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Leader: Are we too snobbish to deserve a British Google?
IT is no job for a gentlemen...

By silicon.com

Published: Tuesday 13 June 2006

'Whatever happened to the British Google, Yahoo! or MySpace?' This is the latest cry from the Conservative Party.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne has been on a fact-finding tour to Silicon Valley to figure out where we've been going wrong.

Osborne's general point is this - we the Brits invented the web and yet we've let it slip away because of high business taxes and a lack of innovation in our universities.

Whether you believe in the Tories as the saviours of the UK internet economy is one thing. But he does seem to have something of a point.

Silicon Glen, Silicon Fen, Silicon Corridor, Silicon Beach - we've heard 'em all. It's not for want of trying that we lack any really big UK internet players. But where are we going wrong?

Perhaps part of the problem is the way the British have looked down on business success.

From the days when the landed gentry looked down on the oiks that made their money from new-fangled steam engines, the British have never really shaken off the idea that business isn't a suitable employment for a gentleman.

And just as those Victorian engineers were looked down on for getting their hands dirty, so today's software engineers are similarly shunned. Even though - as the Conservatives have apparently just noticed - much of the innovation is coming from internet technologies.

On top of this, in the US - for all its other ills - there is a willingness to try, fail and try again. And again, until they succeed. In the UK there is a feeling that if you fail once, you aren't likely to get a second go.

So it's strange to see the posher of our two main political parties bemoaning the lack of innovation in the UK. Perhaps we need a little less snobbery before we deserve some internet successes.