Gordon Brown unveils plans for digital Britain

LAME DUCK Gordon Brown, the UK's curmudgeonly prime minister, has outlined his own plans for a digital Britain.

In a speech that could have been written by a donkey with the barest knowledge of the UK's broadband system, he suggested that this required provisioning "superfast" broadband to every home in the country. We would have started with providing a decent merely half-fast service to those who currently don't get it, but no one asked us.

Yes, some people might react to the Internet in the same way that the good people of Hartlepool did when they first saw a monkey, but that hasn't prevented Brown from insisting that it should be it thrust upon them. At their own cost.

Brown said, "I want us to consider the Britain of 2020 - the Britain we can create at the leading edge of these knowledge industries, but also a Britain which leads the world in open, personal, interactive public services and the new politics."

Ah, an open, personal Internet where the laws are written by music and film companies and broadcast media firms. Who can wait? Nevermind, believe it.

Gordo plans to make the UK a world leader amongst digital players, and expects that by pushing ahead with his speed rollouts, some quarter of a million jobs will be created. We expect most of these to be in the repairs business, at net addiction centres, legal firms or in Whitehall's own IT departments.

Choosing to ignore the hoo-hah caused by the passing of the Digital Economy Bill, which was rushed through before anyone had a chance to even burn their Scouting for Girls CDs, Brown added that he wanted the UK to become the "world leader in the new politics where that voice for feedback and deliberative decisions can transform the way we make local and national decisions."

Public funding will help the government provide next-gen "superfast" broadband Internet service to "nearly every household" by 2012, he added. This will involve a small household levy of 50p a month to help the private sector rollout the services that ultimately will make them a lot more than 50p on everything digital.

"The truth is that a government that is prepared to allow a digital divide to grow would be one that creates a deeper and more pernicious divide than simply one of accessing e-mail or Amazon's shopping services," Brown said, making us wonder if he feels anything the same about healthcare, pensions or education, for example.

Sensibly, because we were starting to think that Brown was just saying words out loud, he added that the government would spend £30m on a new web science institute.

If you were assuming that this would involve MPs sitting around sending unfortunate tweets, you'd be wrong. Wisely, the government has chosen to involve Tim Berners-Lee in this. As opposed, we presume, to someone like Peter Mandelson.

Here work will be carried out on the semantic web, which is just about vague enough to keep us happy for a month or so.

In case you do not already feel that we know too much about the murky goings-on in government, Brown has also promised to make things more open, and will release information and APIs for developers that want to link into them.

A good example, according to Brown, of the more openness of government that its digital intentions will bring about, is an Iphone application that lets you see how many people have Asbos in any particular area. Something that we would have thought the new, digital, leading edge, world leader in politics might have wanted to keep quiet.

Meanwhile Directgov, the web sites designed to link the population with government information, are no more. Brown said that they would be replaced with Mygov, and would make it easier for users to connect with the information that they need.

Our money had been on "Whatsitgottodowithyouguv". µ