until the government scares the people with money with crazy referendums and budgets.

Or until they realise that very few nations own an awful lot of it and the they might not play very nice. To be fair, it's not just the UK. German reliance on Russian fuel wasn't too clever with hindsight.

It concluded by stating that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport was working on a semiconductor strategy "to be published shortly," but this has yet to materialize.

Like so many, many reports expected from the current leadership... And the previous one.... And the one before that.

I wonder if there's somewhere we can go to get updates on all of these promised reports?

Hermann Hauser of course is a bloody foreigner from Austria who came to England to learn English.

"When Hauser was 16 he went to the United Kingdom to learn English at a language school in Cambridge.[15] After a master's degree in Physics from Vienna University,[1] he returned to King's College, Cambridge to do a PhD in Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory."

... this just makes his comments even more relevant.

So the chap is a hun and an expert ?

Hermann Hauser of course is a bloody foreigner

Says someone who's posting as "Lars".

...that we could build and could share the infrastructure with.

Perhaps even one with a member that makes the stuff essential for advanced chip production.

..how much of this article is actually what Hauser said, and how much is the author editorialising.

He (Hauser) is right of course - we can't be sovereign, and the fantasies of Eurocrats that maybe they can are equally nonsensical. It takes a moment to look at the supply chains, materials, skills and established players to see that no nation on this planet is going to be able to "go it alone". Not the US, not China.

The question then becomes what is the strategy that helps the UK to grow and remain healthy? Frankly the idea of starting to build fabs three years after a supply shock hit is ridiculous (unless you happen to be a fab-maker, in which case you're going to be paid very well for building fabs, many of which are going to be unprofitable). What we do need is a healthy, constant influx of new talent - right across the board, and not just in current trendy niches. ARM wasn't successful through design - it was the result of thousands of small innovative companies all taking different approaches to the booming tech scene. One was successful, but it's survivorship bias to assume we could measure what they did and recreate it. We need to get away from the idea that we 'pick the winner' and decide the perfect tech strategy that will deliver the next ARM. Instead, we should be fostering the sort of tech evolutionary slime pit where thousands of different approaches allow a tiny handful to out-compete the rest.

Most of these discussions descend into people declaring their favourite tech sector and how it should be specifically supported. Perhaps we should be looking at ways to increase the overall activity across the entire industry, so value can be created and some might be retained. That goes from college research and courses, through to infrastructure investment and on into support for blue sky innovation.

Foreign corporate raiding of our remaining tech and engineering jewels can only accelerate now: the crashing stock market and tanking pound makes everything an easy and cheap takeover target....

I feel tech sovereignty is actually very easy. The issue is that people don't like to settle for old and stable and instead want more, MORE, *MORE*.

Worst case scenario we could go back to z80 and build up again. These are easy to fabricate, well reverse engineered, already have some decent (albeit slightly bitrotted) software.

It could probably even be done by a single person!

Z80?

I have an abacus somewhere. No worries about battery life. Low environmental impact, all parts recyclable.

Add the two cans and a long length of string and we're all set.

Abacus ? Filthy foreign stuff. When we are the world leaders in stone circles and are ready to export them to anywhere that stones can be dragged.

[1]Fuzix for the post-societal collapse win.

[1] http://fuzix.org/

... has not been interested in technology. It (the establishment) sees fast money as success. Hence we see the most ugly buildings in the world being built along the Thames because there is lots of money in that. Hot and usually dirty money only became an issue in the UK with the war in Ukraine. Don't worry, there's still plenty more dirty money coming in to the UK, buying up property and inflating prices.

About 20 years ago I was party to a conversation between some other people and their bankers. The bankers basically said "stay away from manufacturing". I pointed out the clothes they were wearing were manufactured. But it was indicative of their thinking that they saw and see manufacturing as unimportant. Hence instead of being a nation of factories we are a nation of resellers of goods made elsewhere.

The top countries with the now rarely-reported current account balances are China, Germany, and Japan. What do they do? They manufacture and export in large quantities. Which countries have the largest deficit? The USA and the UK. What do we do? We import, often things which were invented here. But along came and come morons like John Harvey Jones. Sell it off, buy it in, you (the top 1%) can be rich and eff everybody else.

The money grabbers have taken over the long term policies of the UK and the USA. Did you know that every child born in the USA today already has about $40,000 debt around its neck? Don't worry, they'll grow up and keep paying. It is not something to be positive about. It is the sort of thing which makes me despair. There is absolutely no upside to the amount of debt which the USA (and the UK) have. Now the UK has added more. Congratulations.

So what does this have to do with Arm? The long term deep thinking in the establishment is that it does not matter. Forget what politicians say, because those are only words. They want a soundbite to make it seem as though they are doing something. If you look at the Latina nuclear power plant in Italy, it was mostly built by British companies (whatever you happen to think of nuclear power in general). Now we have to have the French and Chinese build our power stations.

When one reads accounts of crappy bankers getting £500,000 bonuses for nothing more than financial slight of hand, why would anyone care about designing computer chips?

I have to agree. The emphasis in policy and self-congratulatory speeches since the 1980s even, has been on The City and Financial Services. Mostly centred on London, of course, so not adding much employment elsewhere. And in recent years has employed fewer people using more tech, even here.

I agree with you, but what does manufacturing have to do with ARM?

Manufacturing doesn't have to involve cast iron these days

Manufacturing doesn't have to involve cast iron these days

Brass is good too.

YAAC has answered for me. But I did write about what this has to do with Arm. The politicians are just making noise. They do not actually really truthfully care tuppence.

well, my former employer was something of a last man standing in the British silicon space, only to be sold to mysterious Chinese investors.. which is probably quite a bit worse than being sold to softbank or as supposedly nearly happened, Apple. Now they can effectively have "in house" chinese chips.. which are actually developed abroad.

Self-reliance is just bloody code for protectionism which is a pillar of Marxism. How is UK self-reliance going to save UK tech? Sell it to themselves? Let no toaster be without British ARM! British Chips for British People... I could ask any Marxist to write your slogans.

Arm is only successful if it trades with others as part of the division of labour ecosystem. It requires global markets to survive. It can't survive in the Murcian world of Government controlling what can be sold and who is allowed to buy it even if you make it. The Gov doesn't own these businesses. Only a Marxist could come up with such a silly proposition. Oh but but but National Security? Perhaps Britain should be more concerned about where it gets its Cheese and wheat flour. Why not apply National Security to CHEESE and crumpets? I guess the British Cheese Bomb has not yet been perfected.

The reason British tech is failing is that the US Politicians seem to control it. The great Muricann brain trust of Donald "Europe is ripping us off" Trump, and Joe Biden aka JOE TRUMP TRADE Policies, and Chuck "Enemy List" SS officer Schumer... Take your British beef to these chaps. They don't have one operational neuron apiece, yet British politicians SURRENDER Contol of British private companies to the Murican idiots. All under the tired old catch-all of Marxism... NATIONAL SECURITY.

Why doesn't Liz focus on the British Egg Problem? Instead of fostering trade with foreign egg producers, make it mandatory that every London flat must also have chickens of their own to make the UK self-reliant on eggs. "British eggs for British People..." and Amen to that...

Brexit was supposed to have been a great opportunity for British Trade to go global. Instead, the UK is applying for VOLUNTARY STATEHOOD under US politicians. You are not trading more, you are shutting down trade to assist Murica's failed Trade war with CHINER and Asia. The largest traders that have ever existed and Britain goes along with this Murican boycott, for absolutely NO GAIN WHATSOEVER, other than UK tech being abandoned and sold off for indoor Chicken Ranches. "BRITISH EGGS FOR BRITISH PEOPLE..." and a bloody Amen to that!

Protectionism is not a "pillar of Marxism". You will find arguments both against and for depending on the situation... likewise "free" trade. Ask any of your Marxist slogan-writing friends.

@lordrobot

Ah, so the British Industrial Revolution was Marx's inspiration? You learn something every day!

No, Marx went to Manchester to learn how Britain's "innovation first" approach to employment law led to great leaps forward in opportunity and worker conditions

Apparently white goods can't be exported to Russia because their army is stripping the chips out of them to use in missiles. Sounds implausible but it would explain how many Russian missiles go astray.

Instead of the expense of setting up a wafer fab maybe the UK could just foreign fridges and washing machines to strip them of chips. Although given the current exchange rate building a wafer fab could prove cheaper.

Apparently white goods can't be exported to Russia because their army is stripping the chips out of them to use in missiles. Sounds implausible but it would explain how many Russian missiles go astray.

The targetting is fine until they hit the spin cycle, when they wobble all over the place.

The City -- the bankers - have very different ideas about what's important than most people. They don't really care that much about whether a country has technology or not, "they've got people for that", its all about the money. So if ARM makes more money by being sold off, dismembered or whatever then that's it fate.

This is has been the ruling situation in the UK for as long as I can remember. Its also what runs the US but the US is still dedicated to being a global power so it thinks as semiconductors and similar technologies as strategic necessities (its actually a large scale version of the UK -- the UK was one of the earliest countries to make microprocessors, for example, but they were dedicated to military use with commercial not even being aware of them). Now the US has started to exercise its strategic muscle countries that are not aligned 100% with its policies feel that they, too, need semiconductor capabitlies as a strategic necessity.

They should have retained their commercial capability. But it didn't make enough money......so off it went..

Of course the UK will have Technical Sovereignity.

Because they VOTED to have it via Brexit.

End of.