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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a Labour MP and chairs the science, innovation and technology select committee
As technology sovereignty rockets up the geopolitical agenda, each minister who has come before my committee has defined it differently. My favourite definition of sovereignty, however, is that it means exactly what you want it to mean. This makes it explicit that sovereignty is a choice — something which is particularly important with regard to technology sovereignty. The key thing now is making that choice.
I am concerned that the current confusion about the decisions the UK government is making on technology undermines the security of our nation, our economy and, ultimately, our democracy because they lack a clear, underlying strategy.
The world has never in our lifetimes felt more uncertain. For the first time since I became an MP, global insecurity is an issue on the doorstep in my Newcastle constituency. At the same time the data revolution, the AI automation revolution and climate change are buffeting people, businesses, communities and institutions.
Technology is at the heart of it all, but people do not feel that it is on their side. My constituents see Big Tech as controlling our lives, not empowering us. The terms techno-feudalism and techno-serfdom may not yet be commonplaces in the pubs and playgrounds of my city, but the techlash is a proxy for it, just as Brexit was a proxy for concerns about national sovereignty. And we know how that turned out.
This time we must be honest with our constituents about what we can and cannot control, and the implications for our industrial, civil and defence policy.
Consider just one example. Last month the chancellor announced a £2bn investment in quantum computing. A week later the prime minister confirmed that we are cutting funding for nuclear physics research programmes. So is it our intention to be sovereign in quantum computing but dependent on other countries for quantum sensing, where nuclear physics is an essential prerequisite for industrial applications including in the defence industry?
Here’s another. The digital battlefield is the frontline in the wars in Ukraine and Iran. We have just handed a £240mn contract to US company Palantir to be at the heart of our digital defence. Should we understand that as meaning we do not aspire to sovereignty in defence AI or that Palantir represents shared sovereignty with the US — or that we are sticking with dependence on the US regardless of how unreliable an ally Donald Trump proves to be?
Palantir is also at the heart of government services, from the NHS and local government to financial regulation; AWS and Microsoft have 70 per cent of the UK cloud market between them. Yet we are investing £500mn in a sovereign AI unit to promote UK AI without saying what that is or at what level of the AI stack we are seeking sovereignty — nor how we can achieve it if we are reliant on a small number of US companies for our civil technology infrastructure.
Meanwhile, our supply chain dependency on China undermines our technology sovereignty from another geopolitical direction. Critical minerals are an obvious example, but as a tech geek, I am very concerned about CIMs, or the cellular “internet of things” modules that enable smart devices (think fridges or cars) to talk to each other. China controls 70 per cent of the market. Are we aiming for or abandoning CIM sovereignty?
We need answers to these questions to justify, direct and set the rules for the £20bn we spend on publicly funded R&D and the £400bn spent on publicly funded procurement every year. We need them to enable the private sector to prioritise its investment. Strategic clarity around this spending is essential because so many other actors in our tech ecosystem take their cues from it — including big companies and start-ups, universities and venture capitalists.
The UK is still a global science leader with extraordinary human capital, particularly in AI. We need to understand what we can own, control, and lead by ourselves; what we can access that is in the hands of allies we trust; and how we manage what we must obtain from those we do not trust.
Then we need the government to execute a clear strategy for technological sovereignty that rests on these understandings. I urge the government to be honest about where we are. It could start by publishing the list of sovereign capabilities and the long-overdue defence industrial plan, to demonstrate that we are not sleepwalking into technology serfdom and stop the techlash leading us to techxit.
