What are the implications for Government and public sector when customers and citizens start to use the technology in ways which cause captive tax bases to fall significantly?

If the "Global Information Society" is a genuine ideal, then a growing proportion of "high-added-value" employment opportunities can be located in the most attractive places to live, transactions "sourced" from those with the lowest sales taxes and "profits" taken in those with the most attractive corporate tax regimes.

We can see this beginning to happen as the Pacific Rim, including China, Japan and Korea, overtakes the Atlantic Rim as the main centre for the development, let alone manufacture, of ever higher valued-added products and services. Meanwhile the Indian sub-continent is beginning to strip out all the the back office and support functions which do not actually require physical contact with the customers or citizen.

Can the centralised, standardised, bureaucratised, state, largely the creation of two World Wars, which has grown remorselessly ... whichever party is in power, still fund itself at a price that the private sector can afford to pay?.

Is a bonfire of regulation, planning and control the only way of stimulating the growth in new and alternative employment that is necessary to avoid widespread social pain and disorder as traditional jobs and careers are destroyed throughout the private sector and falling tax revenues will no longer fund conventional public sector services and/or welfare schemes?

• The need for UK business to be able to compete for "high-added-value" employment opportunities which could be located anywhere in the world.

• The changes needed in the organisation and funding of education and training when village schools or home students can access multi-national teleconferences and multi-media narrowcasts and providers, including publishers, programme-makers and examining bodies, will compete world-wide for paying students and customers.

• The Intellectual Property Rights issues that have to be tackled to encourage the development and dissemination of new and converging products and services when research may be teleconferenced and/or pirated world-wide.

• The rationalisation of the growing confusion of regulatory and monitoring bureaucracies with jurisdiction over the converging technologies and services which is imposing cost and blocking innovation at almost every level.

• The growing vulnerability of large, network-dependent, centralised organisations (e.g. banks, retailers, manufacturers and the public sector) on integrated, on-line, "just-in-time" systems) to sudden and catastrophic collapse - whether from system failure, fraud or market panic.

• The social/fiscal/political issues that have to be tackled in a world where flexiworking (including direct to overseas employers) and teleshopping (e.g. world-wide e-mail-order over Internet) become the norm rather than the exception.