Ever since the people of Britain voted broadly in favour of some form of Brexit, agitated parties on both sides of the debate have weaponised everything which falls under the swiftly setting sun, from currency and stock market rates and business arrangements, to the size and availability of our favourite supermarket foods. In short, every shift has become a consequence of Brexit, whether heralding the benefits of the island’s newfound freedom, or illustrating that life post-EU will be all doom and gloom.
Yet those who would define the BBC as a bastion of wet pro-EU liberalism might be surprised if they actually bothered to read the corporation’s queer assortment of news. At best the BBC veers from one side to the other, changing stances more than daily in a desperate and ungainly attempt to avoid soiling its suit.
If you happened upon this week’s article by the BBC economics editor, Kamal Ahmed, you could be forgiven for thinking that Britain’s technology sector has just been handed a remarkable boost. Ahmed’s piece concerned a Google headquarters to be opened in London, and at first glance, this ‘news’ appeared to be new. It seemed to indicate a major investment decision by one of the world’s leading multinationals, taken with an optimistic view towards June’s Brexit vote.
The opening three paragraphs of the piece certainly established this idea, as Ahmed wrote:
‘Google is to open a new headquarters building in London which could see 3,000 new jobs created by 2020.
The news comes as a major boost to Britain’s technology sector.
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, told the BBC that the UK was still an attractive place to do business.’
The assertion that this amounted to ‘news’, allied to a later sentence proclaiming ‘At present, Google employs around 4,000 people in the UK, a figure that could now rise to 7,000’, suggested that Ahmed was very much dealing with the present. In fact, Google agreed to build this very same headquarters in London all the way back in 2013.
By June of that year, Google had bought a 2.4 acre plot in the King’s Cross area of central London for $1 billion, and had unveiled early designs for an 11-storey glass building which was scheduled to cost around $1.6 billion and be completed by sometime in 2017. In September 2013, Google’s plans were approved by Camden Council, as part of the King’s Cross Central regeneration project which was expected to generate 35,000 new jobs and 1,900 new homes. The Google headquarters was to become a base for 5,000 Google employees.
Around the turn of 2015, Google went back to the drawing board, after the company’s co-founder Larry Page demanded a more innovative and extravagant design, capable of making a statement and serving as a template for prospective headquarters in other countries. The designers Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels – already contributing to Google’s California campus – were brought in to rework the initial concept, which had been devised by the architecture firm Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.
So progress on the new headquarters was slower than Google had hoped, and the completion date became open-ended, but the technology giant remained eager throughout to stress its commitment to the UK. Ahmed’s piece this week contained no new information regarding the headquarters, its size, cost, or proposed number of employees.
It merely reiterated that despite the referendum result, Google will be going ahead with the building as it had always planned to do, while carrying quotes from chief executive Sundar Pichai stressing, in the most tactful terms, that free movement for skilled migrants is more important than ever when it comes to achieving technological progress. What initially read like a boon for Britain post-Brexit was instead a statement of perseverance, business as usual in what has long been an important market with reservations should controls on immigration stretch too far.
