UK government tech policy must become libertarian, writes Preston Byrne.
The government wants to boss tech companies around, but it might not get its way any more, because the market is small, tech companies are mobile, and:
…the permanent bureaucracy in the United States which might otherwise have helped the UK apply informal pressure on Americans who dared to disobey its decryption and censorship edicts – none of which, it bears mentioning, are enforceable against an American who refuses them and is happy to avoid setting foot in British territory – is gone.
We should adapt.
If the UK chooses to be the worst place for an AI company, or a social media company, or a digital asset company to incorporate and do business, it will find that it has very few such companies. Regardless of your opinions on how British society should be structured, the NHS, immigration, or the appropriate quantum of social welfare, if you don’t have high tech employers generating revenues and paying taxes, social programs become very difficult to pay for.
Will we get a government capable of making this realisation? Or will we continue to self-destruct?
Both Tories & Labour (blue & red cheeks of the same arse) are utterly incapable of making that realisation, and that will not change & it does not matter a damn who the leaders of those parties are.
Either Reform wins the next election or we’re past the point of no return, assuming we’re not already.
Short answer, no.
The longer answer is that the Government and Civil Service believe as a matter of principle that nothing can exist or be allowed unless it is permitted by Government decree and micromanaged by the Civil Service under many laws, decrees and suchlike regulations.
As neither the people in Government nor the Civil Service have any knowledge, experience or understanding of technology or how to run anything, including the proverbial whelk/lemonade stand, then the whole process will have the engine of a lawnmower and the brakes of a 60 ton truck.
In other words, there are a lot of factors working to stop the concept and naff all to push it through the layers of entrenched bureaucracy and attitudes.
Will we get a government capable of making this realisation? Or will we continue to self-destruct?
Of course not. The only positive you have are your universities which have often been at the forefront of technological invention. I’m not living in the UK these days, but I’m guessing they are probably pissing in that pot too. And even so, the theory of technological innovation is that the universities invent it then spin it off into a company for commercial development. Given how hard it is to just plain run a company in the UK, never mind the overburden of technological regulation, it sure seems easier to hop a plane to America with your designs and patents in your briefcase.
Of course, the fact that the best place for this, California, also seems focused on its own destruction (including being literally consumed by the fires of hell) perhaps Shanghai, or Dubai or Singapore are a better choices. Though they are all a bit to boiling hot in the summer for some English ex professor to bear.
Or Texas. I hear Musk has started a bit of an exodus there. Gotta love that guy.
It’s very early days for that pronouncement. The judges have not yet begun to fight. The Democrats are still shocked and awed.
These few weeks have been entertaining as heck, but I suspect it’s going to turn into a long slow slog soon. The ‘crats and their church aren’t going to just roll over, and they have always been very good at defensive fighting.
So many of the British government’s problems are caused by other problems entirely of their own making. Today, we’re talking about government eavesdropping on the conversations of private citizens.
And, pray, why might they feel the need to do that? Well, it’s probably because the government has spent the last 50 years importing a terrorist-sympathising minority who hate us and all that we stand for.
And, were you to ask a terrorist why they hate us, they’d tell you it was Iraq or Afghanistan or some other blunder has been foisted upon us by our own half-wit politicians.
The UK birthed the Industrial Revolution and the Luddite movement.
The UK elite by default prefers the Luddite movement, always been the case, always will be the case.
The government is not sufficiently intelligent to make the realisation, managed decline is the future for the UK.
There are occasional splashes of hope – for example the statement of Prime Minister Starmer that the regulations holding back the building of modular nuclear reactors are to be rolled back.
Without less expensive energy the United Kingdom is dead – and I mean the word DEAD.
However, the overall position – the worthless currency (yes Paul is attacking fiat-whim “money” again), the Credit Bubble financial system, the crippling levels of government spending and taxation, the endless regulations, especially in the labour market – where regulations are dressed up as ever increasing “employment rights” whose function is to destroy jobs and make people “economically inactive”, and the general decay of the culture (of society) into crime and uncaring decline, means that the British “tech industry”, and the United Kingdom generally, does not have a good future to look forward to.
The poison of modern political and cultural doctrines is even seeping into the elite universities, such as Cambridge, which the “tech industry” has historically recruited from.
The only positive you have are your universities which have often been at the forefront of technological invention
We are educating over a quarter of a million foreign students, mainly from countries that are our technological competitors.
That technological innovation isn’t staying here.
@bobby b
It’s very early days for that pronouncement. The judges have not yet begun to fight. The Democrats are still shocked and awed.
TBH, I’m also a bit shocked and awed myself. I think this seems to be the first serious attempt to reduce the federal government and bring some semblance of sanity back in a very long time, maybe even for the first time since Andrew Jackson paid down the debt to zero. Will it work? I don’t know. In some limited way, though not enough probably. But I have been utterly flabbergasted by Trump over and over again. The fact that he is President in itself is just simply unbelievable given his route here, and the energy with which he and his team has approached it is just jaw dropping. So who am I to say?
But the federal government will fight for its survival. One need only look at the canary in the coal mine — USAID, which may be one of the most corrupt agencies in the history of the US government. Even the name is a lie — it is designed to make you think of US Aid, sending food to the hungry and medicine to the sick. But is the actually USA International Development — which is to say USA’s corrupting influence on foreign governments and trying to organize coup d’états in states where they want a different leadership. I’d recommend this interview by Carlson with Mike Benz who knows USAID very well. I think he is very wrong about a lot of things, including getting Friedman’s “I Pencil” story backward (it is a story about how international trade arises from the invisible hand of the free market, and somehow Benz thinks it is telling us that the government has to interfere everywhere to make the market work.) However, although I think he is wrong about solutions, he sure does have some interesting things to say about the problems. It isn’t about transexual operas in Ireland, it is about a deeply corrupt agency who, to quote Benz: if a job is too dirty for the CIA they get USAID to do it.
So if we see this much fuss about what is basically a criminal agency under the federal government, what is it going to be like if the try to shut down the DoE? Next up? Another deeply corrupt agency the SBA. Can you imagine what is going to happen if they audit the Fed or the DoD?
But I truly wonder. The left does not seem to be very discriminating in the case they are making. When the truth comes out about these agencies are they REALLY going to defend them? Are they really going to go all “This is the end of democracy” when Holman is deporting mass murderers, rapists and destroying criminal gangs? 79% of the American public supports mass deportations. 79%? You can’t get 79% of Americans to agree that puppies are cute and that ice cream is a tasty treat on a summer day. Are they so insulated in their bubble that they will just further poison themselves in the eyes of the public?
Right now the future is opaque. I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen next. Every news cycle my jaw just drops wide open. And can we all agree that Karoline Leavitt is just remarkable? I know 27 year olds that can barely hold down a minimum wage job, and here is this gal wiping the floor with the snarky, narcissistic, self righteous international press corps.
Well the good thing, purely from my individual perspective, is the DOGE rampage might lead to an effective States Rights position in the end.
Which may further lead to the reconstruction of a Democratic-Republican centre.
The UK needs a Trump movement.
Regarding USAID shut down, our prime doofus has made the noble claim that the UK, as the junior partner in foreign aid disbursement, will step up to make up the short fall.
Proudly declaring you’re a common partner in what is fast being revealed as a corrupt gravy train for rich elites is not going to have the effect he thinks it will.
Aside from the USAID revelations we also discover several UK related stories
* the BBC, not content with fleecing UK taxpayers is also conning $3 million from US taxpayers as well
* a Mr D Milliband, brother of Red Ed, is the recipient of a cool million a year salary as head of International Rescue, a well named puppet organisation of USAID
* a Mr N Clegg has stepped away from Meta as director of global affairs, no doubt his “liberal” administration of mass censorship is no longer required in light of his boss now will to suck up to Trump & Co
Rots from the head down.
To answer the headline question, just look at what their plans for tech are, in order to see whether they understand it:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/02/were-closing-the-loopholes-that-allow-paedophiles-to-use-ai-to-sexually-abuse-children
The answer is clearly ‘No’.
Frasor Orr – the last American President to dramatically reduce government spending, and roll back government attacks on Civil Liberties, was Warren Harding (a century ago), that (not “corruption” – the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations were vastly more corrupt, and the establishment could not care less) is the real reason the establishment (including the education system) hate him.
For Britain you have to go back rather further – the last British Prime Minister to really roll back the state was Lord Liverpool (two centuries ago). Even after the First World War, although military spending was indeed dramatically reduced, there was no real effort to reduce the non military aspects of the state in 1920s Britain.
Many people will say “what about Margaret Thatcher?” – but, overall (including sales tax – VAT), taxes and government spending did not fall under Prime Minister Thatcher, and after 1986 European Union regulations started to flow in, as the government had given up its veto.
However, although, after Lord Liverpool, government spending was not reduced in Britain – as a proportion of the economy government spending fell (due to economic growth), the low point (for national government spending as a proportion of the economy) was 1874 – oddly enough the year Winston Churchill was born.
As Kettering (where I am sitting) did not have much local government in those days (for example it had no School Board – till they were made compulsory in 1891) the overall low point of statism (national and local) in my home town was also 1874 – then we get such things as the Disraeli Acts of 1875 (mandating that local councils do about 40 things – whether the taxpayers approve or not) and the Act putting unions (partly) above the law on such things as obstruction (“picketing”) – this Act might as well have been called the “Unemployment Creation Act” (see W.H. Hutt “The Strike Threat System”) – the Act of 1906 made the situation vastly worse.
Driving across New Mexico last night, listening to an NPR group discussion about the current situation.
The consensus:
1. It’s all performative. This looks bad, but nothing will really be accomplished. He’s just amping up the base.
2. Don’t worry, anything that might be bad is being handled. The lawsuit papers are being drafted and filed as we speak. The judges will protect us. There is a plan, people, so don’t worry!
3. Most important thing we can do right now is self-care. Stop watching the news for a bit, try some nice tea, maybe call a trans friend and comfort them.
This all tells me they have no idea what to do.
bobby b – excellent Sir, excellent.
“Can the UK have a tech industry?”
At the moment, following three-quarters of a century of government interference, we apparently cannot even have a steel industry. So that would be “no”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c75z9925lelo
I would categorise e-bikes as tech. As you can see from this article the bbc is unsure whether tariffs are bad or good (unless they’re Orange Man tariffs).
This comment from the UK manufacturer is a classic of its type:-
“What’s the benefit? I don’t see any. The government are saying there’ll be savings for the UK consumer, but for years we’ve been pushing government to put through alternative savings like grants and subsidies for customers.”
I agree with Barbarus but for a different reason. The answer is ‘no we can’t have a tech industry’ because we don’t have enough electricity and what we do have is too expensive. One of my sons works in this area and his company, although based in the UK, uses servers in the USA particularly for AI.
I would guess that the UK folding e-bike people sent a nice . . . gift . . . to the government people for Christmas, while the non-folding types forgot.
(Just another situation where tariffs are bad because they’re keeping the globalist types from reducing all of us, equally, to the standard of living of a 25-year-old Pakistani brickmaker. That’s what a global economy really means.
Maybe we don’t WANT to share our riches with all and sundry.)
Yet Another Chris – that is why the British government saying that they will roll back the regulations preventing the building of modular nuclear reactors is the one splash of good news there is in relation to Britain.
Without less expensive energy, Britain is dead – and I mean dead.
We import food and raw materials so we must export manufactured goods (those people who say “what about The City!” at this point are deluded – one can not base an economy of tens of million of human beings on playing with Credit Bubbles and hoping the bubbles do not burst, which the bubbles, eventually, always will).
To produce enough manufactured goods we must have less, much less, expensive energy.
Or we are dead.
A bunch of lawyers, (anti)social “science” graduates and DEI drones spearheading an industrial revolution makes the Children’s Crusade look like a good idea.
They should be sent to Gaza to fill in the Hamas underground with the rubble. Or their own corpses. Either is fine with me.
NickM – if these lawyers, and other such, really do get a lot of modular nuclear power stations built quickly, then I will praise them.
And if they do not – then we are all dead in this country.
Paul,
They wont. Not for the UK anyway. Or anywhere else the Greens aren’t understood for what they really are. This is well worth reading. The modular reactors might be exported to developing nations but that’s as far as it’s likely to go unless people really start grasping how evil the Green agenda is and stop thinking of them as at worst busy-body do-gooders. They aren’t that any more Lenin was a “Tanner on the Pay and an Hour off the Day” kinda shop-steward. The Greens are thoroughly evil, atavistic, despotic. Yes, they can seem merely meddlesome ratbags but they are much worse than that. I mean qualitatively worse – it is not a matter of degree but of kind.
NickM – as you know C.P. Snow had a dodgy political stance, but he was correct that people making decisions either had to have scientific knowledge themselves, or access to a wide range of advisers (of different opinions) who did, remember how the first Trump Administration was captured by despicable “scientific advisers” such as Tony Fauci, because they (Fauci and the others) controlled the government machine, this time President Trump has acted to make sure that scientists with different opinions also have important positions.
As for the Greens and their anti nuclear stance – well then the United Kingdom will die, the matter is that serious. We desperately need those modular nuclear reactors – and we need them now.
I have a theory that the CND hippies, who protested nuclear power on the grounds they are used for nukes, found themselves out of a job once the Berlin Wall came down, and migrated to the enviro-fascists taking their stone age policies with them.
It’s very early days for that pronouncement. The judges have not yet begun to fight. The Democrats are still shocked and awed.
Trump administration, as laid out by Kurt Schlichter and Ron Coleman, want an early legal fight and want it to be on legally dubious rulings by jurisdiction hopping DNC activists. It forces the hand of the Supreme Court to make an early decision and there is confidence, I think rightly, that any such decision will go in the Administrations favor.