Britain's Big Tech problem

The essence of a banana republic is that the state has the legal form of a republic but substantive power resides elsewhere, in the hands of American corporations backed by a US state that considers the banana republic part of its sphere of influence. A question for the UK today is the extent to which its relations with American Big Tech are falling into this pattern. We have the laws and institutions of a sovereign nation but market, politics and state are so deeply penetrated by Big Tech that it’s not clear how much sovereignty is left.

This ambiguity can be seen in recent developments. On the one hand, for the first time since the 1970s the UK has an industrial strategy that provides for hands on intervention in the market. Alongside that, ministers have talked of the importance of retaining firms to maturity so that jobs can accumulate and get spread around the country. And the machinery of government is being set in motion to this end; for example, at Innovate UK, the new chief executive is reorganising into programmes based on the industrial sub-sectors identified in the strategy. Although still far from having any commercial impact, this shift towards a developmental state is a potential threat to the kill zones Big Tech maintains around its monopolistic ecosystems.

At the same time, Keir Starmer’s reshuffle saw a significant dissolving of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. With the exception Kanishka Narayan, who I last saw vigorously opposing the idea of national champions, all the ministers of state now have dual responsibilities. For social democrats who favour a developmental state this dissolving makes sense since there is little sense in having DSIT as a department distinct from that charged with industrial strategy.

On the other hand, Big Tech strengthened its position at the Cabinet table in the reshuffle through its alliance with Tony Blair, the Tony Blair Institute and Blairite MPs. Liz Kendall took over Peter Kyle’s post at DSIT while Kyle was moved up to the Department of Business of Trade. It is hard now to think of a touch point for Big Tech with the UK state that does not fall under the auspices of the Blairites. Concerns about Big Tech monopolies? Regulation of social media? Penetration of government and public services? All now fall to Big Tech’s allies.

These substantive moves were accompanied by Big Tech-friendly mood music. Before he was removed as the UK’s ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson delivered a speech oozing in sympathy. And when Donald Trump visited, Starmer lauded investments in data centres being made in the UK by Big Tech.

The goal, as ever, was to paint Big Tech as ally in the UK’s quest for growth, but is it? Unfortunately, the investments lauded by Starmer seem to be simply what is necessary to supply the services Big Tech plans to sell in the UK over the coming years. The pre-announcement briefing talked of sovereign AI capability, but in the aftermath it’s very hard to see where the sovereignty lies. In the Financial Times, Tim Wu, a Columbia professor who worked on tech policy in the Biden White House, warned that the UK risked becoming the Nebraska of AI – devoid of a native tech industry. Nick Clegg, in a repulsive but telling coinage, called the data centres “sloppy seconds”.

The alliance between Big Tech and the Blairites is centred on the Tony Blair Institute, where Oracle’s Larry Ellison has now committed funding of close to $400 million. Its conceptual foundation however is the TBI publication A New National Purpose, which has generated more than 100 tech-friendly policy papers. This programme is often described as techno-optimistic and as such it can seem to be just another turn of Blair’s modernising, depoliticising populism. At heart however A New National Purpose is a right accelerationist text. As in the dark enlightenment thinking of Silicon Valley favourites Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, the goal is explicitly stated to be to “make technology our new national purpose”. Human sympathy and solidarity are to be driven out of politics, this time not by Conservative values but by the fetishisation of technology.

A New National Purpose was co-authored by Blair and William Hague and has crystallised an alliance that also includes those close to Hague in the Conservative Party. The importance of this alliance, which I have called Thatcherism 3.0, is accentuated when one considers the political fortunes of the Silicon Valley and Conservative partners.

Via his son, Ellison has bought Paramount Global, a sprawling empire of channels that gives him control of Channel 5 and CBS. His long-time partners in private equity, RedBird Capital, are buying the Telegraph group of newspapers. He is widely reported to be taking control of TikTok in the US. Like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, he is taking control of influential media properties and thus, in classic oligarch style, putting himself in a position to shape public debate and bend politicians to his will – both in the US and the UK.

In the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch is continuing her march away from the neoliberalism of David Cameron towards the populism of Nigel Farage. The most divisive issue for her party is turning out to be not the European Convention on Human Rights but the Climate Change Act of 2008, a cross-party agreement she seems set on resiling from. Hague and Theresa May, both sympathetic to ECHR withdrawal, have denounced the climate moves.

Meanwhile, on a weekend when Russian drones tested European air defences, the desire of another Big Tech oligarch to intervene in UK politics was on display at the far-right rally led by Tommy Robinson. Elon Musk appeared by video to deliver a speech dripping with desire for violence in front of a crowd created and energised via his social media platform, X.

In the sprawling online space where today’s politics happens, there is a three-cornered fight for UK leadership of the virulent mass of right-wing social media influencers between Badenoch, Farage and a truly extreme dimension that includes Musk, Robinson and Rupert Lowe. If this eventually results in a split in the Conservative Party, Hague, May and the rest of the Cameron-era neoliberals will need Ellison’s money and media leverage more than ever.

Anneliese Dodds’ delivered a sombre speech last month highlighting the growing importance in the UK’s domestic politics of Big Tech and the tech bros who control it*. To me, it feels like the most substantive intervention on this topic by any Labour MP in this Parliament. Those lucky enough to hear it will not easily forget her closing line: “The choice is social democracy or the bros.”

If so, the choice is not going to get made any time soon, for the ultimate source of the ambiguity in the UK’s relations with Big Tech is the coalitional character of Starmer’s government, including as it does both social democrats and the bros’ allies, the Blairites.

 William Cullerne Bown has been writing about the politics of science and technology for 40 years and was the Labour Agent in Hampstead & Highgate 1987-1992. His writing can be found at https://williamcullernebown.substack.com. 

*Anneliese Dodds’ inaugural Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture will be published in a future issue of Renewal.