dTo meet the growing demands on state finances, the government must become more involved in people's lives than ever. As we transition to greener technologies, the need to monitor who emits carbon and where will intensify.
Last week, London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced he would hire more people to ensure cars that fall within the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) are fined, and his representative in Manchester is another example of great brotherhood . Andy Burnham decided that the Mancunians would not accept.
Control of British vehicles is the subject of a bitter debate among Whitehall officials who want to oversee the switch to electric cars, but if they succeed they will lose £25bn in fuel duty each year and the 20% VAT used on retail fuel sales.
As electric cars dominate, the chancellor must find an alternative source of income, not only in London, but also from satellite tracking of zero-emission vehicles. If this direction is inevitable, the 7p per liter increase in fuel duty planned in the October 30 Budget could be the last hurrah.
The same imperative applies to the efficient use of public services, which is another problematic issue for public officials. They want to reform service delivery and welfare payments against the will of a large minority who resist or want to avoid state surveillance.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting wants everyone to have a smartphone and an NHS app to optimize expensive services when delivered in an analogue world. Streeting is battling a serious staff shortage and better use of technology will help it cope. Health service provision would be cheaper and more efficient if UK households provided their information to the NHS in the same way as Google et al. And the health service could be a testing ground for a national ID card, allowing many parts of government to be digitized, cutting costs and tackling fraud.
Keir Starmer has avoided the debate about the impact of digital communications on the population, which has cherished a (false) sense of freedom by stopping government intrusion.
Instead, he sided with the Conservatives and upset the Liberals with a sugar tax and support for Sunak's proposal to ban the sale of cigarettes, included in the King's speech in June.
Starmer, like Tony Blair before him, does not belong to the liberal wing of social democratic thought, and for understandable reasons. They both want to control people to make sure they do the right thing. Starmer has shown how far he is willing to go down this road with his support for a ban on smoking outside pubs and restaurants, where there is little evidence of harm to others but good evidence of harm to the user.
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What will help the government is to make more efforts to develop the state as a competent and secure state to access people's digital information and improve protection against data intrusion by the private sector.
My colleague Martha Gill wrote last week that companies, from startups to large multinational corporations, seek to enslave us all to their products. It is the private sector that wants to use and manipulate digital information.
They create sophisticated ways to lure us in and make us buy again and again, depleting our disposable income and often making us physically or mentally ill. Even in the most successful food industry or gaming industry, they can struggle when the economy is bright. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
Britain is very good at marketing and selling us bad things. The food industry is the largest sector of the manufacturing industry and generates more employment and income than automobile manufacturing.
Dr. Chris Van Tulleghan is the author of the best-selling book. Ultra-processed people, A growing body of evidence has a growing body of evidence showing that more and more sophisticated marketers are using all the digital leverage available to hook us into the worst, both for the individual and the economy.
We are now entering an era that allows the private sector to take control of the digital future, bypassing government initiatives.
Sadiq Khan's Ulez experiment is halfway done. The government has to sell the idea of going to the end. Cybercurrencies and artificial intelligence: all this is on the way. We should let governments, not Google, control that.
