LTEC

Often misattributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let Them Eat Cake” is not a unique story:

In Chinese culture, there is (attributed to Emperor Hui of Jin by the book Zizhi Tongjian) a story that involves rice and meat, instead of bread and cake: “an ancient Chinese emperor who, being told that his subjects didn’t have enough rice to eat, replied, ‘Why don’t they eat meat?'”.

It has been said that our government is risk-averse. Not very risk-averse when it comes to permitting farmers to over-claim on EU subsidies, but risk-averse when it comes to anything that doesn’t involve ships.

Whether it’s building ships or filling boxes with polystyrene and loading them onto ships, it’s the same principle. They like ships. Nothing else can explain the morbid fascination (and exploitation) of the tragic Titanic disaster.

Investing in digital content and software is not the same as building a ship. It is risky. It’s unlikely to cause the deaths of 1500 people but it has risk. The issue is that because they don’t understand it (and they don’t see how it can directly benefit them) our politicians find it difficult to justify the investment.

• 60% of our economy depends on the public sector but it only employs 30% of our workforce. Think about that in terms of salary levels and why there is no incentive for local workers to enter the private sector. And why the public sector has, for generations, been a viable option.
• The app economy created half a million jobs in the US. We should have gotten two thousand but we managed about a hundred. Lack of investment in skills development, lack of assistance for start-ups and lack of investment full stop meant we were not able to capitalise on this opportunity.
• Digital is the new norm. So says PWCs outlook report for 2011-2015. Digital spending is growing three times faster than non-digital. It will, they estimate, account for 58.7% of all growth in spending during the next five years.
• We train fewer software engineers every year than death and retirement take away from us. Our current demands for software skills are such that it would take two years at double production to fulfil current demand, never mind the inevitable higher demand in the future.

Government assistance schemes are meant to address market failure. In my experience the schemes presented propagate failure by restricting assistance to the organisations who do not need it. This highlights the risk-aversion in our economic development.

• InvestNI failed to spend nearly £50m of their budget during the last two quarters due to a lack of investment in R&D by client. This represents a significant failure in outlook and forecasting considering it’s obvious we have been in the grips of a recession for four years.
• Speaking to DEL: they can’t help small companies employ people. If you’re hiring ten people, they can put a programme around you. This ignores the reality that more than 80% of the NI private sector are SMEs and the vast majority are micro-businesses.

At our briefing to the Culture, Arts and Leisure committee last month, we raised eyebrows by explaining all of this. Because the committee believed what they were told by other departments. As long as we continue to believe press releases from government on the quality and quantity of our skilled workforce, we will never progress. You cannot fix a problem that you do not acknowledge. You cannot address a need that you deny.

In my position I hear about a lot of local businesses closing their doors. And while some of my friends and colleagues are doing well, it’s not across the board. Those who are doing well are not in the position to capitalise on their fortune. They’re maintaining and sustaining.

And this is why every platitude from government reads like “Let Them Eat Cake”. Our local industry is still in the grips of a recession and government is intent on removing any and all supports for the development of the industry. They’re removing the bread from our mouths by not developing skills locally, by encouraging ephemeral foreign direct investment and displacing locally bred talent.