TThe government will have to intervene more than ever in people’s lives to cope with the increasing pressure on public finances. With the transition to greener technologies, the need to keep track of who emits carbon and where it happens will only increase.
Last week’s announcement by London Mayor Sadiq Khan that he is employing more people to monitor cars entering the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) and ensure they are fined is a another example of ‘big brotherism’ mentioned by his colleague in Manchester. Andy Burnham decided that the Mancunians would not tolerate this.
Tracking British vehicles is a matter of painful debate among Whitehall officials, who want to oversee the switch to electric cars, but know that if they succeed, a large chunk of the £25 billion paid in fuel taxes each year will be lost. and the 20 percent share of VAT applied to fuel sales will be lost.
If electric cars dominate, the chancellor will have to find an alternative source of income, and that may have to come from satellite monitoring of zero-emission vehicles, and not just in London. If this direction of travel is unavoidable, the 7 cents per liter hike in fuel duty expected in the October 30 budget could be a last hurray.
The same need applies to the efficient use of public services, another worrying issue for civil servants. They want to reform the way services are provided and social security is paid, against the wishes of large minorities who object to or want to avoid state surveillance.
Health Minister Wes Streeting wants everyone to have a smartphone and the NHS app to streamline services that are costly in the analogue world. Streeting is also facing acute staff shortages, and better use of technology will help him overcome that. If British households offered their information to the NHS, as they do to Google et al., healthcare could be cheaper and more effective. And healthcare could be a testing ground for a national ID card that would enable the digitization of more parts of government, reduce costs and tackle fraud.
Keir Starmer shies away from a discussion about the impact of digital communications on a population that cherishes a (false) sense of freedom in fending off government interference.
Instead, he has upset Libertarians by accepting the Tory sugar tax and backing Sunak’s proposed ban on cigarette sales, which was included in the King’s June speech.
Starmer, like Tony Blair before him, does not belong to the libertarian wing of social democratic thought, for understandable reasons. Both want to check on people to make sure they are doing the right thing. Starmer has shown how far he is willing to go in this direction with support for a smoking ban outside pubs and restaurants, where there is little evidence of harm to others but good evidence of harm to the user.
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What would help would be a government that would make more of an effort to promote the state as a worthy and secure recipient of individuals’ digital information, and to defend itself against data intrusions by the private sector.
As my colleague Martha Gill wrote last week, the main goal of companies, from the newest startups to large multinationals, is to get us all hooked on their products. It is the private sector that wants to use and manipulate digital information far more than the state could ever imagine.
They develop the most sophisticated ways to lure us into buying again and again, consuming our disposable income and all too often making us physically or mentally ill. Starmer could find it difficult to take on the food industry, or even the gaming industry, when these are economic bright spots. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try.
Britain is very good at marketing and selling things that are bad for us. The food industry is by far the largest sector of the manufacturing industry and generates more employment and income than car production.
Dr. Chris van Tulleken, the author of the bestselling book Ultra-processed people, is among a growing number of experts with a lot of evidence showing that a growing number of sophisticated marketers, using all available digital influence, could have us on the hook in ways that are bad for the individual and the economy.
Right now, we are drifting into an era where we allow private sector control while eschewing government attempts to navigate a digital future.
Sadiq Khan’s Ulez experiment is an interim solution. The government should sell the idea of going all the way. It’s all coming together: cybercurrencies and artificial intelligence. We need to put governments, not Google, in control.