AI will be transformative – providing the government’s approach is the right one. Fat hope of that, says JAMES McNEILL, the SDP’s 2024 general electrion candidate for Calder Valley.
Keir Starmer recently unveiled Labour’s AI strategy, based on the government’s response to the AI Opportunities Action Plan. Labour’s strategy is reminiscent of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger co-operation between government, business and education, which successfully kickstarted Ireland’s software industry and placed Ireland as the favoured European location for international investment in software development. Will Labour manage to pull off the same trick? Unfortunately, their built-in attitudes are likely to sabotage their own strategy for several reasons
The Social Market
The strategy recognises that success will depend on successful co-operation between government, business and education, in a manner that will be familiar to SDP members from our Social Market perspective. The document mentions public-private partnerships throughout. Although Labour will hopefully avoid the larcenous excesses of the Conservatives (particularly with the PPE scandal), its own history of saddling the NHS with disastrous PFI contracts under Gordon Brown, and its anti-business budget since returning to power, leave little to inspire optimism.
Regional Investment and Development
Labour has launched no significant initiatives to address regional inequalities in investment and development since coming to power in July 2024, and their AI strategy continues in the same vein. The only locations mentioned outside the south of England are pre-existing projects in Liverpool, where Kyndryl Holdings were already planning a hub; Wales, where Vantage Data Centres were already planned to allocate funds for some data sites; and Edinburgh University, where it is planned to extend the Archer2 resource, but only till 2026. It is probable that Labour will be even worse for the regions than the Conservatives, whose fig leaf attempts when they remembered they had a Levelling Up policy were more embarrassing than effective.
There seems to be no chance of this Labour administration taking a determined approach to dealing with the structural damage that has been inflicted on the UK by subsidising the South East to the detriment of the rest of the country. Primary industrial development like AI requires regional clusters of human skill and compute power, for example Glasgow-Edinburgh-Newcastle, Manchester-Leeds-Sheffield or the Birmingham conurbation, not random investments peppered across the country.
Recruitment
And it gets worse. The dead hand of The Blob is evident in the commitment to “drive greater diversity across the AI talent pool”. This is exactly what happened with the Conservatives’ dismal National Cyber Security Council, when civil service careerists got their way and insisted, with no empirical evidence, that the nation’s information resources were best protected by making sure that cyber specialists were hired depending on their sex or their ethnicity, rather than on their ability to do the job.
It is not the responsibility of commerce or public services to counterbalance the asymmetric take-up of STEM studies in education by discriminating against the people who have developed their skills to be the best in the job market. This will only deliver sub-optimal services and products in a hyper competitive arena, and will not give Britain a global lead in anything, let alone AI.
Their strategy is also to recruit from abroad. While it would be sensible to tempt world leaders in AI to Britain, Labour has a history of hiring foreign talent at the expense of the UK workforce, and its domestic plan is just to upskill the workforce and teach young people. Doubtless we need to teach people what is possible with the datasets available, how to frame questions to AI (“prompt engineering”), and how to evaluate the results, but this will not make us world leaders in AI. If you want a career in AI, start by studying for an appropriate degree. The strategy makes the same mistake as the National Cyber Security Council’s keenness for apprenticeships and for the same reason: the mandarins fail to understand that cybersecurity and AI are engineering disciplines and need people who have relevant qualifications and experience. We should be cross-training from other IT areas and reaching out to expatriates to persuade them to come home, rejoin their families and communities, and bring their children up in their own culture.
Privacy and Regulation
Finally, the strategy appreciates that Britain is in a sweet spot with regards to privacy and regulation. The EU has actually created a decent piece of legislation in the EU AI Act, with the intention of not repeating the mistakes of the GDPR and leaning too heavily to abstract individual legal rights at the expense of our access to services and products. However, being the EU they have no chance of facing down the individual states and regions all desperate to be seen to be the foremost in standing up to Big AI. Max Schrems is going to have a field day.
In the US, the tech giants have all drawn up “Responsible AI” guidelines, to keep their own regulators off their backs and to sell into the European market. Their history with the EU means that is liable to face severe roadblocks, and in an ideal world Britain could take the lead with Privacy rules approved by the EU and government datasets managed and shared with business in a pragmatic and transparent manner.
However, given that many Labour stalwarts cut their eye teeth with Grievance Lawyers 4 U, it is far more likely that they will spend their time sniping and cavilling at successful businesses until they decide to relocate to a more profitable environment. This on top of Labour’s tendency to put jobsworths in place to trip up and delay innovation means that any regulatory advantage we might have had is likely to fall at the first fence.
I very much wish these things were not the case. Britain’s ingenuity, democracy and hard graft launched the first industrial revolution, and we are in a unique position to benefit from the Industry 4.0 of AI. The AI Opportunities Action Plan has many good proposals, well-judged to give Britain a lead at a critical juncture. Yet Labour’s default settings are likely to ensure their AI strategy comes to naught:
They fail to comprehend the Social Market.
Their centralist command and control mindset will not utilize skills across the country.
They will force second-raters onto British firms, in an intensely competitive global marketplace.
Their failure to understand that AI is an engineering discipline means that precious time will be squandered in mentoring and apprenticeships of dubious merit.
They will put immigration above education in building the workforce.
Ambulance chasing court cases, and bureaucratic checks and delays on innovative business, will be the death knell for any chance we may have had for benefiting from our datasets and legislative environment.
We could have been in with a chance, but not with this government.
