It's after election day and I'm actually not going to talk about the big vote, instead I'm going to cover a personal gripe I have with the competition committee. I'll state from the off this is my view alone but its one I feel strongly about and if people can show me that my views are wrong I'm willing to accept them but this is entirely my view.
Lets start with the election, its a day of cleaning out the government we feel we don't want and bringing in one the majority of the country do want. I've watched some of the debates and there have been talks of government reform, as with every election there is a promise of reform in some areas. It was the other night though that got me thinking, as I was watching 'First Time Voters Question Time' one of the audience mentioned something that rings in my ears from other people. "We just don't make anything anymore in this country", this is in a large part true. In the UK a lot of the traditional businesses have been brought by other companies outside of the UK or gone bankrupt due to high costs compared to other parts of the world. A recent example of this is Cadbury's take over by Kraft, a company who many years ago brought Yorkshires, Terry's Chocolate and closed the production in the UK.
So what's this got to do with competition committee, well it's mainly to do with project kangaroo. A joint group by public service broadcasters to bring together all their on demand project. Basically an online TV, the competition committee decided that this was not good for competition. So kangaroo died, it's since come back under new management as a commercial system, but is still the loan UK based portal. It no longer hosts the taken kangaroo would have but uses the same technology. So what has this decision done, first public service broadcasters now have no one stop shop for on demand content which is a big hurt for consumers used to using a single device to find multi-broadcasters at one touch button. The other problem is a raft of US owned portals heading to the UK. This shows that the committee are actually not looking at competition in a global business or in the case of consumer habits.
This is not the first of these, the competition committee often looks at things and in my opinion undertake the wrong view. The UK is part of a global economy so we must look at it as such in terms of media. There are of course UK based issues to look at competition of UK company against UK company but those words still ring true, "we don't make anything in UK any more" truth is we do but they are part of the global market like space exploration technology, computer chips, all designed and created in UK but made on mass abroad, we are part of a global competition it's time to start thinking like one.
I think it's time for a reform of the competition committee, its a government body that need to start looking at global competition for industry. Lets kick start the economy again by thinking of competition globally rather than loaclly.
