Let’s take Burnham’s start point that he wants to “end 40 years of neo-liberalism”, which he says has “siphoned wealth” out of northern communities, citing disasters such as rail and water privatisation.
This process of siphoning wealth from government and the economy is nowhere more alive than the digital sector. This is well-understood on the left and the right of politics. The last Conservative administration attempted to address deep dysfunction with IT providers to the state, in a series of policies starting with the creation of Government Digital Services, and including a failed attempt in 2016 to remove Capgemini, Fujitsu and BT from the Aspire contract that delivers the back end of the UK’s tax system. Contracts for these services currently extend to 2027.
There is a consensus that AWS and Microsoft have been ripping off both British businesses and the government to the tune of hundreds of millions of inflated cloud charges, according to investigations by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The difficulty of taxing companies like Amazon and Uber is also well understood. There is widespread knowledge that US multinationals are using tax efficiency measures to ensure that they do not pay their way towards the maintenance of basic state functions. Such companies, many of them being tech giants, now occupy a very large part of our economy, as detailed in Vassal State; whose author, Angus Hanton, can hardly be accused of being a radical leftist.
At this basic level, the idea of pursuing greater digital sovereignty, and building the UK’s domestic tech sector, especially through choosing open source state infrastructure, is a plain easy win. The ideas do not belong to the left or the right, they are simply necessary to avoid depletion of the UK’s state and economy.
Governments of left and right across the EU are building back their state capacity to supervise and build software systems that they own and control. By using open source, they share resources, just like the tech giants do. By ensuring state leadership, through internal experts such as ZenDis in Germany, or DINUM in France, the state is able to manage contractors and own what they build, rather than allowing consultancies to be the experts and contractors owning software systems.
Companies like Palantir are a disaster from the perspective of autonomy and sovereignty. They aim to own the infrastructure and control government systems. Contracts with Palantir should be exited as fast as possible, as happened recently with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, which developed their own open source replacement system for supporting Ukrainian refugees, noting that:
“We delivered Share on time in September 2025 and exited our contract with our supplier. Moving to this in-house model is already saving MHCLG millions of pounds a year in running costs”.
The NHS should be given the capacity to manage federated data systems itself. There are already multiple open source products that federate data for governments, and Manchester’s NHS have delivered their own federated data system for their region. That’s Manchesterism in action. This is not an impossible task.
The Starmer government had taken the view that to attract billions of US investment in data centres and AI, they should hold back the regulators. The ICO was given duties to balance rights and business growth, while the CMA was given a “strategic steer” to avoid doing things that could dissuade monopolists from investing. That is, to go easy on market abuse.
The CMA could take action to reduce the payments Apple force on UK app developers, to reduce the fees that Microsoft force companies to pay when deploying their software on competitors’ cloud products, and to reduce or remove “egress” (data export) fees when switching cloud provider. UK business throughout the economy would benefit from CMA action to increase cloud competition and reduce excessive charges.
The ICO’s failure to regulate both the private sector and government has been disastrous for the most vulnerable in our society. We have been tracking the ICO’s work on eVisas, which is a scheme that keeps denying people access to services, jobs and even entry to the UK, despite people having the right to live and work in the UK. The ICO, as with many other problems at government, has not taken action.
The UK lacks safeguards for the use of AI. There is no legal framework that makes sure that public or private sector use of AI does not breach our human rights and dignity. Yet biased and inaccurate decisions are a natural feature of technologies that are statistical and correlative in nature.
Regulation of AI was a Labour manifesto pledge, which curiously disappeared in the face of lobbing and trade agreements with the US. But it remains necessary. As AI is increasingly used in benefits, policing and borders, government and society needs to know whether it is actually safe. Without a legal framework, government will continue to deploy ill-judged systems like employing AI in immigration decision summaries, expanding facial recognition and rolling out predictive policing tech that targets and criminalises whole communities. These are technologies that cause real harms to real people, in the name of alleged (rather expensive) efficiency.
The Home Office’s approach of creating hostility to migrants has had a deep and lasting impact on UK politics. It has fuelled the politics of hate. As we discuss in a forthcoming report, borders and migration policy is being digitised in a manner which is dehumanising, and creates systemic rights violations, by treating the most vulnerable people as potential threats. These changes are fuelling an AI and border surveillance industry that is dependent on political hostility to migrants. Simultaneously, the UK’s foreign and climate policy risks increasing the instability that pushes people to migrate. The UK needs to take a holistic view of migration, and stop targeting refugees and migrants.
It is still unclear why digital ID is government policy, or what it would really deliver. Digital ID appears to have been promoted because of the personal desires of Tony Blair, combined with the illusion that it could help with evasion of work permits. In our view, Digital ID remains a solution in search of a problem, that threatens to poison the next Labour prime minister’s relationship with the public. Combined with AI, Digital ID could be used to limit access to public services and automate decisions using AI; a recipe for reinforcing systemic discrimination.
There is a lot of understandable pressure within Labour to make the online world safer for children. There ought to be a bigger discussion about the concentration of informational power in social media tech giants and AI companies.
However, as we outlined in our blog, safety policies keep falling flat because they are working against the grain of the social media attention economy. So far, safety measures have punished users rather than big tech. An under 16s ban on access to social media illustrates this: it is children, rather than big tech, that will impacted by a ban.
We need to tackle the power of social media directly, by empowering users to control the information they receive, and by building pro-social social media, like BlueSky and Mastodon. As a first step, government and Labour politicians should publish to these networks, so that voters and residents are not forced to use X or Facebook to receive government social media updates.
Social media companies that are undermining UK democracy continue to be funded by the UK government, through advertising. The next administration should shift government advertising budgets to local news sites, rather than funding Meta and Google.
As noted in our Digital Sovereignty report and our blog discussion of social media policy, the UK government say they promote systemic policy analysis, to understand the complicated interactions that take place in difficult areas of policy, using ‘systems thinking’ and ‘futures thinking’. This is exactly what is needed, so that we can have grown up policy discussions. However, little of this work seems to reach the public domain. Government needs to set out its understanding and analysis of the digital policy landscape.
There is no doubt that changes to digital policy and economics are difficult. However they are fundamental in the current political situation. Our suggestions do not require breaking manifesto commitments, but would contribute to a reset of the UK economy and society, in favour of the UK economy and better value in government spending, improving social balance and protecting our democracy.
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