IT is our best bet for urban renewal

New Labour’s enthusiasm for supercasinos betrays a lack of faith in the transformative power of IT.

I had a row about gambling the other day, when appearing as a ‘witness’ on BBC Radio 4’s weekly programme The moral maze. I chanced that the newly granted supercasino for Manchester wouldn’t be such a good idea as, perhaps, a local wafer fabrication plant and a more enlightened national policy for science and technology.

New Labour doesn’t love casinos because of the tax revenues they bring. It favours casinos because it doesn’t know or care about how to integrate powerful technologies such as IT into ambitious programmes for city growth.

On the radio, somebody hinted that a casino might spin money longer than, say, the LG Philips Display plant that closed in 2003 in Newport, Wales, with the loss of 870 jobs. He didn’t mention how Ireland’s Quinn Radiators, has brought 460 jobs – including some in R&D – back to the LG site, where it makes four million compact radiators a year.

Then Michael Portillo accused me of wanting to subsidise IT.

Had I become, I wondered, an Old Labour nostalgic – ‘warming my hands’, as the Welsh poet R S Thomas had it, ‘at the red past’?

In fact I’d be happy if Manchester, or Newport for that matter, became strong in software. I don’t feel nostalgic for manufacturing, whether it’s chips, other IT hardware. Nor do I especially want to see more government intervention around IT.

Yet I can’t help feeling that Manchester’s victory is a hollow one. Moreover Innovation in UK cities, a January 2007 briefing from the policy and research unit at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta), confirms that view. (1)

Of course, Nesta gives us the usual guff about the global Internet being complemented by the fact that innovation is a contact sport – that it now depends on place, and on community groups, too. Chance interactions in dense cities, it’s revealed, ‘create the conditions for a hot-bed of innovation’. On a Brownian note, Nesta holds skills as vital to urban progress, and speaks up for cities having the proper ‘ecology’ of institutionally supported innovation. We also learn that Reading has emerged as a hub for the UK’s IT industry.

That’s news to me. But Nesta is much nearer the mark in upholding the significance of infrastructure and labour markets to cities. It suggests that what count are: the offices that multinational organisations run in a city, the kind of jobs it offers, its transport and education systems, and its internet connectivity.

To its additional credit, Nesta also notes that Britain’s regional and urban strategies are enormously samey. The organisation is right to say that too many cities focus on the same old things: biotech, creative industries, technology parks and university-industry collaboration.

Now New Labour would have casinos, which are minimum-IT innovations, join this desultory list. And if you mutter that making chips and developing R&D might help Manchester more than installing roulette wheels and slot machines, you’re portrayed as a Wilsonian subsidiser. As Nesta feels called upon to say, one solution to the total chaos of urban policy in the UK would be to centralise planning, but ‘such a structure would stifle local experimentation rather than support it’.

Well, I’m no killjoy. In Manchester, Great Yarmouth, Hull, Newham, Middlesbrough, Solihull, Milton Keynes, Leeds, Southampton, Luton, Scarborough, Swansea, Torbay and Wolverhampton, let the newly licensed casino experiments commence!

It is all frightfully innovative. And if the free play of market forces allows Manchester’s actually rather commendable existing efforts in IT just to wither and die – well that, we are told to believe, would be nothing to worry about.

(1) On http://www.nesta.org.uk/assets/pdf/Innovatin_in_UK_cities_policy_briefing.pdf