I fear Zoe Williams has set Labour an impossible task with her admonition (The future’s at stake: the left must show it could create an iPad, 23 November). As we already have Apple’s iPad, what should John McDonnell’s socialist innovators set their sights on inventing? Nobody knew there was a demand for iPads before they were invented. Similarly, if we go further back into history, there was no demand for telephones or televisions or aeroplanes before each of these were invented.
Innovation rarely, if ever, answers some perceived social or political need. What the political system does influence is the way in which innovation is exploited and, as I illustrate in my book Eureka: How Invention Happens (Yale, 2015), the lesson of history is that technological creativity thrives best in a free market. McDonnell’s ill-judged slogan “socialism with an iPad” will only reinforce the widely held view that leftwing politics and innovation are incompatible.
Gavin Weightman
London
• John McDonnell did not elaborate on the third of his interlinked pledges: a new relationship with the world, based upon a foreign policy promoting mutual cooperation (After the new politics, the new economics, 20 November). Above all, this must mean cooperation with the Brics, especially China. China has made its own pledge to become a major science and innovation power in the coming decade, and its economy is already moving fast up the value chain, soon to challenge our core technologies. The best approach is collaboration; it will be hard to compete. Here Manchester is showing the way with a partnership agreement, signed during Xi Jinping’s recent visit, between Manchester University’s National Graphene Institute and Huawei, China’s leading electronics company, to accelerate the commercialisation of graphene applications.
While encouraging new industries, we also need to address the issues of restructuring our traditional industries, such as steel. Again this can only be done through global cooperation. Blaming China for “dumping” will not do – when China’s growth has done so much to help haul the rest of the world out of recession; when most of the developed world has failed to lift its own economic recovery to pre-2009 levels; when China has reduced steel production while European output has been rising.
Too often on matters to do with China we settle for the superficial: 50 years ago, the renowned Sinologist and radical scientist Joseph Needham enjoined us to study China’s achievements and problems “in sufficient detail in order to consider them in the proper balance”.
Media negativity “others” China in a way that is inimicable to cooperation when instead we should be looking creatively, constructively, for opportunities that the country, with its huge market and huge funds for investment, may offer to aid Britain’s industrial reshaping.
Jenny Clegg
Vice-president, Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding
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