Silicon Valley is gradually taking over the world

We shouldn’t really be surprised that the company continues to insist its UK operations are the equivalent of a shop front even while it is employing about 5,000 people and building huge new offices in London.

And we really should be unsurprised that our government has rolled over and accepted this figure, even tried to make it sound like a victory.

Equally we can’t really be gobsmacked that the Republic of Ireland, with the lowest rate of corporation tax in Europe, is happy to be the place where this multi-national corporation can base itself as a cuckoo in the nest while it sends off its profits elsewhere.

For in a way we are all culpable when it comes to high-tech shiny communications companies like Google. And for that matter the likes of Apple, Amazon and Vodaphone.

For the most part we seem to care not when Facebook and Twitter continue their headlong rush to dominate the world, to carve it up between them.

For we have adopted a wide-eyed sense of wonder at the gathering pace of technological change, it is dragging us uncritically behind it, leaving us hungry to have the latest gadget, be on the right platform, not miss out.

While we pile up planet-sized piles of banality on Facebook, Me Me Meing for all our worth, we are oblivious to information we are freely giving to states and corporations, allowing companies to have virtual monopolies on our ways of communicating.

Your band’s music not on iTunes? Forget it. Book not on Kindle? Sorry budding author. You mean your company has no Google ranking? Oh dear.

The new IPhone launch is treated uncritically in newspaper columns in a way that would not happen with say a new Ford Mondeo, for howls of outrage about the selling out of objective journalism would surely follow.

And there is hardly any debate or critical analysis about any of this.

That is why Google is almost impervious to reputational harm that it’s derisory tax bill would have inflicted on global corporations of yesteryear.

But the denizens of Silicon Valley are just as rapacious a bunch of capitalists as were Henry Ford and Cecil Rhodes in their day.

Just because they sport hipster beards, wear jeans and skateboard to work doesn’t make that any different.

They all want to take over the world even if the means, mores and methods are different.

It would be manifestly dumb to criticise the technological developments made over the last 20 years which have come at helter skelter pace.

For the most part they have opened up wondrous worlds and new possibilities.

But no society should tolerate a global transformation that bypasses democracy.

Individually we matter very little but what we can do is to begin to wake up to power that has ended up in a very small number of hands.

I for one am going to try not to be so gormlessly transfixed by upgrades, designed as they are to keep me enslaved, nor apps that tell me things I didn’t really need to know and just get anxious when I do.

In the end Google ended up paying a tax bill that was tiny in relation to the money it took out of the UK but the scale of the issue it raised about global capitalism and our own place within it is anything but.

So we wait, fearing the worst. Knowing we will have to go along to see for ourselves but maybe getting ready to watch from behind our fingers.

They were much loved characters you see. Funny and irreplaceable.

When they were around everything seemed to be OK with the world. The forces of darkness could be beaten back by a nice cup of tea, cake and some knock-off nylons.

One pompous the others in turn diffident, stupid, confused, insane, doddery but as a whole the boys that made you proud to be British.

Now someone has decided they must be revived, brought back out of time and context for what will, I sure, be the bafflement of the young and the profound disappointment of the old.

Yup they've only gone and remade Dad's Army for the big screen. It's doomed I tell you. Mainwaring, Wilson, Jones, Pike and the rest belong on their endless loop of 30 minute teatime specials on the small screen not on the red carpet with Catherine Zeta Jones.