Opinion If one man should know how living with the consequences of his own actions might suck, it's James Dyson.

The billionaire vacuum cleaner salesman has picked a UK national newspaper to vent his frustration at what he sees as the British government's "scandalous neglect of science and technology businesses," citing a Times piece about the island nation's poor track record in semiconductor investment.

Dyson, who founded his eponymous bag-less vacuum cleaner company in 1980, also let rip about rocketing corporation tax, damaging work-from-home legislation, and rules on "non-compete" clauses for workers which only extend to three months - a risk to intellectual property, he contended.

"Dyson has just announced an investment of £100 million in a new technology centre in Bristol but we are investing far more in modern, forward-looking economies elsewhere in the world that encourage growth and innovation rather than deter them. Meanwhile, the prime minister refuses to meet entrepreneurial, technology-focused employers and investors like me," he said in the letter to The Times.

Strange then how it slipped Dyson's mind that other factors are contributing to the UK's struggle to compete on the global science stage, like, say, Brexit - that country-dividing decision which scientists said would be bad for the UK field.

They are still saying that now. Leading science journal Nature decried the UK's alternative to the Horizon program, the EU's €95.5 billion ($91 billion) science investment vehicle, which the UK has remained locked out of due to a series of post-deal disagreements over Northern Ireland.

Should Dyson be surprised at the state of affairs resulting from the decision to leave the EU, which he was so firmly in favor of? He believed that Brexit would make Britain such a brilliant place to do science and tech business, in fact, that he promptly moved the headquarters of his own company to Singapore.

Then there is the entrepreneur's chumminess with Boris Johnson, who led the Brexit referendum campaign and later became prime minister on the promise of "getting Brexit done." Dyson famously texted Johnson, supposedly to "fix" tax issues while making ventilators in the UK during the early stages of the pandemic.

How then can Dyson have assumed Johnson was anything other than trustworthy? It was the bloviating political behemoth, after all, who set the tone during the post-referendum years when he allegedly quipped "fuck business" at the suggestion that a hard-line departure from the world's largest economic bloc was not the most commercially wise trajectory. It was a decision which arguably also deprived any science or tech startups of unrestricted access to one of the world's richest markets.

Dyson might be excused, though, for directing some his ire at the UK's current prime minister. It is Rishi Sunak who is responsible for sorting out the UK science and tech strategy since he wrested power from Liz Truss a lifetime - sorry, six months - ago. Sunak's latest effort - a move to rebrand the UK as the Unicorn Kingdom - was deemed sufficiently hilarious to make it onto BBC radio's flagship current affairs satire, The News Quiz.

But Dyson also had the nerve to slam the UK's track record on training, seeming to forget that his decision to offshore his manufacturing is depriving the public purse of its ability to pay for the science and math teachers the state education sector so seriously lacks.

It is at this point we might remind ourselves that Dyson's company doesn't just make vacuum cleaners that suck. It also makes blade-less cooling towers, just in case you need a tool for dealing with large quantities of hot air. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2023/05/15/dyson_uk_science_tech/