Letter from Dr David Hill (From This Is Wiltshire)

Letter from Dr David Hill

10:43am Thursday 18th March 2010 in

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RECENTLY I was in the audience of a CameronDirect question time session at Holmfirth, Huddersfield. My conclusion after listening to David Cameron for over an hour was that he has finely tuned these sessions and there was definitely a suspicion that many of the questioners had been pre-selected. I cannot state for definite but this unnerving fact came over to me personally. Therefore these sessions are, in my mind, a not-rock-the-boat situation and no more. Indeed, although as usual with all politicians there was a great deal of rhetoric and aspirations, no applied mechanisms to achieve these goals was forthcoming from Mr Cameron.

In this respect as an example, he talked about the knowledge economy where engineers and scientists are so important but where unfortunately I have heard all this before since I started voting some 44 years ago, from Douglas-Home to Blair (I don't include Gordon Brown as the electorate have never had the opportunity to vote for him) - definitely an overwhelming sense of deja vu. Nothing has changed here and it shows that our political leaders have no idea at all of how to create wealth through British engineers, scientists and technologists, for all their feeble attempts (basically just mere words to catch the voters) to date, have failed miserably and where the state of the British economy can clearly testify to this.

What these so-called clever and intelligent people do not comprehend is what the history of science and technology tells us. That is that over 75 per cent of all the world's foremost inventions, that have created the modern world as we see it today, were created by independent inventors, not our universities or so-called advanced corporate research centres.

Therefore if Mr Cameron really thinks that he can create a world-beating knowledge economy, he has to think totally differently to all those that have gone before him and failed appallingly. That world changing thinking is to invest in the real creative people who have provided basically ground-breaking thinking, the British inventors themselves, and build at least eight people research incubators around the UK so that their pre-eminent wealth creator can be unleashed.

Anything else and Mr Cameron will simply be fooling himself, exactly like all the others who have gone before him.

(Dr) DAVID HILL Executive Director World Innovation Foundation Charity Switzerland