25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

The opening speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, was an inspiring one. I hope it is widely disseminated. The first thing I would like to do is to echo her call on the Government to find a way of recognising the 25th anniversary of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. This is, after all, the country that invented the industrial revolution, the second one that changed mankind out of all shape following the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s step is another giant step on the road for this country and we ought to recognise it as much as other countries do, where you often see public memorials to him even before he is dead, which is quite an achievement. I congratulate him again on that.

My second point is that this moves very fast. I started my blog as a Member of Parliament in the early part of this century. There were just three of us who did it. I then moved it here to the House of Lords under “Lords of the Blog” and it is still going, but I slipped off the edge a bit and I need to reinvent myself. One of the beauties of the world wide web and the internet is that you can actually reinvent yourself. As someone said earlier, you actually can stimulate your own mind in doing so, although I might need the assistance of the noble Lord’s 94 year-old friend to give me a leg up on the situation. I might have to give him a call.

We have talked a lot today about how the web and the internet will change the way everyone works. We do not talk enough about how it will change this place and the way we do politics. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, touched on that point. We really have not thought that through. I give a simple example: the argument about security and privacy, which came to the fore with the revelations about the interception of messages. The Bill that we passed five or six years ago was out of date technologically before it received Royal Assent. Many of the Acts of Parliament that we enact now are also technologically out of date. We have to find a way for Parliament to modify laws as we move on. We have tended over the years to have a system where we simply added amendments or changes or a new Act every five, 10 or 15 years. The speed of change is so great, however, that on anything involving technology, we get left behind.

My last message is to the political parties. I am no longer involved in drawing up manifestos, thank heavens, but all the parties need to have a very clear statement about science and technology in their manifestos for the next election, particularly on how they are going to approach the privacy and security of the world wide web and the internet. It is profoundly important. There are very exciting possibilities here. We really can change the way we do politics and involve people in the political process much more effectively than we have done in the past. It is not easy to work out how to do this, but we need to respond to how people are thinking about things and how we can create politics out of ideas and movements rather than just carry on with political parties in the older form.