Labour's Great Leap

According to embittered champagne socialists, New Labour is in reality a Conservative government that works.

They joke: 'Tony Blair PM' is an anagram of 'I'm Tory Plan B'. Ha ha.

There is no need to hide this impotent anger behind humour. In fact, they are wrong. These Gucci loafers should look past the superficial signals and they would see a government that bears the mark of true socialists.

They would see before them an excess of government which, just like Soviet Russia or Castro's Cuba, pretends to manage the economy by socialising it through rigid control and the setting of arcane planning targets. It is only a short step from these unrealistic targets to false accounting, and ultimately to economic collapse.

Mao Zedong's 'Great Leap Forward' in China claimed that revolutionary zeal would deliver national self-sufficiency. The result was the Cultural Revolution - and 28 million deaths from starvation - while the Chinese government was keeping up the pretence of targets.

Our government is now pointing its particular variant of targets at the IT industry. Discussion documents concerning ecommerce are doing the rounds.

Government will 'develop the UK as the best environment world-wide in which to trade electronically'. Tony Blair says 25% of government services 'should' be available electronically by 2002. By next April, 20,000 bugbusters will be trained to tackle the millennium bug.

In reality only 3,000-odd have been trained thus far, at a cost of half a million pounds. Maybe the government believes that the dole queue is an alternative source of hi-tech personnel. A career in politics requires no qualifications; why shouldn't it be the same for IT? Throw money at a production line, dream up targets, and ignore the fact that success in hi-tech business comes with talent, not process.

Indeed, just like under Chairman Mao, the very act of naming a target figure guarantees success. The government controls data collection; it can re-label any old data to fit the categories being measured and then bluff its way through, ignoring the fact that quantity is not a measure of quality.

All of Britain's 32,000 schools will be connected to the Net by 2002.

The government is proud that, per capita, the UK has the world's second largest installed Internet infrastructure. They fail to see that, rather than creating wealth, this infrastructure dissipates it. Access to global computer networks merely delivers customers to US business. Announcing that it is about to spend large sums of money is another good trick. The message: the more money it spends, the more successful it will be.

A new Enterprise Fund, with #150 million to spend over three years, is to finance small businesses with growth potential. Last October's White Paper Our competitive future: building the knowledge driven economy said: 'Our country's future prosperity will depend on entrepreneurs who can develop and market innovative goods and services, turning the UK's fund of good ideas into profits and jobs.' Business Link partnerships are to provide 'high quality' tailored services to 10,000 high growth potential start-ups per annum.

Gordon Brown claims he will create 500,000 new jobs. No one points out that only business can generate the wealth needed to create real jobs.

Government creates non-jobs funded by taxation. It is obvious that this sleight of hand has now become as sophisticated as the agricultural targets and claims of full employment that bankrupted the Soviet Union and starved Mao's China. But the outcome will be the same.

Lack of quality inevitably leads to failure. When its figures are shown to be false, what should government do? Fire a few scapegoats, before creating a fanfare around yet more targets. Lies, damn lies and statistics?

No. Mark Twain identified the problem: 'it's not the figures lying, it's the liars figuring'.

Ian Angell is Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics.