Richard Pope: On waiting, digital and where the state chooses to operate (LinkedIn warning):

The post-war digitisation of the UK’s tax and benefits system, the creation of automated institutions like Girobank, and teaching children programming with the BBC Micro (ironically, the conservative Thatcher government did a better job of ‘picking winners’ with the BBC Micro, than the statist Benn had done with ICL) were all bets on the future.

Those kind of bets have been long absent from British politics, but looking to the energy behind digital infrastructure in Estonia and India and it’s hard not to see the similarity.