Gartner’s Hype Cycle for 2015

Since the Gartner Hype Cycle for 2016 ought to be coming out any day now, I thought I’d better catch up on the 2015 Emerging Technology Hype Cycle (which is available at http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/whats-new-in-gartners-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2015/). As I’ve mentioned on previous occasions, I have some problems with Gartner’s Hype Cycle. It’s not very comprehensible, particularly in showing the speed of movement of different technologies, and their methodology seems more than a little bit on the random side. However, it’s a useful tool for looking at what technologies are coming along and pretty much everyone who is interested in strategic technology depends on it.

As with 2014, Gartner still have the Internet of Things mired on the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’. It’s been there for as long as I can remember, and I’m not sure if it’s going to make it off any time soon. The problem is that IoT is very much an enabling technology, and they tend to mature extremely slowly. It’s noticeable that there are some IoT-dependent technologies such as IoT Platform and Connected Home coming along the upslope on the Hype Cycle, and they can’t really become productive until Gartner move IoT a little bit to the right.

Talking of moving things to the right, what did Garnet think were productive technologies in 2015? Enterprise-scale 3D printing, Gesture Control and Virtual Reality. I think they might have been a little optimistic there, though it’s true that 3D printing is definitely starting to get a grip outside of the hobbyist market. I’m not sure I’ve seen much evidence of Gesture Control and Virtual Reality hitting the big time though. Virtual Reality is still only just about to hit the market this year, and I’m not convinced it’s going to be productive for a few years yet. I’d have put it on the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ personally. I mean, it’s going to be huge some day, no doubt about that, it’s just that the technical problems are proving a lot harder to solve than anyone thought, and that doesn’t even make a start on the social problems thrown up by products like Google Glass.

It’s interesting to see some technologies that, according to Gartner were about to hit the big time in 2014, are completely missing from the 2015 chart. In 2014, Gartner were betting on In-Memory Analytics, Activity Streams, 3D Scanners and Consumer Telematics. It’s also noticeable that in 2014 Gartner were saying that NFC, Cloud Computing, Gamification and a number of other things were in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’. Which is odd, because I would have said that Cloud Computing was pretty big business even in 2014. It’s noticeable that all of those three had vanished completely from the Hype Cycle by 2015.

All of which goes to show that Gartner is really inconsistent in which technologies it includes in its Hype Cycle from year to year. I suspect the Gartner consultants argue over what to include, and we only get to see the sexy technologies that someone is prepared to die in a ditch over. I’d be much more interested in charting the evolution of some of those things, like NFC in the iPhone, that have hit the big time and have been quietly removed from the Hype Cycle due to embarrassment. I’ll see if I can do an analysis of Gartner’s hits and misses for the last six or seven years.

The New Digital Strategy

As I mentioned last time, I went to an Open Forum conference (http://www.openforumevents.co.uk) in London on ‘The New Digital Strategy: Smarter Public Services’ thanks to Serena Software (http://www.serena.com/), who gave me a free membership and who were extremely friendly. Unfortunately, I was still paying for my own travel, so I set off late and missed the first couple of speeches, including the keynote given by Jessica McEvoy, Head of Policy at GDS . However, I got there in time for a couple of interesting talks and a group discussion on turning unused spaces into public places. I met some interesting people, talked to various vendors about their products and eventually bailed for home just before the end of the conference.

The dominant theme of the conference was the need for user-centric, agile design, not just of applications but also in projects, digital marketing and numerous other areas. It was an interesting mixture of approaches, from the DSDM consortium and their agile methodology to explanations of how to use Drupal in local government. Most of the speakers were competent, though few of them were really electrifying. I did enjoy Deborah El-Sayed’s talk on ‘A Paperless NHS’, though I spent some time being perversely irritated by her opening anecdote. If she really did talk to a ninety year old man about the NHS, then either this was over 10 years ago, or else he wasn’t born in 1914 as she stated. It did make me think about some of my presentations and I’m definitely going to check the numbers on my slides in future.

New technology

I’ve been thinking about tightening my focus from absolutely everything about technology, down to a few significant ones. The trouble is that I like jumping from one thing to another, and the most interesting ideas always turn up when you get unexpected interactions between two or more different technologies. However, let’s think about what’s ripe for innovation at the moment. Here’s my current list:

• Robotics, Automation and networked sensors
• Augmented reality, virtual reality
• Drones and self-driving vehicles
• Financial technology and insurance (mostly blockchain and NFC)
• AI and Personal message bots

There’s quite a lot of overlap between these, and you’ll notice I’ve left off the perennial Internet of Things. I’ve seen quite a lot about the Internet of Things this year, I’ve talked to people, seen demos and I honestly don’t think this is IoT’s year. It’s been high on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for about ten years now, always the bridesmaid and never the bride. I do believe that one day we’ll wake up and find that it’s taken over the world (not literally, I hope). However, the security issues associated with the IoT, the ridiculous premiums for devices that basically cost a few pence and the general inability of anyone to find a killer application makes me think that IoT is going away with the bouquet tucked under its arm, yet again. However, I do think that networked sensors, as opposed to networked autonomous devices, are going to keep on increasing in value and decreasing in price, so I’ve split them off into a category along with automation and robotics. If you want to think of those as being IoT, that’s your right, but I don’t consider something like a Fitbit to be an Internet of Things device. I’d say it’s halfway there, just not far enough.

June Shows and Conferences 2016

I’ve been to a number of large events recently, and it’s time to try and put down my thoughts before I forget everything I’ve seen. Also, there’s another conference tomorrow, courtesy of Serena Software (http://www.serena.com/), a release management vendor that I met at one of the other shows, and I suspect I’ll have a lot to write about.

In the middle of June, I went to a couple of shows at Olympia, the Service Desk Show and Infosecurity. Let’s look at the Service Desk Show (SITS 2016 http://www.servicedeskshow.com/) first.

It’s been a while since I had a great deal to do with service desks, though I worked on a service desk for a couple of years, a long time ago, and more recently I’ve procured them for various clients. It’s still an area I have a fair amount of interest in though. There were a couple of products that stood out for me, principally Hornbill (https://www.hornbill.com/). I remember Hornbill as having an interesting desktop service desk that never quite gelled enough for me to persuade people to buy it. Now they have a Cloud-based/mobile service desk that just blew me away. They can do the whole drag and drop workflow experience in a browser, configuring an entirely new process and dropping it into production in a matter of minutes. When I think how much time that used to take us in the old days, I’m staggered at how the state of the art has advanced.

I also went to Infosecurity Europe 2016 (http://www.infosecurityeurope.com/), again at Olympia. Unlike SITS, which was relatively small, Infosecurity was huge. They had the Grand Hall at Olympia, plus the balcony and various nooks and crannies. I regularly go to Infosecurity and I don’t recall it ever being quite so large before. I guess this reflects greatly increased concern about security, with numerous breaches in recent months plus continued concerns about spying at a national level and of course a new EU data protection standard in the form of GDPR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation). Whatever the cause, pretty much any vendor who matters in the security space was present. I kept wandering around and finding new parts of the exhibition that I’d previously missed. I accidentally watched the same demo twice – how to break into a car’s GPS and management system – because I came at it from a different direction.

Lastly, I went to Cloud and DevOps World (https://cloudanddevopsworld.com/), again at Olympia, though this time in a hall I think I’ve never been to before. I certainly had a lot of trouble finding it and very nearly gave up. This was, I think, the least successful of the three events, though I did come across a couple of interesting vendors and attended at least one very useful presentation. I did feel they were trying a little too hard to be cool, with a graffiti wall, tabletop games and so on, though I did appreciate the quality of the food. Perhaps the most interesting product I came across was from a small company called nCrypted Cloud (https://www.encryptedcloud.com/). They allow a business to put a secure wrapper around file sharing services such as Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and so on, ensuring that all shared files are encrypted and allowing the business to disable access to individual files whenever required. The useful presentation was from Nick Ioannou (http://nick-ioannou.com) on the subject of keeping your Cloud environment secure, and the number of extra products you have to add to it before you get near a comparable level with a more traditional environment. This was one talk that I’d like to have a permanent record of.

The Future of Work

Management Today‘s latest issue has an extended feature on the Future of Work. Although this was supposed to be comparing 1966, 2016 and 2066, it’s mostly about possible changes over the next 10 years or so. I was bit disappointed not to see some sections on what the 1966 workplace used to look like, and how it has changed. I think people forget quite how different things are today, and hence how very different from today the world of 2066 is likely to be.

So, MT’s articles include mobile workplaces and the gig economy, the rise of robots and general automation, changing models of leadership and the impact of job changes on different sectors. It culminates in looking at three possible scenarios, robots win, workers win or leaders win. None of the descriptions actually match the titles, the “Leaders Win” scenario is all about increasing the dominance of small entrepreneurs rather than the sort of corporate grinding people into the dust that you’d expect. However, none of the scenarios are especially radical and none of them diverge from existing models. You can go out and find people with mobile workplaces and portfolio careers today, you probably couldn’t find a lot of current work practices back in 1966 though, and I suspect some work practices in 2066 will be radically different from today. Sure, there will be some similarities to some of the strange new ideas going around today, but they will also be very different.

I have a number of ideas about how today’s work practices are likely to evolve in the next 50 years. I’m not going to go into detail right now, I’m going to save it for another post, but here are a couple of natural extrapolations that seem to have evaded Management Today.

1. A considerably increased public sector. Governments tend to pick up boring, utility work like road maintenance and Health. If a job is going to be done by robots, it makes sense for the government to own those robots. The business opportunities will be in maintaining them. Similarly, I’m willing to bet that governments will go back to running the internet once all the novelty wears off and it turns into just running yet another essential service.
2. Organisations as a service – you won’t set up a business in the future, you’ll contract with a service organisation to do the support work. And that work will all be tightly scoped, so if you’re a worker, there won’t be much opportunity for creativity.
3. Creativity speculation. At present, venture capital and investors speculate on major new ideas for internet start-ups, pouring in money in the hope of finding the next Facebook. It seems possible that this attitude will start to move downmarket, with investment in creativity incubators in the hope of identifying a new craze, or trend or fashion before it actually hits the market. Good news if you’re extremely creative, bad news otherwise.

Modular phones

Google have been developing a modular phone, Project Ara (http://www.projectara.com/), which has been written about quite a bit in the press (http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/24/11748428/google-project-ara-modular-phones-iot-store). The idea is that your phone can be made up of modules that snap together and can be replaced separately. You could detach the camera module and replace it with a 3D camera module or perhaps an infrared sensor. Reactions to the idea generally seem to vary from people who can’t see the point of swapping out bits of phone functionality to people who really want to be able to upgrade the camera, or the battery or something in their phone and see this as a way of doing it.

I think this is a great, if not inevitable, idea that has been implemented shortsightedly. The problem here is that it retains the paradigm of the phone as being a single big chunk of plastic, metal and glass that you use for communication. Why on Earth would you want to insist on plugging all these modules together? A modular phone ought to be a central device with a whole lot of separate modules that can do various different things, connected wirelessly. The only reason for physically connecting these things together is to be able to provide battery power to the different functions. Why not have a phone that you just keep in your pocket, with a separate display that might be a slab of glass, a watch (hey, Apple!), a set of VR goggles, an earpiece and microphone, maybe even something really cool like active contact lenses or a direct brain connection? Then a device like a drone or a wearable just becomes a temporary part of the phone, a temporary module. Your phone is just the hub of a PAN, a Personal Area Network, connected together using something like Bluetooth.

Gatekeeper security

I’m amused to see that Google and the rest of the world seem to have caught up with the idea I wrote about in April last year (Death of the Gatekeeper – A New Model for Security). Perhaps I should raid my files for more ideas, I certainly need to post more often instead of keeping my writing to myself.

More About Self-Driving Cars

Steve: So, did you see that the UK government just announced a whole lot of regulations around introducing self-driving cars?

Jess: I thought you wanted to call them robot chauffeurs or something?

Steve: I’m not fussy. I just think that people will see the advantages more if they think of them as a democratised luxury instead of a dangerous innovation. However, it’s evident that, as far as the government is concerned, they are an outlandish and highly risky perversion of technology. I’m just surprised they didn’t insist on all self-driving cars being preceded by a man waving a red flag. The government, by which I mean the many-headed beast that includes both elected politicians and the civil service, still have no conception of science and technology, many years after CP Snow harangued them for elevating the humanities above everything else in his famous ‘Two Cultures’ speech. Most of them are still, as Snow put it, “natural luddites” with an apparent belief that science is a form of magic.

Jess: Whoa! You don’t usually get worked up like that. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you even the slightest bit passionate about anything. I was beginning to think you were a cyberman or something. Am I allowed to say that? Do we have to credit the BBC every time I make a Dr Who reference?

Steve: I think cybermen are probably well into the public domain by now, if only by virtue of general knowledge rather than how long ago they were created. I wouldn’t try making a TV programme about them, but you don’t need to footnote every cultural reference.

Jess: Phew! So what’s got you throwing your toys out the pram?

Steve: I don’t know if you remember, but I posted an article here about self-driving cars a while back.

Jess: Of course I remember, I just referred to it. Robot chauffeurs, automated pub crawls, all that sort of thing.

Steve: Yes. Quite. Anyway, the proposed rules for self-driving cars require that there be a person in the driving seat at all times, in a fit condition to take over as a driver, even if they never do. And you have to be aware of your surroundings at all times. So, for instance, if you use your phone in a self-driving car, the police can arrest you for driving without due care and attention. After all, at any minute the car might suddenly stop working and you might have to take over the controls doing 70 in the middle of the motorway, or Piccadilly Circus, or somewhere.

Jess: If the car is doing 70 through Piccadilly Circus, you’ve probably got a lot more to worry about. Like a trail of broken tourists and a massive number of coppers in high-speed pursuit.

Steve: That’s not the point. What they should have mandated was a sensible way to hand over control between automated and human drivers. Instead, they seem to have assumed that self-driving cars are dangerous beasts and completely untrustworthy. They also want any driver to have had extensive training in every aspect of self-driving cars; not exactly Google’s philosophy of pushing a button. All of this is all very well when you’re testing something, but I bet this is going to continue for years. It’s the modern equivalent of having to keep a bundle of hay in the back of your car in case the non-existent horse wants a snack.

Jess: You know what? You’re completely full of it. While you’ve been ranting about this, I’ve been on Google, downloaded the document and guess what? It’s just about testing on roads where there are normal cars. In fact it specifically states that someday there will be cars that don’t need operators, but while they’re doing testing they need to have special rules. See? You wasted a perfectly good rant on something that was totally irrelevant.

Steve: You’re saying I should have read the document before complaining about it, instead of relying on lots of inflammatory statements on the internet?

Jess: Maybe…

Steve: Why break the habits of a lifetime?

Jess: Because you’re always telling me to look at the original sources for things?

Steve: OK. I admit it. I was wrong. Now I’m just annoyed because I was full of righteous indignation and I completely wasted it.

Jess: Wow. That was easier than I expected. So, since we’re on the topic of self-driving cars, have you thought about using self-driving vans and on-board drones for delivering packages? Instead of all those dodgy fellas delivering Amazon parcels and groceries, you’d have a van with an on-board drone. It drives to your house, the drone takes off and delivers the package, then recharges from the van.

Steve: What happens if someone nicks the drone?

Jess: You could have lots of drones in one van. And all it’s doing is going from the van to your front door. Also, your drone has to have GPS so you know where it is. But it’s going to be like those wooden things you have on trucks.

Steve: Pallets?

Jess: Yeah. They’re cheap so you don’t mind leaving them behind, but people have whole businesses rounding them up and reusing them.

Steve: I think you overestimate just how cheap you can make a drone.

Jess: Bets? You’re the one who was telling me about the cost of memory back in ye olden dayes. I mean, close on a thousand quid for a ten megabyte disk? Crazy! And now look at it, you can’t find something that small except on eBay. Hell, you can probably get a petabyte for that, these days.

Steve: I’m just not convinced drone prices are going to scale in the same way as hard drives.

Jess: Hah! You probably said that about digital watches. Now you get them as freebies and they go straight in the bin. Actually, I’ve got some really neat ideas about drones, we should chat about them next time.

Steve: Sure, I’m always interested in how you plan to change the world.

3D Printing

Steve: So you wanted to talk about 3D printing? Any particular reason?

Jess: I just think it’s a cool idea. You know, push a button and out pops the thing you want. Instead of having to go onto Amazon, order something, hang around waiting for it to be delivered. Now you’re going to tell me it doesn’t work like that, aren’t you?

Steve: It doesn’t work like that.

Jess: You see, this is why you’re you. It’s that terrible inability to accept that reality is wrong and I am right. OK, I’ve seen 3D printers, I know it takes ages to print things out and it’s all this yucky looking plastic, and half the time something goes wrong and you end up with what looks like a candle that had an accident with a blowtorch. But the idea is cool. And it’s getting better. In ten years time you really will be able to press a button and get something out without spending a week messing around with shape files, clogged extruders and keeping the damn platform level.

Steve: You know there are commercial 3D printers available right now that let you do things like print bits of airplane engines? And there’s this bunch in Dubai who are building a twenty foot high 3D printer that they’re going to use to print a building with? And there are commercial 3D printers on the high street who’ll let you print things out in colours and different textures and materials?

Jess: I guess. It’s not the same when it’s big commercial stuff though. That’s not 3D printing, that’s, that’s…

Steve: Additive manufacturing?

Jess: Yeah. Whatever you just said. What I want is the thing that frees me from the tyranny of big business and let’s me make what I want, when I want it. So if I suddenly need to print out a dwarf with a scimitar instead of an axe, I can do it, right then and there.

Steve: I hadn’t actually thought of you as being interested in miniature wargaming. Or is this D & D?

Jess: It’s… can we talk about something different? You could print spare parts for your car, or fancy icing for cakes or fix stuff that breaks. You were complaining about your fancy Humanscale office chair that broke and they wouldn’t let you have a spare part for it.

Steve: Well, you can do some of that right now. I mean the icing and things like that. There’s a problem though, at least with printing spare parts for the car or for my chair or even things like game pieces. The original is going to be copyrighted and you can’t just go around making copies. Like you can’t just take a book into a copy shop and get it photocopied.

Jess: When I was at school, our teachers used to do that all the time.

Steve: And now they can’t. Because everyone, meaning the big international businesses with a lot of money tied up in it, clamped down on intellectual property. So you’re not allowed to do it any more. I mean, it was always illegal, it’s just that nobody used to care because what are you going to do? Print your own book? Well, unless you were in the US. American publishers used to be infamous for printing unlicensed copies of other people’s books. The Lord of the Rings being a well-known example. Then they sort of got religion and stopped letting anyone copy stuff. And that means objects like toys and so on as well as spare parts and all that kind of thing.

Jess: I know a guy at work who has a 3D printed ‘My Little Pony’.

Steve: Well, that’s a special case. Hasbro partnered with one of the shape sites to license people so they could print their own. So if you obey the terms of the licence, you can do that. It doesn’t mean everyone can print whatever they want. If you want the details, I know this guy who’s a lawyer and has done some very interesting work on the legal implications of 3D printing. Or you could just Google it.

Jess: But what if you could just print stuff? The rights have to expire some time, no? Then you could print whatever you want, when you want.

Steve: Given the current limitations of 3D printers, there’s only so much you can do. I mean, lots of things you buy require particular types of material. You know, you can’t just print a kitchen spatula, it needs to be silicone because otherwise it’ll probably melt as soon as it goes in the pan. Also, it won’t be flexible, most of them have a steel core so the centre is rigid but the edge is silicone so it bends when you want it to. And anything with electronics in is going to need special parts. There’s always going to be stuff you can’t make, unless your printer is going down to the atomic, or maybe even sub-atomic, level and that’s a bit of a way off. Maybe someday.

Jess: What are you saying? That it’s just a fad? That it’s not a real thing at all? What about that thing you mentioned earlier? They’re printing buildings and jet engines!

Steve: Yes. But you can’t expect to be able to print a working jet engine in your garage. Not any time soon, anyway. And no, I don’t think it’s a fad, but it’s going to take a lot more development and it’s mostly going to be of use to big companies that can afford fancy machinery and replace it every few years until the technology settles down. Look, you know you get people with their own lathes or milling machines in their garage? You could go to someone like that and ask them to make you whatever you want. But you don’t, because it’s easier to buy it from some big manufacturer who gets fifty thousand made in China and shipped over in a container. Sure, if you’re a craftsman, maybe you’ll want to do it yourself. But for most people, it’s going to be easier to pay someone else to do it in bulk. Well, unless we’re talking individual artworks, or something. And if you use 3D printing for that, anyone can have one.

Jess: But there are going to be cases in-between. Maybe there are only 100 fans of some anime or something in the country, but we’d all like a model of the main characters. We’re not talking about individual artworks, but we aren’t talking about tens of thousands either. It’s not just black or white.

Steve: I guess there’s a lot in what you’re saying. There are these small runs of things, this sort of long tail of artifacts, where there is a pent-up demand for a relatively small number of custom-designed objects. I’m not sure how that works as a sustainable business model though. If you were a big business, wouldn’t you try to squeeze those people out?

Jess: If there’s enough demand, and there’s always going to be enough demand for some things, they’ll get made. And who cares about big business? The machines exist, they’re cheap, stuff is going to happen. Maybe we’ll all get used to buying small runs of things, instead of wanting mass market designs.

Steve: But if there’s the demand, the big corporations will just take over. If there’s enough money to be made, they’ll try and move into the market, squeezing out the small operators. That’s the way business works!

Jess: They’re not going to be interested in tiny runs of things. The money isn’t there. Sure, if this hypothetical anime hits the big time, there will suddenly be enough interest in it to warrant big runs and factories in China turning out a hundred thousand toys overnight. But there’s always going to be things that relatively small numbers of people like. Maybe in the future everything will be like that.

Steve: Well, there may be a few, but look at things like Minecraft. It was a minor interest and then suddenly it became very popular and the big toy manufacturers, not to mention Microsoft, bought up the franchise. Look at Angry Birds, the same thing happened. This is the way cultural diffusion works. You have a small interest, suddenly it catches on and everyone’s doing it, it goes mass market, people start exploiting the hell out of it, and the original fans drop it for something else. You might have a narrow window in the middle, but not enough to build a change in society on.

Jess: I’m going to go away and try to work out why you’re wrong. Your trouble is that you’re looking at this from a twentieth century point of view. You should be thinking about the age of abundance!

Steve: Yes, but the problem is getting there. And if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.

The End of History

I was listening to a podcast (Six Pixels of Separation, by Mitch Joel) yesterday, in which someone mentioned Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’. I remember when this first came out, and was as confused then as I am now by the mindset that can even consider this being the end of history. As I understand it, and I have not actually read the book, though I have read the Wikipedia page about it and a number of reviews, Fukuyama’s idea was that Western Liberal democracy, as demonstrated in America in 1989, is the ultimate political system and that although events may continue to occur there will be no further political development and hence no “history”. Quite apart from using “history” solely to signify the evolution of political systems, I’m about as unconvinced as it’s possible to be. As indeed were most people, even back in 1992 when the book came out. Speaking as someone who sees the development of technology as being extremely important as a component of human history, I think that the world has changed considerably since 1992, and that some significant amount of that can be considered to be the evolution of the ways that people communicate with each other, and that this is a major part of politics and history.

I suspect that as technology develops, it will have more impacts on the ways that people, businesses and states are organised, and that this state of change will continue for decades, if not centuries to come. To state that any one political system, particularly one based on people actually getting together and shouting at each other, face to face, is the ultimate in political development, strikes me as a symptom of a mind that is somewhat impoverished in its ability to speculate, or possibly utterly devoid of imagination.

Even our own, totally fossilised and poorly-functioning, political system in the UK has experienced a significant degree of change as the web and social media have allowed people to see what was going on at long last. Web sites such as TheyWorkForYou and similar related organisations now cast a billion-watt spotlight into what was once a dark, dismal hole illuminated only by the flickering candle of Hansard. When I was working at the Houses of Parliament, about ten years ago, they were in the middle of digitising all of Hansard, doing video search on all the speeches and developing XML schemas to provide semantic analysis of their contents. I suspect that, before long, somebody will finally grasp the nettle and root out some of the ancient traditions that stand in the way of efficient processes in the House of Commons. Quite apart from anything else, allowing phones and laptops into the debating chamber will at least ensure that political representatives are better informed and will not have to rely (as they do at present) in demanding that the record (Hansard, again) be changed to reflect what they should have said rather than what they actually did say.

One of the undervalued benefits of the political system is its inertia and resistance to change. This means that it is not constantly changing with every new idea that comes along, but (at least in theory) requires a lot of effort to ensure that adopting an idea is not going to simply have it changed back by the next government. In recent years,this doesn’t seem to have worked as well as it could, but the idea is there. Despite this, bringing the political process at least into the ’80s would still provide some benefits without exposing too much risk of vacillation.

And what of the future? The Lords have been on their way out for twenty years, despite their colourful pageantry and deep-rooted tradition. Replacing the Lords with a different way of selecting the upper house makes sense to everyone except the political parties for which it serves as a joint pension scheme and rubber-stamping body. Allowing the upper house to be selected on a basis of interest groups, rather than by geography, would be interesting but hard to mange and easy to game. It would, however, help to break the logjam that the South East has on UK politics. I also look forward to alliances including the Member for small puppies and the Member for fluffy bunnies standing together against the representative for capitalist thuggery. Or maybe not.