Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn Pledges More Cash for Broadband

The new leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has today given his first big conference speech and as part of that he pledged “investment in fast broadband to support new high technology jobs“, but details were in short supply.

One of the problems with political debates, conferences and even elections is that more often than not we, the electorate, simply aren’t given enough detail about specific points of policy. In that sense today’s speech by Jeremy Corbyn was no different from any other but it did mention broadband. The new LibDem leader, Tim Farron, sadly didn’t manage the same in his first speech.

Similarly any promise of further investment in broadband from a big party leader is worth reporting, especially one that follows after the Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Kerry McCarthy MP, similarly accused the current government of leaving “rural businesses and communities isolated without broadband or decent transport“.

McCarthy’s comments perhaps hint at Labour’s frustration that the current Broadband Delivery UK programme is following an inside-out approach to the deployment of faster Internet connectivity, which is logical but also means that many in remote rural areas will be the last to benefit from faster broadband. In fairness, Labour could have done more when they were last in power too.

Jeremy Corbyn said:

“So it’s for us, for Labour to develop our forward-looking alternative. That’s what John McDonnell started to do in his excellent speech to conference. At the heart of it is investing for the future. Every mainstream economist will tell you that with interest rates so low now is the time for public investment in our infrastructure.

…

Investment in fast broadband to support new high technology jobs. A National Investment Bank to support investment in infrastructure [and] to provide finance to small and medium sized firms that our banks continue to starve of the money they need to grow.”

At present Labour’s idea for a National Investment Bank appears to be another twist on quantitative easing, which is to say that you print new money (increased debt) in order to support new infrastructure projects (the current government is instead trying to reduce our debt mountain). Naturally such an approach does have big economic risks, but we’ll leave those arguments to others as right now there simply isn’t enough meat on the bone to conduct a proper analysis.

In the meantime any new position from an opposition party, particularly one concerning broadband connectivity, is somewhat of a moot point because the next general election isn’t until 2020 and by then the market will have changed, as it always does. In the meantime it’s the current Government of power that will continue to hold sway over existing and future policy.

A new leader often also means policy changes, particularly with one as different as Corbyn appears to be. Standard practice in this situation is often to assume that anything which may have been said before from Labour might no longer exist anymore (examples here and here), at least until they’re confirmed.

Generally speaking we welcome any party that puts broadband on the agenda in a serious way and if Labour can do that then so much the better, but the devil is always in the detail and so far there’s not much of the latter. Still, he has only been in the job for a couple of weeks. Now to ask our readers for their thoughts.