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I suffer from a strange sensation – as if I’m back in the nineteen seventies. A tunnel vision version of Labour are in power debating state ownership, price controls, joyfully rushing back into the swamp of ten thousand new rules dreamed up by the cash hungry Vampires of Brussels. The present contestants for Party leadership are all too young – one was not yet born – for any knowledge of those days when big unions represented workers in industries rather than public sector officials. Back then union leaders told the contemporary Labour ministers that such ideas were bunk. Eventually along came Margaret Thatcher who dragged the state by the scruff of its neck from activities better managed through private enterprise.
Meanwhile the doom mongers also are back, running down the country to hide their own incompetence. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the King reminded Starmer of their duties to Parliament because my hunch is that he did. The King’s speech did not fudge, he told Parliament how Starmer intended to cut them out of any debate when his party imported every new EU regulation going. Does that include banning or restricting AI? The reason I ask is that – thanks to Brexit – at present we have a huge advantage over the EU.
According to Fraser Nelson in The Times, last week, ‘ UK start ups raised £6 billion in venture capital in the first three months of this year: more than the next three countries combined. Money is flooding into Nscale, Wayve, ElevenLabs: American sounding names but usually with defiantly British management. Labour’s adept use of Brexit powers is part of the story.
Full control including Borders allows us to manage globalisation better.
This other Britain — the booming, world-beating one — takes us to King’s Cross, a part of London once notorious for prostitution, crime and seediness. It’s now a thriving tech campus, home to Google, OpenAI and the small army of British tech startups. One is Wayve, which recently raised £1 billion for its self-driving AI “brain” that can be installed in any car. Another is Nscale, whose data centres serve as the picks and shovels of the AI gold rush. It has raised £3 billion in the past year.
Perhaps the godfather of the new King’s Cross is DeepMind, the biggest artificial intelligence lab built outside America. It was co-founded by Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, both of them Londoners who grew up in relative poverty. The teenage Suleyman was homeless; he is now head of AI at Microsoft. Both went to Oxbridge, both flourished in a London that had become Europe’s most successful melting pot. When Google bid for DeepMind in 2014, its offer was accepted on one condition: that the company stays in Britain. In California, this seemed crazy: one of its earliest backers joked that investing in a London start up was “like investing in Somalia”. But Hassabis saw in Britain a vastly underrated country that nurtures precisely the kind of talent that companies like his most need.’Staying in Britain was a bet not so much on what he thought the country could become but on what he saw around him every day. A nation full of lively individuals rather than the stereotypes he’d seen in Silicon Valley and in Westminster. DeepMind went on to crack the biological problem of protein-folding, a triumph for which Hassabis shared the Nobel prize in chemistry. The same Silicon Valley investors who had compared London to Mogadishu are now leasing the offices either side of his. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is building a 7,000- scientist campus in Oxford, and Microsoft is building Europe’s largest AI supercomputer on a site off the M25. All this will bring plenty of high-skilled, high-pay jobs and spin offs that create far more.
Labour suffers from Tunnel Vision at the Top.
Labour used our Brexit powers by providing light-touch AI regulation. Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting want to stop all this by rejoining the EU and on its terms. I might add that the revival of Manchester began after the dreadful IRA bomb attack in 1996. Manchester City Council’s has an excellent website on the reconstruction. Burnham is taking the credit for the hard work and vision of thousands who were on the spot long before he was elected Mayor, a job he thought so little of that he gave it up. Sir Richard Leese and the late Sir Howard Bernstein are two people who stand out among all who repaired Manchester. In any case it is mainly Central Manchester which has a good growth record. The 75% of Greater Manchester outside Manchester itself has grown more slowly than the UK average over the last quarter century and only slightly better than the UK average during Burnham’s tenure. The conurbation as a whole has grown more slowly than Belfast.
The European Union regards information technology as a threat – something over which it lacks total control – so its new AI regime imposes all kinds of regulations, with fines of up to €35 million for firms that don’t comply. No wonder Europe’s IT super nerds head for London. Jensen Huang of Nvidia believes we have a “Goldilocks” moment: our regime light enough to encourage bright ideas while alert enough to keep people safe.
Fraser Nelson points out, ‘ Brexit payoffs are all around us. The time from an AI-discovered drug candidate to a patient trial is measured in months. In the EU with its stacks of regulations this takes years. DeepMind’s drug-discovery spin-off, which raised £1.6 billion this month. British hospitals can pilot AI cancer screening tools through the UK’s fast track system. There’s no EU equivalent. Wayve’s self-driving cars were on British streets years before the EU agreed a common framework for testing such technology.’
That’s also exactly what Kemi Badenoch keeps urging – Brexit allows us to create a new competitive framework of rules. I would add only that we need a task force scrapping EU rules at speed. Replace some when that makes common sense. Allow our economy to take a deep breath and grow.
Adrian Hill is a former Army officer and diplomat who has known and worked with key political figures over his long career. This piece is based around a notable article by Fraser Nelson in the Times May 23rd.
