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Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
Coronavirus poses challenges for BPO and IT services delivered from India
Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the Mayflower
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to application modernisation
From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz
Edge computing environments: What you need to know
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New World for robot technology
Autonomous ship set to repeat the voyage of the Mayflower
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21-27 APRIL 2020
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Home
News
Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
Coronavirus poses challenges for BPO and IT services delivered from India
Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the Mayflower
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to application modernisation
From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz
Edge computing environments: What you need to know
Downtime
Government urged to delay digital services tax amid coronavirusTrade body TechUK has called on the government to reassess its digital services tax, arguing that tech companies should be given more “breathing space” by delay-ing liabilities for a year. The tax, which came into effect at the start of April, applies to search engines, social media platforms and online marketplaces with global revenues above £500m, where more than £25m of this comes from UK users.
Rolls-Royce alliance focuses on coronavirus economic recoveryRolls-Royce has established an industry alliance called Emer2gent to bring together data analytics experts to work on how to tackle the economic impact of the Covid-19 coronavirus. Rolls-Royce said the alliance aims to combine tra-ditional economic, business, travel and retail data sets with behaviour and sentiment data to support the global recovery from the pandemic.
ICO relaxes regulatory approach temporarily during pandemicThe Information Commissioner’s Office has made a number of tem-porary tweaks to its regulatory approach during the ongoing Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, putting the emphasis on pragmatism and empathy, but said it will not shy away from protecting the informa-tion rights of UK citizens. “It is right that we must adjust our regulatory approach,” said information com-missioner Elizabeth Denham.
Two-fifths of employees likely to continue remote workingA Gartner survey of 229 HR man-agers has revealed that while 30% of their employees worked remotely at least part of the time before the coronavirus pandemic, 81% or more are now working remotely and 41% are likely to do so at least some of the time once a return to normal working is permitted. Some 15% of the managers said 61-80% of their staff are now working remotely.
UCL and IBM work on tech to tackle lonelinessWith the UK population having to main-tain social isolation to reduce the impact of coronavirus, new research has high-lighted the extent of loneliness. A study by IBM’s Institute for Business Value on loneliness in the era of social distancing has found that 43% of the ageing popula-tion feel lonely at least some of the time. UCL is now working on a project with IBM to investigate how technology can overcome the challenges of loneliness.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
NEWS IN BRIEF
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Home
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Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
Coronavirus poses challenges for BPO and IT services delivered from India
Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the Mayflower
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to application modernisation
From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz
Edge computing environments: What you need to know
Downtime
NEWS IN BRIEF
House of Commons reports progress on virtual ParliamentThe House of Commons is making good progress in the preparations around taking some parts of parlia-mentary business online, according to the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle MP. The plan is to get the infrastruc-ture ready for when the House of Commons returns on 21 April.
Booking.com celebrates women in tech with annual awardsTravel booking site Booking.com has announced the winners of its 2020 Technology Playmaker Awards, designed to shine a light on women and diversity in the technology sector.
Amazon warehouse workers strike over workplace safetyStriking Amazon workers across Europe and the US are walking out of company warehouses over the lack of protection being provided to employees during the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.
BT inks Ericsson 5G supply deal but delays Huawei replacementEricsson has closed a deal with BT to deploy cloud-native, container-based mobile packet core for the UK telco’s 4G, 5G non-standalone and 5G standalone services. But it has delayed replacing the Huawei tech in the core of its EE mobile division network.
Microsoft patches 19 critical bugs in heavy Patch TuesdayMicrosoft’s run of lengthy Patch Tuesday releases continues, with April’s round of bug fixes running to 113 vulnerabilities, slightly below the all-time record, of which 94 are rated important and 19 critical.
Cyber attacks on banks seen spiking, says Carbon BlackCyber criminals are targeting the financial services sector during the Covid-19 pandemic. Attacks spiked by 38% from February to March to make up 52% of all attacks seen by VMware’s Carbon Black Cloud. n
NHSX partners Facebook for video calling devicesNHSX, the digital unit of the NHS, has partnered with Facebook to distribute thousands of devices that Facebook has developed to provide “emotional support and companionship during Covid-19”. Some 2,050 Portal video calling devices will be supplied free to hospitals, care homes and other care settings.
❯ Standard Chartered bans employees from Zoom.
❯ Apple and Google unite for contact tracing technology.
❯ Alarm over double extortion ransomware threat.
❯ Nordic digital educators collaborate with authorities.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
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Home
News
Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
Coronavirus poses challenges for BPO and IT services delivered from India
Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the Mayflower
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to application modernisation
From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz
Edge computing environments: What you need to know
Downtime
Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reformsWhile many firms have seized on the government’s decision to delay the roll-out of the IR35 reforms to rethink their approach, others are sticking by their decision not to use limited company IT contractors. Caroline Donnelly reports
Several weeks have passed since the government confirmed that the roll-out of the IR35 tax avoidance reforms to the private sector will be deferred for 12 months because of
the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak, pushing the start date for the changes back to April 2021.
In that time, it appears many private sector businesses caught within the policy’s scope have decided to use the 12-month exten-sion to re-evaluate their approach to ensuring compliance with the new rules now that they have a little longer to prepare.
Under the reforms, from 6 April 2021, medium to large private sector firms will assume responsibility for determining how the contractors they engage with should be taxed, as part of a push by the government to clamp down on “disguised” employment.
Currently, it is down to contractors to decide whether the nature of the work that they do, and how it is performed, means that they should be taxed in the same way as permanent, salaried employees (inside IR35) or in the same way as off-payroll work-ers (outside IR35).
The government claims that leaving these decisions up to con-tractors to decide has led to some individuals abusing the sys-tem by deliberately misclassifying themselves as working outside IR35 in order to minimise their employment tax liabilities.
ComplianCe strategiesAccording to James Poyser, CEO and founder of online account-ancy InniAccounts, the deferral has prompted a number of firms to switch up their IR35 compliance strategies, based on data from his anonymous contractor feedback site, Offpayroll.org.uk.
“Of all the updates we’ve had since the government announced the deferral, three-quarters of end clients have used it to defer their own implementation,” Poyser told Computer Weekly.
“For the most part, those who tried to assess contractors but made a hash of it are the ones who have decided to defer the implementation and are re-engaging contractors.”
These include companies that may previously have solely relied on HM Revenue & Customs’ (HMRC) much-maligned Check
ANALYSIS
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Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
Coronavirus poses challenges for BPO and IT services delivered from India
Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the Mayflower
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From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz
Edge computing environments: What you need to know
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Employment Status for Tax (CEST) tool to assess the tax status of the contractors they engage with, or adopted a “role-based approach” to deciding how they should be taxed, Poyser added.
The latter approach means the firm in question has based its decision on how the contractor should be taxed solely on the job role they fill, rather than assessing the work they do, the way it is performed and without taking into account other factors, such as mutuality of obligation and substitution rights.
However, the rest of the firms that Offpayroll.org.uk holds data on appear to be ignoring the deferral and carrying on as though the original start date for the reforms still stands, meaning that any determinations they made about the tax status of their con-tractors before the delay was announced, remain in place.
Banning psC ContraCtorsThis behaviour is particularly prevalent among firms whose IR35 compliance strategy consists of banning limited company and personal services company (PSC) contractors from their work-force ahead of the reforms coming into force.
“Those who banned PSCs without assessments have backed themselves into a corner,” said Poyser. “They have claimed all along that it’s a ‘procurement choice’, therefore it’s harder for them to defer while saving face. They have also already had the difficult conversations and many of their contractors have walked.”
As reported by Computer Weekly, the issuing of blanket bans on contractors is a strategy that a number of high-profile financial services organisations, including HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays, are known to have adopted in the run-up to the reforms.
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The government has delayed the roll-out of the IR35 tax avoidance reforms to the private sector until April 2021
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Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
Coronavirus poses challenges for BPO and IT services delivered from India
Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the Mayflower
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Speaking to Computer Weekly, Dave Chaplin, CEO of IR35 con-sultancy ContractorCalculator, echoed several of Poyser’s market observations, saying: “There are still firms blanket-banning now, and it appears they are now in the minority. You would hope that the banks, for instance, would stop their blanket bans, because there’s really no need for them any more because of the deferral, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
On the whole, most companies are happy to revert to allowing contractors to decide how they should be taxed, and whether or not they would prefer to engage with clients as limited company contractors or on pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) terms, said Chaplin.
“There are companies that are assessing contractors, even though they have no lawful basis to do that, and then forcing them to work with them and engage in a certain way,” he added.
Holding firmComputer Weekly has received copies of internal emails from contractors working across the financial services industry in recent weeks that confirm many companies are holding firm on their contractor bans for the foreseeable future.
For instance, in an email to staff dated 23 March 2020, insurance firm Legal & General confirmed that its IR35 compliance strategy remained unchanged, meaning that contractors can only continue to work for the company on PAYE terms or through an umbrella company. “The only exceptions to this will be where a worker has already been issued with an outside-IR35 determination already confirmed,” said the email, seen by Computer Weekly. “L&G feel this is the best approach to stabilise its contingent workforce,
whilst acknowledging the global market conditions. It is also important to note the government has made clear that this is only a delay to the changes, it is not a cancellation of the changes.”
Computer Weekly contacted Legal & General for a follow-up comment, but received no response. The email continued: “This is consistent with the approach being taken by a number of other financial services businesses.”
The same is true of Nationwide Building Society, whose agency, Alexander Mann, emailed suppliers on its behalf within days of the deferral announcement to confirm that any contractors deter-mined to work “inside IR35” will still be classified as such.
“Nationwide have reviewed and considered the government’s announcement and, whilst they understand these are challenging times, have made the decision that as your contractor’s engage-ment has been assessed as ‘inside IR35’, and therefore subject to PAYE deductions, to require that your contractor to be engaged via umbrella only,” said the email, seen by Computer Weekly.
In a follow-up statement to Computer Weekly, Nationwide set out its reasons for sticking with the determinations, which it said
“You would hope that the banks would stop their blanket bans,
as there’s no need for them”Dave Chaplin, ContraCtorCalCulator
ANALYSIS
❯Government stands accused of leaving IT contractors “out in the cold”.
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Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
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were made over several months and involved each contractor on its books having their status individually assessed.
“The work we have undertaken on the implementation of IR35 included a thorough review of all associated policies to ensure Nationwide’s compliance, alongside conducting individual assess-ments,” said a spokesperson. “With the vast majority of assess-ments being ‘inside’ and having completed this process prior to the government’s announcement, we felt that continuing to work to the original deadline of 6 April 2020 was the right thing to do.”
But Poyser is not so sure, and said organisations that decide against “taking advantage” of the deferral to re-evaluate their approach to the IR35 reforms may end up regretting that decision come April 2021. “It has become clear in recent months that con-tractors will reject being forced into umbrellas, be it through pol-icy or poor-quality assessments,” he said. “We expect, come April
2021, that more clients will be delivering fair IR35 assessments, so those who continue with blanket banning, or recommence in the run-up to April 2021, will suffer disproportionately as contrac-tors will have more choice and can’t be bullied or strong-armed into umbrellas. Clients have revealed their hands, and unless they make amends, this will come back to bite them.”
Chaplin also feels that, against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, there is every chance that the IR35 reforms could be delayed again, beyond April 2021, or even cancelled completely. At which point, these firms will have cut themselves off from being able to use limited company contractors for no good reason.
“HMRC has saved face and said this is a deferral, not a cancel-lation, but I would say that’s extremely hopeful,” said Chaplin. “If I was a betting man, I would more than happily take bets that it will never go out in April 2021.” n
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ANALYSIS
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Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
Coronavirus poses challenges for BPO and IT services delivered from India
Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the Mayflower
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From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz
Edge computing environments: What you need to know
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Coronavirus poses challenges for BPO and IT services delivered from IndiaUK businesses receiving business process outsourcing and IT services from India will face disruption during the Covid-19 pandemic, but IT services from large IT suppliers should be less affected, writes Karl Flinders
Organisations that receive business process outsourcing (BPO) services from India face major challenges follow-ing the country’s Covid-19 lockdown, but IT services are
less affected as companies’ investments over the years pay off.India’s lockdown, announced on 24 March, saw the government
ask 1.3 billion people to stay at home for at least three weeks. Although thousands of miles away, UK businesses, already with their own coronavirus challenges, now have to worry about the challenges faced by firms that do work on their behalf from India.
Although disruption is inevitable, the larger IT suppliers that deliver from India are well equipped to continue to deliver ser-vices in the lockdown. But BPO suppliers and smaller IT players face major hurdles.
India’s lockdown has been a shock for many of the UK’s largest businesses, including most of the big banks.
With UK business offshoring work in India in huge volumes, the knock-on effect of this development is inevitable. Large UK com-panies have for years shipped roles to India, whether in call-centre
operations or IT support. On the back of this, large Indian IT suppli-ers, such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, as well as BPO firms such as Genpact, have grown to become global giants over the last two decades.
Meanwhile, service providers in the West, such as Accenture and Capgemini, have established operations in India to take a share of the growing market.
CHallenges aHeadFollowing the announcement of the lockdown by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, a message from Nasscom, the indus-try body that represents suppliers in India, warned its members of the challenges ahead.
Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh wrote: “While the prime min-ister acknowledged the need to have the bare minimum of people in offices to support mission-critical work, he strongly reinforced the need for all companies to increase work from home for the next few weeks. He also acknowledged some of the logistic issues
ANALYSIS
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being faced due to a lack of coordination in the states and we will work with his office to follow up on that.
“However, with all these developments, we would urge mem-bers to prepare for a complete lockdown and move all your assets immediately, where possible, to enable employees to work from home. Please assume that only a handful of staff will be allowed to come to the office to support the mission-critical functions and operate datacentres.”
And it is not just Indian heritage companies that are being affected. Accenture has about 200,000 workers in India and Capgemini nearly 100,000. These staff are often serving custom-ers in the West, with large customer bases in the UK and the US.
Barry Matthews, partner at outsourcing advisers ISG, said there are risks for both BPO and IT services because suppliers have not
planned for this situation. “How do you plan for tens of thousands of workers to suddenly have to work from home?” he said.
Matthews said BPO is likely to be harder hit than IT services, but it is hard to tell because “it will be almost impossible for either to maintain current services levels”.
skills and CapaBilityHe added that customers working with the big Indian suppliers, such as TCS, and the Western suppliers delivering from India, are likely to be impacted less, because these IT companies have the skills and capability to enable effective remote working.
But the lockdown has inevitably caused major concerns for busi-nesses using services from India. According to human resources specialist New Street Group, many UK businesses are trying
ANALYSIS
KRIANGKRAI/ADOBE
Accenture has about 200,000 workers in India and Capgemini has nearly 100,000
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to re-shore work from India to the UK following the lockdown. Andrew McIntee, managing director at New Street Group, said: “For many UK businesses, the problems in India risk key functions going offline. That has added to the chaos at many UK operations and delivery centres in recent days.
“It has resulted in a surge in demand for hiring professionals like business process change specialists, who can help redirect work from India back to the UK, where companies have greater flexibil-ity in both workforce and workplace strategy.”
It is easy to jump to the conclusion that the best idea is to repat-riate work to the UK, and for companies using BPO services from India, this might be a good strategy.
But India might be better prepared to deal with IT service deliv-ery amid the lockdown thanks to investments made to enable people to work remotely. Also, the large IT services companies have global delivery networks that can make up for lost capacity by switching locations for support delivery.
BPO, on the other hand, which is all about data processing, poses very different challenges. People can’t do their work from
home because of data security issues – strict rules about protect-ing the data of corporate customers. “BPO services are a much bigger issue because they can’t be done from home,” said Peter Schumacher, CEO at the Value Leadership Group, which special-ises in advising companies on outsourcing.
Corporate lawyer Mark Lewis, who specialises in IT outsourcing contracts, agreed, saying: “Instinctively, this must be a problem and particularly in BPO. If UK businesses are struggling to con-nect their staff and get them working remotely, it is the same in India but on a much larger scale.”
major privaCy ConCernsLewis said that with BPO, there is a further challenge with privacy concerns. “BPO is all about IT-enabled data processing, and very often the offshore operations are dealing with personal data and consent has to be given to process personal data from home,” he said. “There is a lot of personal data processed quite legiti-mately. The offshore company is the data processor employing people at centres that have been through due diligence by their customers. Working from home from an unsecured connection could be a real problem.
“Similarly, staff in India providing voice support to customers of corporates in the UK cannot work from home because they will be unable to access the information about customers they need.”
But while these services face huge disruption, IT services need not, said Schumacher. “IT service providers have invested heav-ily in enabling staff to work from home over the years,” he said. “Some of them are up to about 90% in terms of the proportion
“for manY uk businesses, the problems in india risk keY
functions going offline”anDrew MCintee, new Street Group
ANALYSIS
❯UK Labour MP calls for politicians to lead by example during coronavirus outbreak.
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Bans on limited company contractors hold firm despite deferral of IR35 reforms
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Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the Mayflower
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From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz
Edge computing environments: What you need to know
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of staff that can work from home. It is important to separate off-shore IT services from offshore BPO and voice services, where the impact will be greater.”
For example, TCS, India’s biggest IT services provider, quickly increased the number of staff who can carry out their roles fully from home. The company reacted to the coronavirus by rapidly scaling up its Secure Base Working Space initiative, which ena-bles staff to service customers securely. Within weeks, it has made it possible for 85% of its global staff to do this. Before the pandemic, that figure was less than 40%.
TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said: “We launched a massive pro-gramme to ensure business continuity using our Secure Borderless Work Spaces infrastructure, which allows TCS associates working from home, onshore and offshore, to ensure business continuity with support from minimal associates working from offices.
“TCS has been a pioneer in location-independent work prac-tices, having started offshoring 50 years ago. We proactively deployed collaboration platforms, cloud-enabled infrastructure and robust security practices, which stands us in good stead as we deal with this unprecedented situation.”
seeking alternativesBut if problems do occur, it could spur businesses to start look-ing at alternatives to offshore services. The current pandemic could have a massive impact on the BPO offshoring industry as it demonstrates the advantages of automation, which could replace the traditional models of lower-cost workers in coun-tries such as India carrying out tasks manually.
Automation can negate the impact of people not being able to get to their workplace. An EY report, How do you find clarity in the midst of a crisis?, examined how businesses can respond to Covid-19 to protect their supply chains. Automation was identified as a key investment for more than one-third of businesses questioned.
The report said: “The sudden and unexpected nature of Covid-19 has compelled executives to re-evaluate operating models. While building agility and resilience have been dominant themes for much of the past decade, the unique nature of the current situ-ation has left many companies unprepared.
“The total shutdown of activity in parts of the world has exposed vulnerabilities in many companies’ supply chains, with 52% look-ing to re-evaluate their current arrangements. Nearly the same number (47%) are taking active steps to reconfigure. More than a third (36%) are accelerating their investments in automation.”
Lewis observed: “It will be interesting to see how this impacts offshoring and even nearshoring.” n
“it is important to separate offshore it services from bpo
and voice services, where the impact will be greater”
peter SChuMaCher, value leaDerShip Group
ANALYSIS
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Building a robot ship to navigate the high seas and follow the route of the MayflowerIn 1620, the Mayflower set sail to the New World. Cliff Saran speaks to Don Scott, technology lead for an autonomous ship that has been built to make the same voyage 400 years later
On 19 September 2020, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the Mayflower taking the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World, an autonomous
trimaran vessel, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, will trace the route of the original Mayflower in 1620, sailing from Plymouth, UK, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, US.
Although remotely controlled ships are not a new concept, Don Scott, chief technology officer of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, says the project is at the bleeding edge. “What’s new about the project is the marine autonomy aspect, creating the ship as an edge device that operates on its own, sensing its environment, making intelligent decisions and acting on them without any human intervention,” he says. “That’s what makes this vehicle really innovative.”
The Mayflower is a prototype, a proof of concept, to demon-strate that a solar-powered autonomous ship can navigate the oceans safely and cope with changeable weather, other ships, and encounters with marine creatures and submerged hazards.
INTERVIEW
Don Scott, Mayflower Autonomous Ship:
“What’s new about the project is the marine
autonomy aspect, creating the ship as an edge device that operates on its own”
SUBM
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Scott has worked on the oceans for 30 years. For him, one of the biggest challenges in developing an autonomous ship is the unpredictable nature of the sea. “You certainly don’t approach these engineering tasks lightly,” he says. “You very quickly get humbled by the power of the ocean.”
He says one of the philosophies that underpins the design is that the Mayflower Autonomous Ship needs to operate in an extremely hostile and dynamic environment, which is very unpredictable.
Until very recently, undertaking such an engineering task would have seemed impossible. For Scott, the recent convergence of technologies such as computing power at the edge and the growth of machine learning has meant that today it is possible to have an edge device make decisions in a timeframe that enables a vehicle to operate within the environment it was designed for.
Engineering for unpredictability requires partitioning differ-ent tasks, so that there is a strong sense of separation and lay-ering between the software running on the edge devices. The
architecture is highly modularised, with each edge device maintaining its own situational awareness and communicating upstream and downstream with other modules.
Sensor inputs include six cameras, an automatic identification system, wind speed and direction sensors, and obstacle avoid-ance sonar. Scott says: “Each of these collects unstructured data, which is then processed and fed into a data server to provide the information needed for the vessel to navigate.”
Weather forecasts are provided via application programming interfaces (APIs) to The Weather Company. “Weather updates will be our highest priority,” says Scott. “We will steer around a storm cell, for sure.”
The Mayflower is designed to run autonomously, but it will have the ability to send and receive data. Given that the ocean offers limited low-bandwidth satellite communications, weather data is given a priority. “It is critical information – we will get what we can get,” says Scott.
Collision avoidanCe moduleIBM PowerAI Vision models are being used to provide object classification and object tracking for the vessel’s computer vision system, he says, adding: “All of this information is fed into a navigation hazard map used by a collision avoidance module.”
The collision avoidance module takes this data to determine a series of potential courses and speeds, which are then fed into a route planner, which Scott says is essentially an autonomous sys-tem that determines the course the vessel should take. “Layered on top of the route planner is our safety manager, which deals
INTERVIEW
“You certainlY don’t approach these engineering tasks lightlY. You verY quicklY get humbled bY
the power of the ocean”Don SCott, Mayflower autonoMouS Ship
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with more localised information, such as wave direction and the unpredictable aspects of the ocean,” he adds.
Each system on the vessel is redundant, with a backup mod-ule running in parallel, which is ready to take over if the primary system fails. One of the hazards of the ocean is short circuits, so the Mayflower Autonomous Ship has been built in a way that enables it to continue if systems are damaged. “Any system that is exposed to the ocean needs to be isolated to protect against
electricity shorts,” says Scott. “We are hedging our bets on the electrical reliability of the system by putting in a backup system.”
Because each system has been designed to operate indepen-dently, each can be tested before they are all integrated on the ship, says Scott. For instance, at the start of March, the collision avoidance system, called AI Captain, was being tested at sea on another ship. “The ocean presents a lot of different hazards, such as land, marine debris, submerged objects, wildlife and even
INTERVIEW
❯Norway is a pioneer in the autonomisation of shipping.
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The Mayflower Autonomous Ship will trace the route of the original Mayflower in 1620, sailing from Plymouth, UK, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, US
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curious whales,” says Scott. “In a classical marine system, human vigilance is required to make decisions on these hazards.”
The autonomous system also needs to adhere to the rules of the sea, he says. “We need to identify surrounding marine traffic and make sure we are operating safely.”
Scott says IBM suggested taking ODM, its rules-based engine for determining credit card fraud, and adapting it to marine regu-lations. This means that AI Captain enables the Mayflower to fol-low the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) as well as recommendations from the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS).
explainaBle ai deCision-makingHaving the AI Captain make decisions based on a predefined set of regulations means its decisions do not come out of a black box, says Scott. In effect, the AI decision-making for collision detection is entirely explainable because it adheres to the rules that govern marine navigation.
For Scott, the vehicle systems the Mayflower will use are proven technologies, tried and trusted. “We know we can do this voy-age tomorrow, with the existing capabilities we have in classic deterministic systems, going waypoint to waypoint, and dynamic updates based on local conditions,” he says.
However, the fully autonomous AI Captain needs to operate without any human intervention. Scott adds: “The thing that keeps me up at night is the collision avoidance system, which we haven’t tested yet. It is essential for the success of the ship. We need to go through a bunch of sea trials.” n
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The fully autonomous AI Captain system must navigate the oceans safely and cope with
changeable weather, other ships, and encounters with marine creatures and submerged hazards
INTERVIEW
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IT departments deserve applause in crisis
While questions are being asked of the government over its coronavirus exit strategy, one thing is clear – large parts of the UK workforce are able to work remotely, thanks to the efforts of IT teams around the country. By enabling people to communi-cate, office workers do not have to travel. They can remain socially distanced from work colleagues and commuters, which,
ultimately, saves lives.The new NHS Nightingale hospitals set up at conference venues are now operational. Along with the dedicated medical staff, the beds
and life-saving equipment, they took delivery of “essential” IT equipment.For some, the coronavirus crisis is leading to a whole new respect for IT departments. IT has transformed everything. People do not
have to go into the office to work. The BCS launched the #vITalworker cam-paign, and is asking people to share and celebrate examples of IT professionals working to keep essential elements of national life functioning.
One IT leader Computer Weekly spoke to said that people now realise how much they can get done at home. Employees have learned what tech works and what doesn’t, and how office-based activity can be achieved in a secure remote environment. Broadband and mobile networks have stood up to the challenge.
In the past, people often only noticed the IT team when something went wrong, and that is their abiding memory. Today, companies around the world are only able to function because of their IT department. Millions of staff have kept their jobs, thanks to the IT department. Even our social lives, isolated from loved ones, revolve around technol-ogy such as videoconferencing.
Nobody is going to organise a national clapping session for the folks in IT, and that’s fair enough. But have no doubt that, in their own way, everyone in IT has been a bit of a hero.
This also poses some challenging questions for government policy. Rather than spending £100bn on HS2, for example, why not invest in nationwide superfast broadband, so people don’t have to travel so much? But that’s a question for another day. n
Cliff Saran, managing editor (technology) and Bryan Glick, editor in chief
❯Read the latest Computer Weekly blogs.
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have no doubt that, in their own waY, everYone in it has been a bit of a hero
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Technical integration challenges and effective project planning are hindering the digital transformation efforts a range of enterprises are taking to modernise their application portfolios.
According to the Connectivity benchmark 2020 report released by software management company MuleSoft, 99% of IT organi-sations will be undertaking digital transformation projects in the next five years, but 85% of them say integration challenges are slowing these initiatives.
MuleSoft reports that while the average IT enterprise has around 900 applications, only 28% of these are currently inte-grated. This demand for integration is only set to grow as new technology investments, such as security or big data analytics, increase the burden on IT departments, which will need to pro-vide further integrations to connect any new sources of data.
Separate research by data management firm Boomi on enterprise resource planning (ERP) finds that, for European IT organisations at least, the main challenges of modernisation can be split into two camps: people and process issues; and technical issues.
“Modernisation programmes need to be properly scoped and managed, with clear goals, measurement and communication in place,” says Boomi in The ERP innovator’s dilemma report, adding that the biggest technical challenge is “integrating and managing data across complex hybrid environments, where some legacy technology is still in use”.
The situation is further complicated by the sheer scope of older systems that require modernising. In its Application modernisation
BUYER’S GUIDE TO APPLICATION MODERNISATION | PART 3 OF 3
How to overcome application
modernisation barriers
While everyone is talking about going cloud native,
most businesses are not lucky enough to be able
to start afresh. Sebastian Klovig Skelton looks
at how to take legacy applications forward
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should be business-centric, continuous and multiplatform report, analyst firm Gartner warns that enterprise IT portfolios are far too large for a cost-effective and comprehensive inventory of all applications, in all locations.
To overcome these challenges, enterprises should assess, seg-ment and prioritise their modernisation workflows so they can plan projects in a targeted way, while still having enough holis-tic visibility of their digital estates to understand how different applica-tions are connected.
Segment and prioritiSeGaining visibility of digital estates, including all of the legacy applica-tions in use, can be a daunting task for many organisations. Nick Ford, chief technology evangelist at low-code software platform Mendix, urges IT decision-makers to start with portfolio mapping exer-cises to understand what is in their digital estates.
“We tend to find in any estate of applications that there are apps that can probably be consolidated, or are no longer rel-evant and can be easily replaced with off-the-shelf solutions, or even rebuilt in a lot of cases,” he says.
“We’d advocate taking a look at that estate, looking at how you’re going to rationalise that estate and then picking off those areas that are going to give you the most significant advantage in a short period of time,” adds Ford.
Ian Fairclough, vice-president of services at MuleSoft, says most organisations have “a very complex web of interconnected applications”, which constrains innovation.
“We’re talking about IT estates that have grown up over the past 30 to 40 years, and you find that many of these organisa-tions have not invested in technology over time,” he says, adding that a lack of integrations between these applications is a major
barrier to building agile, modern application portfolios.
Like Mendix’s Ford, Fairclough recommends modernisation pro-jects are divided into “prioritised chunks”, which he says enables IT teams to tackle the most important things first.
“Maybe there are some things that you don’t even need to tackle, so actually you segment and decide
that we can run those IT systems over there for another few years and then just retire them,” he says.
Describing a challenging modernisation project he worked on, Fairclough says the amount of work required to complete the project had been “totally underestimated”. He says the project involved an IT estate of more than 500 applications, which meant the customer did not understand how everything was connected. As a consequence, project costs were pushed up “exponentially”.
“Whenever we set out to modernise one application, we effec-tively lifted it up and found a tangled web of other applications, so
most organisations have “a verY complex web of
interconnected applications” which constrains innovation
ian fairClouGh, MuleSoft
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we couldn’t just take that application in isolation and move it to a new environment,” he adds.
He says the project team needed to develop new integrations to support the connections between the new and the old systems.
To solve the problem, the team needed to divide the applica-tions into gold, silver and bronze tiers to denote their priority level. Each gold application would have a number of silver and bronze applications attached to it, meaning that although they were lower priority, they needed to be moved over along with the gold applications.
For Fairclough, procedures meant the project team could focus on the gold tier applications while still making sure everything worked properly.
managing dataEstablished in 2012, London-based Disguise specialises in build-ing the software and hardware that powers live music shows for acts such as U2 and Katy Perry, but its technology is also used in the film industry, as well as for special events such as the Queen’s Jubilee.
The company has expanded rapidly, going from 27 to 131 employ-ees globally in just two years. It also has a large cloud portfolio, which includes using Salesforce in its sales and marketing sys-tems, NetSuite for its financial systems and Jira for its developers.
“We were amassing a lot of data and travelling fast, but if you don’t travel fast in a certain direction you’re not necessarily going to get anywhere, so part of what I needed to do was to bring together the data we have across that estate,” says Ivan Roche,
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head of global business intelligence and technology at Disguise, who spent six weeks in early 2019 assessing and planning the company’s modernisation needs.
He found that using a mixture of out-of-the-box connectors and bespoke application programming interfaces (APIs) created by Boomi, Disguise was able to integrate with Salesforce, NetSuite and Jira, as well as the manufacturers of its hardware, so that all of the data could be managed at a “master” level.
With the visibility and consistency of data this provided, Disguise was then able to begin optimising its processes and fur-ther expanding its systems.
“While the architecture means we are currently improving what we’ve already got, the connectors we cur-rently have in place mean we can also get bigger,” says Roche.
“Maybe there are certain systems we’re currently using that aren’t keeping pace with us, but as long as we’ve got that data structure in the data warehouse and we have the rules around it with Boomi, it means we can take one of the systems we currently have, unplug it, put in a new system, and get that up and running as if it was there from day one,” he adds.
The ability to plug and unplug different systems and applica-tions therefore gives Disguise a lot of flexibility in terms of inte-gration, and helps it to assess and segment workflows for plan-ning future modernisation work.
legacy windowSApplication modernisation is not only about getting rid of legacy hardware – it encompasses a number of technologies, people and processes.
“Whether your company has been around for centuries or just a few years, there are universal challenges that face everyone – be it managing co-existing new and legacy systems or the investment of money and time needed to modernise,” says Olivier Maes, vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at
Rancher Labs.Many businesses have an ambi-
tion to become cloud first, or cloud native, which means they aim to move the majority of their existing applications to the cloud and new applications are developed to run in the cloud.
“Kubernetes allows companies to make legacy functionality available for new, cloud-native applications
and, crucially, it’s saving companies money and valuable time,” says Maes.
However, 70% of on-premise workloads run on Windows Server, which has prevented them from being containerised. But this has now changed with the availability of Windows containers.
One of Rancher Labs’ customers is Abax, Europe’s largest telematics company, which has been able to take advantage of Windows containers. As Maes explains: “Despite processing
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application modernisation is not onlY about getting rid of
legacY hardware – it encompasses a number of technologies,
people and processes
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masses of data from its sophisticated fleet tracking and vehicle control systems, the company had long relied on outdated tech-nology based on a Windows environment.”
Abax had spent many years developing core services in Windows environments and, according to Maes, wanted to con-tinue doing so, but he says having to re-engineer large swathes of infrastructure would have been costly and time-consuming.
With the availability of Windows containers, Maes says Abax’s systems engineers can run mission-critical workloads in both Windows and Linux containers that can be centrally orches-trated, regardless of whether they are deployed on-premise or in the cloud.
Therefore, whether it is through containers or master data man-agement systems, there is a range of technologies available that enterprises can use to help navigate the complexities of applica-tion modernisation.
However, these technical choices should be accompanied and supported by an appropriate organisational structure to execute the project effectively.
“For the most part, the challenge is organisational,” says Mendix’s Ford, adding that modernisation is not a “big bang”, but a continuous, iterative process that needs support from the very top of the organisation.
“Legacy modernisation is about leveraging your entire organi-sation and, for the most part, using those who are closest to the business problem to deliver the software. That comes from hav-ing the right platform, the right governance model and the right organisational structure,” he concludes. n
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There are many technologies available to help enterprises navigate the complexities of application modernisation, but these technical choices should be accompanied and supported by an appropriate organisational structure to
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Human artists may be more creative than machines, but when it comes to animating characters and objects at scale in a feature-length film, computer algorithms still rule the day.
That’s why animation studios and visual effects powerhouses such as Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic employ teams of com-puter scientists and physicists to create programs that do the heavy lifting, such as simulating the threads of wheels and the creases of human skin, for tens of thousands of frames.
Chong Jiayi, a distinguished engineer at Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech), spent much of his career doing just that. At Pixar, where he was technical director, Chong devel-oped an effects simulation system that was eventually used in all the company’s productions.
Specifically, the system was deployed to animate the movement of human muscles and robots in Wall-E, among other advanced visual effects, using a numerical technique called Finite Element Method, which is also used by aerospace companies to perform stress testing of aircraft wings.
The animations created by Chong’s system appeared to be as lifelike as the work of veteran animators in a comparison test ini-tiated by Pixar’s leadership at the time, but the apex of Chong’s work was for Brave, the 2012 animated fantasy film.
On the virtual set, he cracked the challenge of animating skin sliding, where human skin slides over the bone as it is pulled. He presented his work at Siggraph, the leading global conference
tHe inside story of singapore’s ai wHizz
After nearly a decade at Pixar, GovTech’s Chong Jiayi is leading a team of experts to solve difficult problems
in robotics and artificial intelligence. Aaron Tan reports
AI AND ROBOTICS
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on computer graphics, and was eventually awarded two pat-ents, one of which was for simulating the flow of the river in the same movie.
“The director at the time wanted to simulate a realistic river with two characters splashing, along with their interactions with cloth,” Chong says. “It’s a difficult problem called two-way cou-pling where you have two different kinds of material interacting with one another. We wrote a fully distributed, parallelised com-putational fluid dynamics [CFD] solver to compute the physics between them efficiently.”
The computing demand of the CFD simulation was massive. Chong’s team required the compute power of a simulation farm that ran round the clock, with each frame taking as long as three hours to compute. “We were solving really hard physics problems on Google-like scale – and with a hard deadline too.”
But after Steve Jobs – Pixar’s former CEO who took a seat on Disney’s board after the company was acquired by the enter-tainment giant – passed away in 2011, the firm became “more corporate”, Chong says, prompting his peers, many of whom were top computer scientists, to part ways with Pixar for Silicon Valley bigwigs such as Apple, Facebook and Google.
intrigued by deep learningAround that time, Chong was introduced to deep learning by a friend who led the machine learning work that went into Face ID, Apple’s facial recognition system. After reviewing lecture videos by Stanford University on convolutional neural networks, Chong became intrigued.
AI AND ROBOTICS
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On the virtual set of Brave, Chong Jiayi cracked the challenge of animating skin sliding, where human skin slides over the bone as it is pulled
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“It’s easy for us to pick up deep learning because the foundation is the same,” Chong says. “The math is the same, so it’s really sim-ple for us to go into things like robotics and graphics. At the time, I started a company to develop a 2D animation tool and used a lot of machine learning to automate animation.”
Then, the CEO of DeepMotion – a startup that specialises in applying deep reinforcement learning to graphics and computer animation – came knocking.
Lured by the prospect of working for a startup in the pre-seed fund-ing stage, he joined DeepMotion as technical director while continuing to build up his own company, even-tually partnering with DeepMotion to publish his 2D animation tool.
But two years into the job, he had to return to Singapore urgently for family reasons. At that time, he met with Chan Cheow Hoe, the government’s chief digital technol-ogy officer, at a GovTech conference in San Francisco, who con-vinced him to take up his current role.
robotic advanceSToday, Chong leads a team charged with advancing the use of robots in unknown environments that the robots may be encountering for the first time. “The challenge is to get robots to function properly, safely, robustly and at scale in extremely
unstructured environments, because that’s where they are most useful,” he says.
To tackle the challenge, Chong’s team is developing a robotic technology stack to power a robot that can climb stairs and trav-erse difficult terrain. The robot is also fitted with Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) capabilities usually found in drones, ena-bling it to be piloted remotely. “It’s now robust enough and works
over 4G and 5G networks,” he adds.Another aspect of GovTech’s
robotic technology stack is simul-taneous localisation and mapping (Slam), which helps robots navigate unfamiliar areas by reconstructing the 3D environment around them.
While the problem is “mostly solved”, thanks to the work of other experts in the field, Chong’s team is working on what is known as Visual Slam, which uses commodity cam-eras fitted on robots, instead of the
more expensive and bulky Lidar laser-sensing technology, to map the environment.
Chong says the technology will let government agencies deploy four-legged robots in areas hazardous to people. These could be structurally unsound buildings or places with toxic gases. “The key is we can now do 3D reconstructions of places that drones can’t reach – and at scale from a cost and technical prospective,” he says. n
AI AND ROBOTICS
chong JiaYi’s team at govtech is developing a robotic
technologY stack to power robots that can climb stairs and
traverse difficult terrain in areas hazardous to people
computerweekly.com 21-27 April 2020 25
T he saying goes: “If you’re not on the edge, you’re tak-ing up too much space”. And compute itself is now moving to the edge, forcing datacentre operators to wring the last drops of productivity from their infra-
structure, ahead of a future supporting multi-sensor internet of things (IoT) devices over 5G for machine learning, and even artificial intelligence (AI).
Jennifer Cooke, research director of cloud-to-edge datacentre trends at IDC, says datacentre operators need to start thinking about how many systems they will need to roll out, and the peo-ple they will need to support them. “Cost becomes the prohibitive factor,” she says.
Edge will take different forms. A system to support the opera-tion of autonomous vehicles needs a lot of infrastructure to deliver low-latency levels of responsiveness. Such business cases remain “a little bit” immature – and a long way from current announce-ments around cloud-in-a-box offerings.
How does Cooke define edge? “A cooling supplier gave this analogy: Lamp posts are not going to be where your dog lifts his leg any more; it’s where all the tech will be,” she says.
Forging aHeadYet datacentres cannot hang back on these investments. “Many organisations will need partners to help them. Organisations have a lot of trouble keeping track of stuff on-site already – who has touched it, and where the data actually is, who will protect that data, where is the infrastructure? Even more importantly, who will pay for it?” says Cooke.
edge computing environments: wHat
you need to know
An edge case in business sits at the limits of viability, and edge computing requirements suggest a similar struggle. Fleur Doidge reports
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Russell Poole, UK managing director at Equinix, notes its own survey shows that businesses are forging ahead with invest-ments that support AI, IoT and 5G across the UK, with counter-ing distance-related latency across distributed networks seen as a competitive differentiator.
“Almost half (45%) of businesses in the UK are prioritising moving infrastructure to the digital edge as part of their technol-ogy strategy, in turn facilitating interconnection between new and existing partners, and customers around the world,” he says.
Rhonda Ascierto, vice-president of research at the Uptime Institute, says edge may pay off anywhere agility is needed across many distributed machines – from cloud gaming (Jitter, Wag) and augmented reality (AR) to Industry 4.0 and an industrial internet of things (IIoT).
“We are seeing a lot of true local edge capacity in factories of all different types, smart factories, and it’s not that they are retool-ing completely all their factories at once, it’s generally an iterative process,” she says.
How many times does the data have to hop before it is acted on? Then you need that compute on-premise – the financial jus-tification for a highly instrumented multi-sensor smart factory might be speed and accuracy. “You really need to have very low latency with that stuff,” says Ascierto.
Operators need not wait for hordes of ultra-low-latency cus-tomers, though. Ascierto points out that many applications con-sidered for edge actually live “quite happily” within a more middle zone. If a distributed application is mission- or life-critical, there can be a rationale.
Retail, healthcare and financial services already have distrib-uted IT but need to upgrade their datacentre capacity, with net new edge coming online.
This can mean existing server closets with “half a rack and a bunch of networking kit” replaced by micro-modular all-in-one datacentres with huge capacity in a smaller footprint incorporat-ing cooling and backup power, says Ascierto.
an inveStment in multiple partSEdge datacentres should be lights-out if remotely managed and highly instrumented.
“Don’t think of your edge datacentre footprint as one site – design a whole function, because they will be sharing data across this mesh configuration,” says Ascierto.
Operators should invest in component-level resiliency, with complementary resiliency up the stack, to support remote moni-toring with strong instrumentation, multiple sensors, multiple power meters and video feeds.
“You might want digital-eyes videos, power/cooling visual monitoring, and you’re going to see more robots and virtual reality technicians needing the right information – so a site can come back online through a remote fix, or as quickly as possible,” Ascierto says.
Datacentre management as a service (DMaaS) can be worth looking at. Buying one from a big player such as Schneider can offer big data analysis from many thousands of customers.
Networking for the edge should be software-defined. Look at single-path routing with delay considerations for mission-critical
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applications, designed-in concurrency and testing. Testing is not just best practice at the edge, but critical, according to Ascierto.
“Think about the level of redundancy you really need for an edge site. Because of the way edge IT is architected, you probably need far less redundancy even for a mission-critical edge application than you might assume. Again, test your service-level availability, customer infrastructure topology, validate your design, and iden-tify the weak points,” she says.
Ascierto also says to look at service resiliency and transac-tion orientation. Consider a mesh-type configuration, automated failover, and automated load balancing, using alternative plat-forms and nodes. All those functions should be highly monitored and tested regularly – which, at scale, suggests a decision-making role for AI.
“Mission-critical edge is really too complex for human beings,” Ascierto says. “But your decision of whether to do that in-house or as an outsourced service really depends on your business appetite and level of investment for those skills. In-house or not, you also need to be very comfortable with edge environments, remote data, resilience and cloud environments.”
At scale, with many different edge environments to consider, the cost to compute and store the data can be “unreasonable” and too expensive to do on-premise, she warns.
State oF playAscierto points to big sports events offering augmented reality (AR) add-ons. Smart masks, like 3D glasses, could receive and display team data via mobile. When looking at a player on the
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field in real life, the stats about that player will come up on your smart mask, for example.
“A lot of compute will travel with that team in a micro-modular datacentre. I was invited by a storage vendor to a big concert recently at Madison Square Garden, a major light show. That’s the same sort of thing – massive amounts of storage and compute that travel with the band,” she says.
Edge will evolve, from local deployments to regional, to the core; from regional to regional, or from regional to core. Increasingly, users won’t want to rely on a public wide-area network (WAN) to relay data between datacentres or integrate data from different applications, especially as IoT apps mean a lot of integrated data.
“Colocation provider VPNs and virtual interconnections are able to offer a kind of private routing,” Ascierto says. “You can track where the data is routed; it doesn’t go on the internet and a black hole appears at the core.”
integrated edge colocationEdge computing startup Vapor IO signed a deal with network provider Cloudflare in January to roll out on the former’s Kinetic Edge integrated edge colocation, networking and exchange ser-vices platform.
Nitin Rao, head of global infrastructure at Cloudflare, says the interconnection ecosystem includes small datacentres at wireless aggregation hubs, owned by investors.
This will enable code to run in more places across a mobile net-work, thereby improving the performance of internet applications. “It dramatically improves the experience of users beyond what
was remotely possible with a traditional centralised datacentre,” says Rao. “Every piece of code runs on hundreds or thousands of machines by default. Scaling to millions of requests per second becomes trivial.”
Computation should be done and data stored close to the users interacting with it, yet modern distributed databases remain focused on the goal of replicating data everywhere rather than intelligently sharing it, he adds.
Matt Trifiro, chief marketing officer at Vapor IO, says that while Vapor IO is primarily focused on last-mile networking, edge means investing in the emergence of highly automated, remotely operated, lights-out facilities.
“It requires a very different skillset to operate thousands of highly distributed small datacentres than a smaller number of large datacentres,” he says.
Benefits include that latencies can be reduced by hundreds of milliseconds while boosting reliability and saving resources. Caching content at the edge means it does not have to be fetched across the internet or responses regenerated.
wHere it’S all HeadingPeter Hewkin, founder of SmartEdge DC, agrees that the most efficient future indicates a mesh redundancy environment. Multiple edge nodes with replication of data across a distributed network mean if one fails, the others can pick it up in fractions of a second. Fully lights-out, hardened micro-modular datacentres can be scattered across a city or small metro area – think 69kW every 40km.
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“The edge is a location – it’s the edge of a network, and the only way of delivering is you’ve got to have them replicate what happened with mobile phones,” he says. “Yet 5G needs another 50,000 masts on top of the 34,000 or so in the UK. So you need tiny aerials on the side of buildings and so on.”
Ultimately, achieving this kind of “true” edge is costly, potentially requiring some sort of government funding if data is to become a utility, or if higher-end applications such as autonomous vehicles are to happen.
It’s probable, says Hewkin, that massive efficiencies remain untapped – not only through waste heat and the like, but by the practice of “bouncing” so much data all around the world via sub-sea cables, even though it’s only needed in one place.
Another idea entails working out how to “switch off” access to the vast archives in datacentres that are rarely used. Hewkin suspects a solution might be devised around controlling retrieval hour by hour – similar to the way financial services companies get allocated access to share information.
“There’s a need to do something like that,” Hewkin says. “Or look at Facebook ‘cold storage’ – it had to do something, because it has so much data. Everyone uploads all these photographs and shares them once, and then they have to hold them live. That’s what’s happened, the internet is stuffed with junk, which con-sumes energy.”
So, the better the efficiency gains, the more there will be to invest in innovation. n
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I’m a celebrity...Let me monger fear!We’ve all been in Amanda Holden’s shoes. One minute, someone’s sending you a petition explicitly linking 5G to Covid-19; the next, you’re accidentally sharing it with 1.9 million Twitter followers.
The butterfingered Britain’s Got Talent judge has since distanced herself from 5G conspiracy theories, but a variety of public figures are still testing positive for having no shame at all, and they read like a TV producer’s old wish list of I’m a Celebrity contestants; starting with the budget-draining marquee name of Woody Harrelson, then stopping by the cash and carry of cap-in-hand reality show stalwarts for Amir Khan, Calum Best and Lee Ryan.
It’s almost as if conspiracy theories attract the unloved. In 1991, David Icke endured the transformative experience of humiliation on a Terry Wogan chat show. Icke had claimed to be the son of God, and when the audience laughed, he said that “2,000 years ago, had a guy called Jesus sat here and said these same things, you’d still be laughing”. That’s an understatement. He was crucified!
Here in 2020, YouTube is removing Icke’s latest videos, where he’s found a far more obsequious interviewer to tell that telecoms firms are part of a cult – a cult that can only be defeated without fear. What a crucial flaw in his racket it is, then, that he’s scared of something with a lower radiation frequency than a microwave. n
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