Why the Raspberry Pi will save the UK

The United Kingdom used to have a very rich engineering and manufacturing past.   The industrial revolution started here and since that point we followed a course of solid, reliable and well thought-out engineering.

Unfortunately during the last quarter of the 20th century decisions were made to shut down our engineering and manufacturing base so that we, as a consumer society, could buy cheaper goods that we cared less about.  To fill the hole we relied more and more on the City of London and de-regulated it to ensure that it became a honey pot for the world’s investors.  Whilst the City was generating the money for the country the rest of us set to work Servicing the needs of the nation – whatever their needs were – usually spending some money in a generic chain food or beverage outlet.  Meanwhile those that struggled on making actual stuff were relieved of permanent work in favour of contract work run by agencies so that companies could hire and fire as fast as they needed whilst a large percentage of the wages were scraped off by these blood-suckers.

But there is one industry that can turn things around for the UK – software.  We have a strong heritage of computer hardware and software in this country but the beauty of manufacturing software is that it can be done by anyone, in any location with minimal start-up costs.  The biggest cost by far is the cost of training people to be able to build software – although fairly easy to pick up the basics it’s still a craft that requires knowledge of engineering principles and practical experience.

This is where the Raspberry Pi can save us: it’s now affordable for the government to equip any child in this country with a machine which they could take home with them and play with.  Furthermore if the government keeps its promise to stop giving lessons about how to use Microsoft Word and start teaching some decent subjects we will soon have a generation of highly-skilled workers at our fingertips ready to export product to the world.

Programming is not for everyone, of course, but making software is only partly about programming – it’s also about high-concept design, ideas, reasoning and planning.  We already have top-notch (but minority) design, games, web and software industries in this country  -  if representatives from those industries can steer this ship and massively expand those industries to challenge the big players from the US then we really could be onto something.

It’s great to hear that Nissan are creating new jobs in this country but I believe we need to start moving away from the dinosaur industries and create a grass-roots, decentralised and highly skilled workforce of creators in order to export again.

And we need to start giving the software industry the respect it has in the States.

I write this as the Raspberry Pi is selling 700 units a second having 700 enquiries a second and it gives me my faith back in the world – that a non-profit initiative with such philanthropic designs can be having so much success.  And I love the fact it’s based on another Cambridge technology that changed the world (and confirmed that we can still make stuff): the ARM chip.