Barring an asteroid, Keir Starmer will be UK Prime Minister in three days. Given that he is leading in the polls, I would probably bet on him over an asteroid too.
Labour will come into office with a bankrupt state, a stagnant economy and no money. A weak manifesto and a huge parliamentary majority mean the party will almost certainly end up scrambling for ideas to deal with this infernal trilemma.
So let’s try to offer something.
Free our data
Back in March 2006, when the Guardian’s technology section was a physical supplement to the Thursday paper, we ran a campaign to “free our data”. We wrote about government-sanctioned agencies such as Ordnance Survey, the UK Hydrographic Office and the Highways Agency collecting data on our behalf. We asked: “Why can’t we access that data as easily as we can with Google Maps?”
The campaign had, in the following years, mixed success. Across the public sector, a new norm was created that government data should be made available to the public where possible. It almost certainly influenced the direction of the gov.uk project, putting open data at the heart of the state’s digital footprint and giving a glimpse into high-level data. data.gov.uk The website shows how much work has been done to that end.
Someone born on the day that campaign launched will be voting for the first time on Thursday. Yet some of the most valuable pieces of our digital infrastructure are still locked away, behind restrictive terms or costly paywalls.
The Postcode Address File is one example. It contains 1.8 million postcodes and almost 30 million postal addresses and is the basis for how we navigate the country. It was privatised along with Royal Mail but remains tightly controlled by the state, with access charges regulated by Ofcom and an exclusive licence for the public sector to use it at a fixed cost.
Freeing our data is the right thing to do, but successive governments have seen it as expensive – giving up a valuable source of revenue in the name of abstract concepts. But a Labour party seeking growth and renewal of the state in the years ahead should recognise that if a government dataset is valuable enough to be worth charging for, it is even more valuable if it can be developed, improved and reused.
Similarly, much of the data that has been made public over the past two decades has been released under non-commercial licenses. The public is naturally apprehensive about changes that could be construed as “selling our data,” but offering state data for free to amateurs and charging a license for commercial use is the worst of both worlds: the data is still sold, but the only companies able to extract a commercial advantage from it are those already large enough to pay the fees.
There’s more to this shift than the nebulous promise of economic growth: there’s also the simple fact that government data is very good, and that removing the mundane hassles from people’s lives helps. I speak from experience: my flat was built in 2020, and for the first year I lived there, I was functionally invisible to most e-commerce businesses. Those who had paid a fortune to obtain a PAF licence could deliver to my home; everyone else had to call and beg for directions, while waiting for the changes to propagate through various inferior free databases that provide the same information.
Like Nixon on his trip to China, a Labour government at the height of its popularity may be the only one capable of convincing the British people to make such a change: to free up our data, boost growth and remove friction from our daily lives.
… Even medical things
It is worth bringing this into the open, because it is far more controversial than simply offering access to Ordnance Survey maps. England’s National Health Service (NHS) is one of the largest unitary healthcare providers in the world. Its pursuit of clinical excellence is respected around the world, even after 14 years of misgovernance, and its partnership with researchers across the country is essential.
Pharmacology is on the verge of a revolution. Vaccine development was brought forward a decade by the race to protect against COVID-19, and mRNA vaccines that can defeat the next pandemic before it starts are the next frontier. Gene therapy has gone from science fiction to dangerous experiment to reality of life, and rare genetic diseases can now be permanently cured with a single personalized medicine treatment. The cost of genetic sequencing continues to fall, making it possible to diagnose these same diseases at birth rather than years later when symptoms are damaging and permanent.
The NHS should be at the forefront of such research. For many types of genetic disorders, involving a single base pair mutation, a cure already exists in theory, but the practical realities of creating, testing and certifying it are beyond the reach of private industry.
Yet a disease that affects one in a million children appears in the UK once every 18 months. If genetic testing was offered free at birth and a government able to consider the long-term costs, treatment could be offered to every single one of them.
Not only is it the right thing to do, it also helps the country as a whole. A £1 million, or even £10 million, project to treat a genetic disease in a single child is nothing compared to the cost of supporting someone who can live their life with a profound disability.
And the cure need not stay in the UK. A very different kind of medical success, semaglutide, has been so successful that it has transformed the Danish economy. The drug, sold under names such as Ozempic and Wegovy, was developed by Novo Nordisk. By 2022, two-thirds of the country’s economic growth was due to the pharmaceutical industry, essentially due to its phenomenal popularity.
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Cracking down on big tech
The groundwork has already been laid for the Digital Markets Unit, the arm of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) charged with enforcing the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that serves as the UK equivalent of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. But the next Secretary of State still has leeway in judging exactly how it will be enforced.
One of the first things Labour will need to do is to send formal instructions to the CMA to set that process in motion. Doing so as a priority in the summer would be valuable, because European experience shows that much of the response to competition enforcement is to delay action; equally important are the peculiarities of the wording of those ministerial instructions that will set the tone for the next few years of wrangling.
The key word in all those weighty names above is “markets”. The focus of this legislation, in the UK and the EU, has been on the aspects of big tech companies that distort the free market. There are companies that cannot exist because the way the App Store, Amazon Marketplace or WhatsApp work prevents them from doing so. The arguments of these companies are invariably that the limits they impose are for the benefit of their users; the DMCC says: “We will be the judge of that.”
At worst, the changes it brings about will be zero-sum transfers from big tech companies to smaller firms. At best, they could help spur a new wave of entrepreneurship, while offering a free upgrade to all smartphones in Britain.
Take AI governance seriously
The state of the art for LLMs is already good. Better, I think, than is generally believed: as the wonder wore off, most of us got very good at spotting the hallucinations, the stilted turns of phrase, and the ease of unlocking the systems, and we’ve done so faster than we’ve figured out how to harness the raw power of cutting-edge AI models and use it to augment our own abilities.
By the end of Labour’s first term, it will be impossible to ignore how powerful this technology can be for the tasks of government – tasks which, at an essential level, are about dealing with the vast amounts of information the state receives and determining how to manage and act on it efficiently.
The trick is to start before then. Labour needs to know how, when and why it wants to use LLMs to boost the state, so that it is ready to act when it decides they are competent enough to help.
For some functions, that time may have passed. If the civil service is like any other knowledge source, some of its staff are already using ChatGPT or Claude to help proofread emails, draft memos, or refine workstreams; bringing this function in-house would allow the government to ensure that the systems are used securely and responsibly, while also expanding access to others who could use them well but were unwilling to shell out the cost.
In the future, more possibilities will open up, including the most dangerous part: interaction with the state. It will be a long time before any government can – or should – put the life-changing decisions of individual citizens in the hands of an AI system; but you only have to fill out a few forms to apply for a disability benefit or an education and healthcare plan for a disabled child to know that the current state is already a faceless machine with inscrutable motives. If an AI system can help people navigate that machine, rather than acting as another barrier to accessing help, then it could transform people’s relationship with the state.
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