Nick Clegg

I'm a little less enamored than Professor Matsukata is about the capacity of the state.

Sometimes one of my sons is just about to start a Ph.D.

in quantum physics.

physics at imperial and i if you look at imperial they're really getting so much better now compared to 15 years ago or something um uh and so i look i've got a lot of sympathy with that but the how you do that and who pulls levers and makes the decisions is quite an important one actually competence does matter but but i look as a general directional thing totally totally agree

You and I are both old enough to remember having to go down to telephone boxes with bags of 5p, 20p, 10p pieces to ring our boyfriends, girlfriends or whatever.

Now you can speak to someone in a clear video signal on WhatsApp anywhere in the world for free.

It's an extraordinary, extraordinary change, which often I think is undervalued.

It's one of the reasons I was so interested in working in Silicon Valley, because I think they've brought fantastic innovation, which has enabled and empowered people to speak for themselves, to express themselves, to communicate with each other in a way which is almost without precedent.

That's not really the essay question.

Do those technologies bring great benefits?

Of course they do.

The question is a slightly different one.

They're not mutually exclusive.

But is the level of our dependency...

on American technology at every single level of the stack, from physical infrastructure to handsets to cloud computing to the apps.

Is that compatible with the kind of interests of our nation and our continent at a time when

Clearly, the transatlantic relationship is changing out of all recognition.

So much of the, and this is more your world than mine, so much of the debate, in my view, is infantilized by this sort of silly media headline thing of just wanting to vilify all technology rather than actually think about it and just scare the living daylights out of everybody.

It sort of paralyzes everybody.

So the politicians that run around in ever diminishing circles, beating their chest and saying, I'm going to do this and do that and the other and not actually doing, which I think is I really hope someone's doing this Whitehall.