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Follow us on twitterOpinion: Rethinking the Internet
3rd April 2013 01:24 by Loz Kaye
Loz Kaye - Party Leader
There is a joke from where I come from: A man is out lost wandering on Dartmoor desperately trying to get home. Eventually he comes across a farm. He asks the farmer “how do you get to Plymouth from here?” The farmer replies “I wouldn't start from here if I were you.”I didn't say it was a good joke. But it is good advice for rethinking the Internet.
All too often the future of the Internet has been framed as how to serve outmoded business models, clamping down on sharing of information for a whole host of reasons, and who will be key industry players. If you will forgive me for conflating the net and the web, as is in fact the reality now, we shouldn't start from here. Because the web didn't start from here.
Opinion: From Triple A to Triple Dip
25th February 2013 18:16 by Philip Hunt
Phil Hunt
In February 2010, just before the general election, chancellor George Osborne set out his economic objectives "against which I expect to be judged". High among them was retaining Britain's AAA credit rating. Now the credit rating agency Moody's has stripped Britain of its AAA rating. So judging Osborne by his own criterion, he has failed.Moody's explained their decision as due to "continuing weakness in the UK’s medium-term growth outlook, with a period of sluggish growth which it now expects will extend into the second half of the decade". Put simply, the economy isn't growing, and isn't expected to grow, and the implication of that for our debt to GDP ratio is dire.
In the short term, Moody's decision is unlikely in itself to change anything, since the markets were expecting it and have factored it into their decisions. But it does signal that the government has failed. In three years we've gone from a triple A credit rating to a triple dip recession.