Tech Week is an opportunity to celebrate London and the city’s strongest urge: competition

It’s more than a little tempting to think that nothing is working very well in the UK at the moment. Anyone with tickets to the Rolling Stones or cricket at Headingley next week will face a train strike, families looking to take a well-deserved break will need to take a week’s supplies with them just to get through security and on Phone to Go Every customer service representative feels like Sisyphus.

So it’s a job well done that Tech Week – the capital’s celebration of all things digital – reminds us that despite the best efforts of our government and our unions, London still has a unique ability to embrace new technologies and businesses at a dizzying pace to develop .

At the heart of London’s technological success, despite its image, is cut-throat competition. A CEO of a public company told a City AM reporter last week that London is the best place in the world because it’s the most competitive place in the world, and along with New York, he may well be right.

The tech scene is perhaps so successful because the competition is so fierce and because the risk appetite and especially the potential reward for investors is there.

Move fast and break things was a famous slogan of the original online disruptor Google, but many of Britain’s best new companies live and breathe the same ethos.

And best of all, new, digitally-enabled entrants are making our older businesses better. Insurance startups are forcing established players to up their game. Fintechs disrupting cross-border payments have forced our largest lenders to become more flexible. Even technology-enabled retail investment platforms have forced stockbrokers and analysts to raise standards. This week celebrates the best of the UK economy – innovative, competitive and ultimately for not just founders and investors, but consumers too.

If tech companies could focus on air and rail travel next, we’d have something different to celebrate.