Promises and premises.

This year more than any other the parties competing for your vote needed you to understand their capacity to deliver.

More than in any other year – and in Scotland more than in any other part of the UK - the capacity to deliver meant stretching the digital boundaries.

Efficiency in public administration?  Refueling economic growth?  Building a better society?  Improving health and education and public safety?  Cutting environmental damage?  Encouraging Innovation and Enterprise?

There is hardly any area of public life and economic development that does not now depend on digital delivery and yet might be so easily scuppered if the fibre fails to connect the promises to the premises.

Now, with the Scottish National Party victorious, the race will be on to reconnect the societally disconnected. The race will be on to deploy local access capacity to deliver the sort of benefits commonplace in countries like Sweden - places where the last decade didn’t wait for old Telco’s to wake up.

Did the SNP’s manifesto writers realise that voters are fast becoming network savvy?  In contrast to Scottish Labour the SNP certainly made a vastly better job of articulating digital policy.

Both Scottish Labour and the SNP acknowledged the importance of broadband take-up, its relevance for rural areas, and its value in fuelling economic growth.

But on closer inspection digital/broadband futures were threaded far more deeply throughout the SNP manifesto – appearing on more than 20% of the pages compared to just 7% of the Scottish Labour production.

Maybe neither party fully captured the scale of effort required to achieve their digital dreams. The reality is that this infrastructure transformation is a huge economic and technological undertaking that cries out for strong community leadership.

But the SNP’s manifesto explicitly linked digital ‘next generation’ broadband to administrative efficiency, innovation, creativity, heritage, health, education, helping the disadvantaged and rural economic issues – and, moreover, they clearly identified the infrastructure funding challenge.

If this election had been decided entirely on some sort of  broadband policy shoot-out, the score would have been at least 16 – 6 in favour of the SNP.

On our reading, the SNP see the digital agenda as far more central to policy development.  Their manifesto showed digital resources and connectivity woven into the fabric of the Scottish economy and community life.

But promises and premises.  By openly acknowledging these critical dependencies between policy delivery and higher quality digital broadband the SNP is far more exposed to the mercy of an infrastructure utility industry that has not in recent times shown much regard for societal priorities or real innovation.

This week, as vote counting and media analysis winds down, the NextGen Roadshow Edinburgh - backed by ScotlandIS and The Royal Society of Scotland - will examine in detail the practical challenges of connecting the premises of the people with the promises of the policy manifesto.

____________________________

NextGen Roadshow, Edinburgh, 12th May 2011 - Full Programme and Registration >