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“Despite my experience, I have no faith in ministers’ or officials’ ability to ‘pick winners’ even when our decisions had to be approved by external advisory boards.”
- Martin Stanley, who led the Business Department’s industry/education team https://ukcivilservant.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/picking-winners-and-state-aids/
- Martin Stanley, who led the Business Department’s industry/education team https://ukcivilservant.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/picking-winners-and-state-aids/
“More generally, I have absolutely no faith in ministers’ ability to withstand pressure to spend unwisely for political and constituency reasons...
“Equally, I have little faith in minister’s ability to focus support narrowly enough.”
“Equally, I have little faith in minister’s ability to focus support narrowly enough.”
The subsidies provided to ICL — a British national champion competitor to a giant American tech company, IBM — perfectly illustrates the folly in Cummings’ plans:
“There was a fierce battle, in the UK in the 70s/80s, between big bad IBM with their closed propriety systems, and ICL, keen on open systems and a proud successor to the earlier giants of British computing including English Electric Leo Marconi.
“I inherited the sponsorship team and initially continued to pour as much money as possible into ICL and to arm twist the public sector to continue to buy its mainframes.
“But I eventually realised that the company was uncompetitive to the extent that well over 90% of its sales were to the public sector.
“In other words, any business that had a choice bought IBM. I understand that colleagues subsequently did their best to continue to support the company but it was essentially doomed and was eventually bought by Fujitsu.”
