For all the fine words, the ‘localism’, the hacking back of ‘red tape’, the emphasis on ‘community action’ in ‘bigging up’ the ‘Big Society’, most of us doubt the existence of fairy-dust and economic magic.

Indeed any attempt to re-invoke those now-distant dreams of a never ending source of economic growth, easy money, employment and property ladders, would (at least until memories fade once again) collide head-on with reminders of bankers who were bonkers and leaders seriously short of left/right-hand coordination skills.

But a settled state of despair is a contradiction of human nature. Reggie Perrin’s CJ might have observed, ‘We didn’t get where we are today by not doing something’ - the perennial political call to arms, ‘Something must be done’, is impossible to suppress.

But it is also a common paradox that for all the projection of hope and aspiration, the triggers for concerted action are more-often found in real or perceived threats. We respond to a crisis or calamity more decisively but we often fail to support visionary schemes or to reach out to grasp ideas that we haven’t yet fully understood or personally experienced. We don’t fix things if they seem not yet to be demonstrably broken.

If new ideas need whole-hearted support and sure-footed leadership to rise above the sniping of the naysayers, it would be foolishly inefficient, in today’s cynical society, to project imaginative and innovative expectations of turning things inside out or upside down. The ‘animateurs’, those who live to make things happen, can only claim their rights to that progressive agenda in retrospect, long after the changes were induced by collective fear of real or imminent disaster – and even then those windows of opportunity are but briefly open and rarely universal.

So where might we sensibly search for believable sources of economic growth and societal stability? Most of the answers seem to be in the dull detail of digging and laying foundations. The post Great Depression revival in the USA boosted transport infrastructure and there are countless other diverse examples around the world where today’s citizens should be thankful for those now long-forgotten sporadic outbreaks of investment in their future.

Set against those crisis-driven projects the numbers of lasting beneficial investments driven by visionary leaders are either now far fewer or belong to a Victorian era where innovation and enterprise was prized way above the democratic sensitivities of citizens who were not allowed to vote. In recent UK times, only the Channel Tunnel and the new British Library (heroic survivors of the 1980’s) seem to fit the hope and aspiration model, and the current difficulties of the HS2 rail link illustrate the challenge of doing anything that is not a response to a widely acknowledged crisis.

The 21^st century equivalent of infrastructure investment may not be immediately obvious. Wealth creation for the UK hinges much more around intellectual capacities and high-value engineering than in the production of basic commodities. Job-creation is, more than ever before, largely in the hands of very small innovative enterprises of not more than 50 employees and they divide into two distinct classes of being either intensely locally focussed or international in outlook. Jobs growth in organisations beyond 50 employees is increasingly negative as ‘growth by acquisition’ is quickly followed by ‘rationalisation’, the economies of scale and, completing the cycle, by ‘outsourcing’ to smaller specialist enterprises.

The new growth creation foundation-building agenda can sensibly include far greater investment in skills training, in demystifying the processes for protection of ‘Intellectual Property’, in smarter better-targeted intelligence-driven export promotion, in higher education, alternative energy generation and health sciences, and in arts and design for media-driven global markets. But common to and under-pinning all of these necessary adjustments to investment priorities is the single most significant economic growth hormone that can be applied locally by community-driven investment.

But years of debate have amply demonstrated that it is pointless to preach hope and aspiration in the expectation of collective support. Only when the true extent of the gap between the UK and its competitors is exposed, only when realisation dawns that getting by with short-term fixes and ‘upgrades’ will no longer suffice, only when the feeble excuses of incumbents and regulators are revealed; only then will political leaders begin to notice that local communities, business enterprises and the public sector will be demanding that ‘something must be done’.

The single most significant economic growth hormone, the rebuilding of the UK’s information access infrastructure on an all-optical foundation (with all the shocking transformational facility that this implies) is now so long overdue that it is fast-shifting from opportunity to survival need.

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Readers of this editorial also read 'This is not an Upgrade', 'Communicating Communications' and 'Community Study Tours'

Post Script (added 15th September)  See also: FTTx European Leadership - Table 2 extracted from report by Arthur D Little 'FTTH - Double Squeeze of Incumbents'