Dáithaí C - Longford Lecture 2010 - Martha Lane Fox

Longford Lecture 2010 – “Views from a dot com dinosaur”; why the digital disruption hasn’t even started yet

Martha Lane Fox

It was with a decided sense of anticipation that I made my way to the Assembly Hall of Church House on the 16th November last for the Ninth Longford Lecture. It is always a fine gathering of people who care about Penal Reform and building a better society, a lonely furrow ploughed by Frank Pakenham (Lord Longford) whose memory the Longford Lecture commemorates. The anticipation was heightened as the lecture this year was being delivered by one of my heroines, the indomitable Martha Lane Fox who co-founded Lastminute.com. With her business partner Brent Hoberman, Martha and came to epitomise the new breed of internet entrepreneurs who appeared in the mid to late 90s. She represented the zeitgeist of the dot Com boom and the media being the media made her the poster girl of the boom, a role she never sought. Unlike many others she caught the wave well and when Lastminute floated in 2000 she trousered a handy £30 Million+ in real cash.

Having stepped down from Lastminute she decided to “get a life” after the years of graft and long hours and then disaster struck. In May 2004 she was severely injured in a car accident in the tourist resort of Essaouira in Morocco when the open 4x4 she was driven in crashed and not wearing a seatbelt she was thrown out of the vehicle and landed heavily on her back on rocks.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/03/essaouira-morrocos-white-city.html

Brent Hoberman didn’t wait for details but sent down an air ambulance to bring her back to the UK, only for this, by all accounts she would have died. She spent a year in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford having metal inserts and bone grafts. She is registered disabled, can’t drive, has reduced mobility walking with a stick and is in constant pain. She could be more than forgiven for wallowing in self pity but hell no; MLF is made of sterner stuff!

Martha Lane Fox (born 10 February 1973) is a British e-commerce business woman, charity trustee, board member of Channel 4, mydeco.com and Marks & Spencer. She co-founded Lastminute.com, an icon of the dotcom boom of the early 2000s. She also co-founded Lucky Voice, the karaoke bar chain and is the British Government's first Champion for Digital Inclusion and to head a new cabinet Digital Public Services Unit. Born in Oxford, (See “Oxoniensis” on the Blog sidebar->) Lane Fox is the daughter of the historian Robin Lane Fox. She was educated at Oxford High School, Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where she read ancient and modern history. Indeed her dad is an Oxford Don and an expert on Ancient Greece and has written (amongst others) a major book on Big Al, or Alexander the Great as he is normally called in academic circles;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/03/oath-of-alexander-great-in-324-bc.html

By coincidence I had seen a programme presented by him the night before (once you get into the Greek thing it is hard to get out; see “Real Greek” on the Blog sidebar->) and he was really good because he just doesn’t “do telly”; Rather he was an academic explaining his great love and fascination with the ancient world and a huge antidote to the inexpert “Muppet” presenters we have to endure on many other programmes. He is also an occasional gardening writer for The Times newspaper. The Lane Fox name is well known in the UK due to the eponymous chain of estate agents founded by Martha’s grandfather. She graduated from Oxford University with a degree in ancient and modern history and later became an associate at Spectrum Strategy Consultants, where she met Brent Hoberman. Her clients included the BBC and Canal Plus - handy companies to understand, as Lastminute aimed to extend its service offering from the internet to other channels, such as interactive television. Martha Lane-Fox then worked for a year as business development manager of Carlton Communication's initiatives in pay TV and digital channels. Brent Hoberman eventually persuaded Martha to join him as chief operating officer of lastminute.com.

She is associated with progressive causes as a trustee and patron of Reprieve, a legal action charity, which made the news during its involvement in the release of UK resident Binyam Mohammed from Guantanamo Bay. Lane Fox is also a patron of Camfed, dedicated to fighting poverty, HIV and AIDS in rural Africa through the education of girls and young women. She has been a strong and vocal advocate of progressive causes including human rights, women's rights and social justice. In 2007 she founded Antigone, funded by her own money, a grant-making trust to support charities based in the UK.

In 2005, advertising executive Julian Douglas shared an idea of his with her about launching a Tokyo style private karaoke bar in London. Falling in love with the idea, together with Nick Thistleton she launched a private karaoke company Lucky Voice with a club in London's Soho. The company have five bars countrywide, an online application, and the Lucky Voice Party Box to be used with computers. In 2007 Lane Fox joined the board of Marks & Spencer as a non-executive director. She is also on the board of Channel 4.

Assembly Hall Church House

On 16 June 2009, she was appointed the UK Government's Digital Inclusion Champion to head a two year campaign to make the British public more 'tech savvy'. She has argued that "I don't think you can be a proper citizen of our society in the future if you are not engaged online." On March 22nd 2010 her government role was expanded when it was announced that she would set up a new Digital Public Services Unit within the Cabinet Office. As Digital Champion, Ms Lane Fox is committed to getting nine million people online by 2012. She is working with the Race Online 2012 campaign and the transformation of DirectGov, the Government's online portal for public services. I can confirm as a user DirectGov now works a lot better whereas before it was a clunky user unfriendly disaster. She pointed out that digital exclusion tends to overlap with other forms of exclusion and the unemployed, unqualified and disadvantaged are overrepresented in the nine million in the UK who are not online. She convincingly made the case that people online will get employed faster, achieve a higher salary and are less lonely but tellingly she mentioned that when they started out selling the idea of Lastminute to suppliers they often had the phone slammed down on them. Now internet sales in the UK are over £100 Bn a year.

Post lecture reception and stalls

At the Longford Lecture she threw down the gauntlet to charities, which she urged to do more to use internet services to engage with the people they sought to help. She also said she was surprised to learn that there were 9,000 charities working in the criminal justice sector alone – more than one for every 10 prisoners. Like all of us concerned with Penal Reform she is concerned about the financial and human cost of Prison Policy. The best way to address public concerns is to cut reoffending rates and that is an area where UK Penal Policy can only be considered a failure. She has pointed out elsewhere;

“The prison service currently costs the government around £13 billion a year, but most of this is invested in prison and probation services, i.e. incarceration and custody, with very little left over for support services that address root causes of offending behaviours. Mental health care, drug treatment and helping those leaving prison to find employment and housing is heavily bolstered by independent funding through foundations such as Tudor Trust, Lankelly Chase and the Bromley Trust as well as individuals.”

Martha suggested a properly controlled prison web scheme could benefit thousands of the country's inmates. Speaking ahead of the annual Lord Longford Memorial Lecture, she said couldn't understand why some prisoners were being "excluded from the conversation". She added: "Controlled internet access for prisoners can help in rehabilitation. I don't believe in cutting people out of conversations. Nine million people do not have access to the internet and 80,000 prisoners are just a subset of this group."

She said she hoped Lord Longford would approve of her drive to move disadvantaged groups online. "He believed in giving everybody a voice no matter how unfashionable it might seem," she said. But she conceded she would not be pressing ministers on granting prisoners the right to use the internet, as there were other groups whose claims were more urgent. "This is not a rallying cry and I won't be campaigning on it in my official capacity – it is my personal view," she said. "Such a powerful group of charities could use the internet to work together on so many different levels to help share resources or back office functions to make them more efficient," she said. Ms Lane Fox pointed to the example of Comic Relief, which makes it obligatory to apply for funding online. She said this showed how it was possible to save money for good causes by using the internet to cut red tape.

The same applied to Government policy, where ministers should be putting the internet "at the heart of their decision-making", she added. "My experience of 18 months working in Government and as an observer before is that we are not very good at responding to developments in the internet. The web requires rapid responses but we tend to be rather risk averse in the public sector." She said Government and business could learn a lot from American companies such as Google and Apple, which had succeeded by testing their services and products through learning from their failures on the web.

Now in its ninth year the Longford Lectures have three main aims;

•to provide a national platform for a serious contribution to questions of social and penal reform
•to make significant recommendations to policy makers
•to be written, delivered and promoted in such a way as to engage wide public interest.

Jon Snow

Martha Lane Fox has followed in a distinguished line of speakers who have included Cherie Booth QC, Helena Kennedy QC, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Mary McAleese of Ireland. The broadcaster Jon Snow, who is a trustee, chaired the lecture with his usual aplomb as he missed it last year as he was in Peru. He recounted how Frank Pakenham had given him his first job when he was thrown out of University for “Politicking” on the grounds that this showed he was made of the right stuff. He reminded us of his importance and contribution to politics which is often forgotten. He worked with Lord Beveridge, during the war, in his researches on social security - the ensuing Beveridge Report laid the foundations of the post-war welfare state. After WW11 he was Minister for Germany responsible for the British Occupation Zone and the reconstruction of post-war Germany, he was Minister for Civil Aviation when Heathrow and in fact he was a member of various Governments until 1968.

Lord Longford (Frank Pakenham) was from the Anglo-Irish tradition and remained sentimentally attached to Ireland even though he probably broke every tradition of his Anglo-Irish ascendancy family. He was born into a military, Protestant, Conservative and Unionist clan, and educated at Eton and New College, Oxford. As an adult, he embraced the Roman Catholic Church and Irish nationalism. His failure to follow his soldier father, who was killed at Gallipoli when Longford was nine, remained an open wound. Longford's memory will live on, if not for the scale of his achievements then certainly because of his courage, tenacity and nobility in trying. He was a man of great intelligence and moral strength and the speakers and themes of the “Longford Lectures” reflect his life’s work.

The Longford Lecture is also the opportunity to present the Longford Award to organisations, often unknown and badly supported, who work with offenders, victims and their families. Lord Longford's courage and sincerity in pursuing unpopular causes in the face of formidable opposition and ridicule were unquestioned. He was described by his biographer, Peter Stanford, (who is Director of the Longford Trust) as the “Outcast’s Outcast” and the composition of the Longford Prize shows how fraught an area this is as the prize was presented to Circles UK, a charity of Quaker origin which works with rehabilitating perhaps the most difficult type of ex-offender, released sex offenders.

The Longford Prize 2010

Circles UK (winner)

The charity was recognised for its work with sex offenders, which the judges said provided "a much greater opportunity for preventing further crime, rehabilitating the offenders, and achieving safer communities for us all". As Peter Stanford wrote;

“There are many myths that the public choose to believe about prisoners - often with the encouragement of certain sections of the press and of politicians. One of the most widespread is that it is impossible to rehabilitate sex-offenders, that once those who have served sentences for such crimes are released they will reoffend, and that it would therefore be better if they were locked up forever.

The facts are rather different, and therefore it was with great pleasure that the judges were able to award the 2010 Longford Prize to Circles UK, a charity of Quaker origin which through a dozen local projects runs 'circles of support and accountability' for newly-released sex offenders.”

Just for Kids Law (highly commended)

This charity was lauded for its work with children on the wrong side of the law at a young age. The judges were impressed by its "holistic approach". One way to stop prisons being full of adult criminals is to stop jailing children?

Peter Kilgarriff (lifetime achievement award)

He was recognised for his impact on the prison-reform sector over many years.

As for Martha Lane Fox’s Lecture her contention that prisoners should be part of the race to ensure everybody is included in digital world it is surely inarguable logic despite all the guff and negative reaction her comments have provoked since. The strap line of the Longford Trust is “Second chances for ex-offenders through education” and surely this is in the interests of society for having held people to account through the Criminal Justice System society’s only further interest is in stopping re-offending, pure and simple. To do this you must put rehabilitation at the heart of penal policy for it is only if you can integrate and give prisoners a stake in society afterwards that you will stop reoffending. Having somebody leave prison with adequate life skills (including computing skills) is in everybody’s interest and is not necessarily altruistic, it is common sense.

Catering at the reception was by “The Clink”, a restaurant in High Down Prison run by prisoners

As for MLF herself, a woman of accomplishment who is still only 37, what is not to like? Despite her near death experience and the terrible physical and mental toll the accident took (She joked that her brain had got smaller due to morphine, I suspect it was only half a joke) including the stroke she suffered she is an amazingly driven character, affectionately nicknamed the “Bionic Vixen”, a play on her last name and a reflection of the amount of reconstruction she has endured.

Two of Lord Longford's daughters - Rachel Billington and Lady Antonia Fraser

Altogether apart from her business achievements she was in good company with the Longford Family and the other campaigners who met for a reception after the lecture, catered for by “The Clink”, a restaurant in High Down Prison run by prisoners. She is a Republican, and has campaigned strongly on human rights, women's rights and social justice supporting and funding organisations in these areas. She is a classicist’s daughter who has used her own money to set up her charity Antigone based on the heroine of a play by Sophocles where “In the Antigone contempt of death enables a weak maiden to conquer a powerful ruler.” Well, she is a heroine herself in the face of the type of adversity which would have crushed a lesser soul and I have no doubt her drive, intelligence (and can I say fey beauty?) will continue to conquer for Res publica, the common good.

There is one further anecdote. After the lecture I put out a few positive Tweets on Twitter (twitter.com/daithaic). The next day I received an SMS on my mobile;

“Marthalanefox: .daithaic why thank you!”

MLF doesn’t just talk the talk on being digital savvy, she really walks the talk!

For more about the work of the Longford Trust supporting prison reforms see;

http://www.longfordtrust.org

Martha Lane Fox’s website;

http://www.marthalanefox.com

via daithaic.blogspot.com