George Osborne MP

George Osborne MP Conservative MP for Tatton first entered Parliament on 7 June 2001. Chancellor of the Exchequer. Has a degree in modern history from Oxford. Worked as a freelance journalist for a sort period of time before going into politics. He was one of the youngest MPs.

George Osborne said in Getting IT right on the web 8 March 2007

Politics and government need to change to keep pace with the internet - the question is, how should they do it?

...

My Treasury team recently introduced legislation in the House of Lords that would enable British taxpayers to see how and where their tax money is spent by searching through all the government’s contracts, grants and programmes. In , they call this ‘googling your tax dollars’.

The bill is about to reach the House of Commons, where it the Government has made it clear it won’t pass. That’s a shame because modern governments need to embrace the age of information equality.

Second, we need to harness the potential of new online social networks.

These bottom-up grassroots networks like MySpace and Bebo bring people together on the basis of common interests, irrespective of geography or even language.

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The final pillar of this new settlement is open source.

Open source harnesses the power of mass collaboration and to find new ideas.

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Not only is this a really cheap way of designing software, but it's often faster and more effective too.

Looking at cost savings that have been achieved by companies and governments all over the world, it's estimated that the UK government could reduce its annual IT bill by over £600m a year if more open source software was used as part of an effective procurement strategy. That's enough to pay for 20,000 extra teachers or 100,000 hip operations.

Government Spending (Website) Bill. The Bill makes provisions for the creation by the Treasury of a free website containing government expenditure information for the public to search. The information would have to be made available online within 30 days of the expenditure occurring and remain available for a period of five years. This bill was killed by the government.

Issues

Surveillance

“Just as we are becoming more suspicious of the need for such an elaborate and expensive intelligence community, and less ready to let them ‘get on with the job’, new technology is enabling organizations like GCHQ and MI5 to literally ‘harvest’ communications from the air-waves, making it that much easier to monitor the affairs of British companies and British citizens whose interests they are supposed to be guarding.” -- Written as a student in 1992

Links

• George Osborne MP website
• George Osborne MP conservatives.com
• George Osborne MP TheyWorkForYou.com
• George Osborne MP Wikipedia
• Voting Record

News

2007-12-06 - The Telegraph - HMRC boss admits to more data losses

Author: Andrew Porter

Summary: HMRC has admitted there have been seven other significant data losses in recent years. ... Last night shadow Chancellor George Osborne said: "These admissions blow a hole in Alistair Darling's defence. As the acting head of HMRC admits, far from being a mistake by a single junior official, the data security breaches at HMRC are the result of serious systemic failures." "The public will now expect the Chancellor to come clean and explain exactly when and how these previous losses of personal information took place. Alistair Darling's credibility is hanging by a thread. He is running out of time to reassure the British public that he's capable of getting a grip."

2007-03-09 - The Register - Britain's Tories love open source (true)

Author: Mark Ballard

Summary: George Osborne, Britain's shadow chancellor of the exchequer, has stuck the Conservative Party's banner firmly on the internet bandwagon. George Osborne speaking in 2006Speaking at the Royal Society of Arts yesterday, he applauded the "democratisation of information" brought about by the internet. And he championed the Open Source movement by stating how the British government should save money by ditching its conventional software licenses.

2007-03-09 - Kable - Tories champion open source

Summary: Shadow chancellor George Osborne has pledged to create a 'level playing field' for open source software if his party is elected. Osborne slammed the government for its lack of support for open source software at a conference held at the Royal Society of Arts on 8 March 2007.

2007-03-08 - ZDNet - Shadow chancellor slams government over open source

Author: Colin Barker

Summary: George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, has criticised the government over its apparent lack of support for open-source software. He said that many of the world's multinational corporations are developing open-source software strategies, and that "far-sighted governments are also taking advantage of this trend".

2007-03-08 - BBC - Tories want open source Whitehall

Summary: The government could save more than £600 million a year if it used more open source software, the shadow chancellor has estimated.George Osborne said the savings would cut 5% off Whitehall's annual IT bill. He called for a more "level playing field" for all software companies, and urged "cultural change" in government. ... Using open source software was about "better and more effective government".

2007-03-08 - Conservative - Open source politics

Author: George Osborne

Summary: In a speech at the Royal Society of Arts Shadow Chancellor George Osborne will announce his intention to create a level playing field for open source software in the UK, which is estimated could save taxpayers over £600 million a year.

2007-03-08 - Conservative - Recasting the political settlement for the digital age - speech

Author: George Osborne

Summary: "It gives me great pleasure to be here today at the Royal Society for the Arts - and I am very grateful to Matthew Taylor for inviting me to speak. We are all here this morning because we share a common belief: we believe in the power of technology - in its ability to help transform society for the better by giving individuals more freedom, more choice and ultimately more power. At heart we are technology optimists....

2006-11-15 - Guardian, comment is free - Weaving through the web

Author: John Naughton

Summary: In his Olsen Lecture last night George Osborne extolled the virtues of modern communication technologies - which represent, he says, a profound cultural shift that politicians (not to mention journalists, bankers and lawyers) ignore at their peril.

2006-11-15 - Guardian, comment is free - Democracy goes digital

Summary: Although it is belatedly starting to grasp that the internet will be vital in keeping the party alive among under-35s, the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, was right to point out in a speech yesterday that Conservatives are embracing the web with an enthusiasm that eludes Labour.

2006-11-14 - BBC - Tories want spending put online

Summary: The Conservatives want to allow taxpayers to go online and find out how their money is being spent. Shadow chancellor George Osborne is proposing legislation requiring the Treasury to set up a website revealing all expenditure over £25,000

2006-11-14 - Conservatives.com - George Osborne: Politics and Media in the Internet Age

Author: George Osborne

Summary: Speaking to an audience at St Bride's Church in central London, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne gave the annual Olsen Memorial Lecture entitled 'Politics and the Media in the Internet Age'. Text of the speech

2006-06-13 - The Times - Where are the British giants of cyberspace?

Author: George Osborne

Summary: Why is there no British Yahoo! or Google? Why are we not home to fast-growing community websites such as MySpace, the fifth most visited site on the world wide web? The internet may have been invented by a Briton, but it is a sad truth that not one of the leading internet companies is British.

2006-05-16 - The Register - Don't stifle net content, Tories warn BBC

Summary: The Tories have warned the BBC not to "stifle the growth of innovative new companies" looking to invest in the internet and new media. Speaking yesterday, shadow chancellor George Osborne said the Beeb - which doesn't know its IT experts from its elbow - "must not become the Bull in the China Shop of new media" as it follows its own digital agenda. ... "I am concerned that in too many of its [The BBC's] non-core activities, particularly on the internet, it is stifling the growth of innovative new companies that simply can't compete with BBC budgets," he said.