The House of Lords Science & Tech Committee just dropped a brutal 2025 report:
“We’re world-class at inventing… and world-class at losing it.”
- DeepMind? London-born. Google’s now.
- Arm? Cambridge chip genius. SoftBank owned.
- Graphcore? Bristol AI unicorn. Folded into SoftBank – 500+ UK jobs gone.
- Skyscanner? Edinburgh unicorn. £1.4B to Chinese Ctrip - control vanished.
- Hopin? £4B peak in London. Liquidated UK ops in 2024 to chase US scale.
This isn’t bad luck. It’s a system failure.
As I believe I've said before, we should stop selling companies/land/intellectual property to foreigners. Thatcher-era capitalism insisted on a "golden-share" to insist stuff stayed UK-side. But that went and here we are...
A lot of us must have watched thousands of BBC news broadcasts over the years presented by people like Moira Stuart, Jeremy Paxman, Michael Buerk, Andrew Harvey, Sue Lawley, Peter Sissons, Anna Ford, Nicholas Witchell, Martyn Lewis, Philip Hayton, etc, and the amazing thing is that I never had the slightest idea what the political opinions were of any of those journalists. It's incredible when you think about it. The BBC were so good at being impartial and un-biased. I still think they mostly are today, but not quite in the perfect way they used to be. What a generation of presenters they were.
It has to be said that Nicholas Witchell was conspicuously more royalist than the King
The fact no-one complained about the BBC edit is not necessarily a good thing. It could be viewed in the opposite way, as showing how trusting people have always been of the BBC not to do something like that, and therefore the fact they did it was particularly disappointing.
Bollocks. No-one complained at the time because it was, while a mistake, not a very serious mistake.
It wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate.
And it was very serious. Integrity matters. Just ask @Cyclefree - you can often spot a fraudster (with the benefit of hindsight!) from a pattern of small deceptions.
The fact that it reflected the truth didn’t make it good journalism.
How do we know it was deliberate?
I had read that the two parts of the speech were c 50 minutes apart: it wasn’t an accidental deletion of a few words.
The fact no-one complained about the BBC edit is not necessarily a good thing. It could be viewed in the opposite way, as showing how trusting people have always been of the BBC not to do something like that, and therefore the fact they did it was particularly disappointing.
Bollocks. No-one complained at the time because it was, while a mistake, not a very serious mistake.
It wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate.
And it was very serious. Integrity matters. Just ask @Cyclefree - you can often spot a fraudster (with the benefit of hindsight!) from a pattern of small deceptions.
The fact that it reflected the truth didn’t make it good journalism.
Which a lot of people who defend the BBC (including me), and the BBC itself, have acknowledged.
The overreaction (variously motivated), though, is off the scale.
Although not @bondegezou who was the person I was responding to.
Comments
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5901/ldselect/ldsctech/192/19202.htm
House of Lords report into science and innovation, why the UK is good at the inventing bit yet all the money arising from these inventions ends up overseas.
TL:DR
https://x.com/alanjlsmith/status/1987823535394291931
UK Innovation Is Bleeding To Death:
The House of Lords Science & Tech Committee just dropped a brutal 2025 report:
“We’re world-class at inventing… and world-class at losing it.”
- DeepMind? London-born. Google’s now.
- Arm? Cambridge chip genius. SoftBank owned.
- Graphcore? Bristol AI unicorn. Folded into SoftBank – 500+ UK jobs gone.
- Skyscanner? Edinburgh unicorn. £1.4B to Chinese Ctrip - control vanished.
- Hopin? £4B peak in London. Liquidated UK ops in 2024 to chase US scale.
This isn’t bad luck. It’s a system failure.
I suppose you can’t rule out gross incompetence