Living in Britain feels rather like being responsible for an intelligent yet lazy teenager. “You could be so great!” you want to burst into the country’s bedroom and yell. “You have so much potential. If only you would just do something, build something.”
Sometimes, you feel like you might be getting somewhere. But then, sure enough, the teen will find an excuse. “I want to build the train line, Mum, but I’m worried someone might disturb an endangered bat.” It wouldn’t be fair if we had a new road outside our house; what about the other people who don’t have a new road? And if we can’t do something perfectly, perhaps we shouldn’t do it at all.
I found myself thinking all this as I read with frustration last week about the Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s new institute of technology for Oxford. Last week, Ellison surpassed Elon Musk to become the richest man in the world.
• Is Larry Ellison’s Oxford science project at risk of unravelling?
Oxford has been a great beneficiary. Last year Ellison invested £200 million in the university. His institute aims to solve some of humanity’s “most challenging and enduring problems”, including climate change and food security. His vision is of a city that will lead the world in technological development, attract the best scientists and rake in megabucks. Good. We need all the economic growth we can get. And if it is going to come from anywhere, it will be our scientific powerhouse universities.
You don’t need me to tell you that Larry Ellison is an American. So, too, is Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone chief executive who has thrown £185 million at a centre of humanities for Oxford. Schwarzman’s centre will house the Institute for Ethics in AI, something that will become increasingly important over the years to come. Oxford will be at the forefront of what could genuinely be an existential debate.
It makes sense that these men want to invest in these already great institutions. This is what Americans do. They see something good, and wonder: “How can I make this even better?” They also, needless to say, see something good and wonder: “How can I use this to make money?” As Brits, we look at something good and resent it, or we presume everything is going fine and that the good thing hardly needs our help to thrive.
Both these billionaires have been criticised for their involvement in these ambitious projects. “Ethics fly out of the window at Oxford University when big donors come calling” was the headline of an Observer column about Schwarzman’s donation. The investor’s crimes? Donating to Donald Trump, making his money from a “rapacious business model, criticised for associated redundancies and cuts” and, horror of horrors, throwing big parties. An American billionaire with a rapacious business model? Colour me shocked.
Now Ellison, too, is under fire. The Times reported last week that insiders worry about a “toxic culture” at the new research institute and “a ‘cavalier attitude’ of hiring and quickly letting staff go”. We should not be particularly surprised by this. By all accounts, Ellison is one of those mad tech geniuses: obsessive, visionary, extraordinarily self-confident.
It is no surprise that such a man would acquire extreme wealth (or end up in an asylum — it’s always a delicate balance). Of course such a man would want to secure a legacy. Of course, any institute set up to ensure that legacy would be riddled with problems, and would involve a lot of broken eggs along the way. But could such a project also achieve remarkable things? Almost certainly.
We have a squeamishness about such projects in Britain, about such ambition. We always seek to dwell on what might go wrong, on who might lose out. We have an abject refusal to — as the old Facebook internal motto goes — move fast and break things. It’s attitudes like this that explain, in part, why the US has 1,200 unicorn companies, while last year the UK science minister had to plaintively tell MPs that Britain’s tech sector is “not just OnlyFans”.
Take another big investment project which would have made one of our greatest and most potentially profitable national assets even better: the Oxford-Cambridge arc. Set in motion by George Osborne in 2016, the idea was to link up Oxford and Cambridge with the completion of an east-west railway line, build a massive dual carriageway, and unlock the capacity for a million new homes. Link up these two potential economic powerhouses, the idea ran, and growth will follow.
And yet the plan was scrapped in 2021 due to overwhelming opposition from residents and councils, who feared the impact of all this new infrastructure. Some MPs, too, whinged that money would be better spent in less prosperous parts of the country. Not for them seeing something good and wondering if it could be made better.
Now, very little of what was once planned remains. This year, four long years on, Rachel Reeves announced that she was going to have a crack rebooting something similar, in the hope of a £78 billion boost in growth over the next decade. Let’s see. I fear we know how this goes: delays, opposition, paperwork always seem to get in the way of any grand British project. We are far more interested in fretting about what might go wrong, mitigating for potential problems, than we are in taking action.
Ellison and Schwarzman give us a glimpse of what can be achieved if we can overcome these instincts.
This entrepreneurial spirit has for too long been suppressed in Britain. As the rest of the world grows, we sit sulking in our bedrooms. It’s past time for that to change.
Hadley Freeman is away