The uneasy relationship between invention and leftwing politics | Letters

I fear Zoe Williams has set Labour an impossible task with her admonition (The future's at stake: the left must show it could create an iPad, 23 November). As we already have Apple's iPad, what should John McDonnell's socialist innovators set their sights on inventing? Nobody knew there was a demand for iPads before they were invented. Similarly, if we go further back into history, there was no demand for telephones or televisions or aeroplanes before each of these were invented.

Innovation rarely, if ever, answers some perceived social or political need. What the political system does influence is the way in which innovation is exploited and, as I illustrate in my book Eureka: How Invention Happens (Yale, 2015), the lesson of history is that technological creativity thrives best in a free market. McDonnell's ill-judged slogan "socialism with an iPad" will only reinforce the widely held view that leftwing politics and innovation are incompatible.
Gavin Weightman
London