S1M-2133 New Economy

Scottish Parliament

Thursday 6 September 2001

[THE PRESIDING OFFICER opened the meeting at 9:30]

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New Economy

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Patricia Ferguson): The next item is a debate on motion S1M-2133, in the name of Alex Neil, on behalf of the Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Committee, on the report on the inquiry into the impact of the new economy. I ask members who are leaving the chamber to do so quickly and quietly.

11:37

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12:17

Stewart Stevenson (Banff and Buchan) (SNP): I do not know whether it is a coincidence that the Presiding Officer has given me the privilege of speaking immediately after Murdo Fraser, thus enabling me to congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. I welcome his presence in the chamber for two reasons in particular: with his elevation, I cease to be the most junior member of the Parliament; and, unlike myself, who raised the average age of the SNP group by three months, he has achieved the impossible by reducing the average age of the Tory activists in the Parliament by an amount so large that I can barely compute it. I am sure that the Tories welcome that.

I saw my first computer in 1969, which was the year that I started programming computers. In 1975, two friends and I built the first home computer in Scotland. By coincidence, that is the same year as Tim Berners-Lee—the English founder of the worldwide web—developed and built his first home computer. In 1979, I gave a keynote speech at the Microsystems conference on the then emerging technology of microcomputers. Let me tell the minister that I got some things wrong, from which we can draw parallels. I suggested at that time that people would shortly need 64 kilobytes of memory in their computers and that, within the next five years, most people would need a hard disk. Time telescoped rapidly. In a few months, my predictions were overtaken by events. In 1980, I started to use e-mail and, in 1995, I created my first website.

Despite all that background, I nonetheless say that there is no such thing as e-business. There is only business. Business needs to use the e-world to reach and offer services to customers by internet, by mobile phones, by interactive television and by other means that are yet to emerge.

Tavish Scott mentioned Caesar. It is interesting that the Romans succeeded where the Greeks had failed precisely because the Romans had a superior communications network. They could send a message by hilltop signalling from Londinium to Roma in six hours. The Greeks had to send ships, so they lost out.

In the modern world, it is no good having clusters that live on e-development. Bangalore in southern India has a modern infrastructure that supports, with hundreds of technicians, at least half a dozen companies here in Edinburgh. However, one has to walk for only 10 minutes down the road from Bangalore to return to the third world where people queue to use the community telephone.

Women have played an important part in the development of modern technology. Ada Lovelace was Charles Babbage's programmer—the first programmer—in the 19th century, and rear admiral Grace Hopper invented COBOL when she was in the United States navy. Indeed, Grace Hopper was still in harness as a consultant with a technology company when she died in her eighties. If the Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning wants to go down in the history of technology and its exploitation, she will have to work a great deal harder. She sets no targets for supporting business, seeking thereby to avoid having her future failure measured. She avoids underwriting private sector provision of the infrastructures that we need. In the past few days, she offends the very private partners on whom she will depend to make a start in public provision. Aggregation of demand is her panacea. However, what our businesses really need is access to markets now. For that, they will need broadband communications. In my short period as a member of this Parliament, I have already had three separate people at my surgeries in Banff and Buchan to ask about that subject. We are not in the Highlands and Islands or the Borders.

Let us suggest an immediate audit of the existing infrastructure. Even BT Scotland cannot tell us how many telephone exchanges there are in Scotland. Until we have done such an audit, we will not be able to do anything about costing what we will need. However, we can cost a failure to respond to the new world—we will pay a very heavy price. Try something new, minister. Listen to the experts, some of whom I can see in the gallery. Otherwise we will fall behind.

12:22