W Hutton is finally getting sensible again in the Observer today.
If the Tories truly want to reshape the country, they should help to buy Arm
Arm is a 'tech giant' which Hutton has written about before:
Weeks after the referendum vote [sign of a link to come] , Britain lost its biggest and best technology company – Arm – to the predatory charms of the megalomaniac Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank. Son, who this year compared himself to Jesus, paid $32bn (£24bn), the highest price ever for a European hi-tech company....venal City shareholders, ignorant of what they owned, were only too ready to pocket handsome profits....[Son] is now trying to sell Arm, which has languished under his ownership. It is available for no more than what he paid for it and presents a heaven-sent opportunity to reverse what never should have happened.
By 2016, [Arm] had become as important in its world as a Google or Apple – and British. The genius is that it is a kind of public-interest commercial company: licensing state-of-the art instruction sets that can be implemented in silicon architecture by everyone. It was in nobody’s pocket. Its business, as its chief founder, Tudor Brown, acknowledges, relied on it never betraying its neutrality.
Sounds a bit like the image the Graundina has of itself, but fair enough. He has venal and ignorant City shareholders, megalomaniac robber-baron capitalists, short-termism, and an example of a better business model.
A future owner could almost trash Arm in the pursuit of its own commercial ends....Nvidia, reported to be in advanced talks with Son, is just such a possible owner..... Once it owns Arm it will withdraw its licensing agreements from its competitors, notably Intel and Huawei, and after July next year take the rump of Arm to Silicon Valley, just as Google has done with the British AI company DeepMind. Arm, and Britain’s hopes to be a player in hi-tech, will be dead.
Stil a bit odd for such a European that a hi tech giant stands for Britain and that its values are somehow obviously British, but still OK. Hutton wants the UK Government to intervene:
Britain could act. The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors – some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers – to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry
Only ideology gets in the way of seeing the obvious sense of this proposal:
The problem is that the Tories are so starstruck by the notion that anything private is always best – hence the succession of scandals, from Chris Grayling’s deal with a ferry company with no ferries to buying £150m of inoperable masks from a dodgy “entrepreneur” – that they don’t understand the need for public action on this scale and ambition. Equally, there is a powerful strain in the Labour party whose instinctive solution is to nationalise.
If only there was some sort of 'Third Way'? Some Prime Minister interested in the Third Way, some statesman wanting to rise above mere party ideology...
Anyway, all that is over, so what's the lesson for we deluded Leavers?
Theresa May and Philip Hammond, joined with Nigel Farage to prove their pro-Brexit credentials [May and Hammond?] by hymning, nonsensically, the [Son] deal as showing Britain was “open for business” (code for being asset-stripped)...The open question is whether Brexit Tories, forced by reality, might change. This kind of audacious deal could appeal to Johnson and Cummings, a statement of intent to match China in our commitment to a decisive presence in 21st-century hi-tech. Brexit was meant to give Britain the freedom to make this kind of move [and is this claim valid in these circumstances?]. So Brexiters, show us the money. I am not holding my breath.
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