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In a week when Lars Ramqvist, president of the Swedish company Ericsson,
put the case for heavy spending on research and development at the annual
Department of Trade and Industry Innovation Lecture, it was depressing to
see one of Britain’s leading companies apparently mocking high technology.
In advertisements comparing a microprocessor (‘in 12 months it will be obsolete’)
with a brick (‘in 12 months it will still be the latest thing in bricks’),
Hanson tells us that the latter ‘may lack the Silicon Valley cachet. But
it is typical of where Hanson puts its cash.’

The ad goes on to boast that as well as owning Britain’s leading brick
companies, Hanson owns ‘one of the world’s largest private coal producers’.
These holdings obviously impress the investment community. But why knock
the microprocessor? Presumably, Hanson does not have thousands of workers
making bricks by hand. Nor are its miners likely to be digging coal with
picks and shovels. More probably, the company’s brickworks and its coal-cutting
equipment employ those nasty pieces of advanced electronics in their control
systems. And we can be sure that Hanson’s accounts are prepared on computers,
not by clerks with quill pens.

As the DTI R&D Scoreboard made clear last year, Britain’s companies
lag far behind the world leaders in their investment in research. Putting
the brick before the microprocessor won’t help change attitudes.