On Thursday, while Americans are heading to backyard barbecues, residents in the U.K. will be heading to the polls to vote on who will be their ruling government for the last five years.
The Labour party, which has been in opposition for 14 years, appears locked on to win with a massive majority. But a Labour victory might not lead to much change in the country’s approach to its tech sector.
In some ways, the left-leaning Labour’s governance would likely continue policies enacted under outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak (a proud Stanford MBA grad and doting fan of Silicon Valley).
“We’ve seen a really successful period for U.K. tech over the last decade-plus,” says Dom Hallas, executive director of the industry lobby group Startup Coalition. Most recently, the country was front and center of the global AI safety movement with the November 2023 Bletchley Park summit. But it’s also gone beyond that, promoting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and championing a U.K. space industry.
Assuming Labour indeed wins on election day, which is essentially a foregone conclusion, the incoming government is likely to be less ideological than the outgoing Conservative one, says David Lawrence, director of the U.K. Day One Project, a lobby group. “I think that’s really a good thing,” he says. “Because actually, if you’re approaching this from a really ideological perspective, you’re only going make it more dangerous.”
Indeed, Labour has worked hard over the past few months to woo the tech industry, through presentations and meetings with Peter Kyle, the party’s shadow secretary of state for science, innovation, and technology. “I think it’s quite clear [from those events] that they have an idea that they want to invest in digitalization and empower the tech sector,” says Keegan McBride, an AI and policy researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.
An incoming Labour government has committed in some way to regulate AI, including policies that would limit the speed at which companies producing so-called “frontier models” could develop. Lawrence suggests the Labour party is more ideologically in tune with worker rights, not least because of its connection to unions, and is therefore more likely to bring development of AI in check so as not to disrupt labor markets too much.
The Labour party also published a policy blueprint, around 18 months ago that committed to supporting small companies, although that’s lacking in detail. “Like any government, it’s not all in the manifesto,” says Startup Coalition’s Hallas. “And I think that we’re still working through some of those questions, but I think we have a reasonable amount to be going off, and what we’ve heard is relatively positive.”
The new government is also likely to supercharge the rollout of technology throughout public services. “Anyone who’s used public services here knows that they’re not in a great state of affairs,” says Hallas. “And at the same time, they’re trying to do that, whilst not necessarily having gigantic amounts of money to throw at the problem.”
Still, the prevlaining impression in the tech sector of a Labour-led government is positive. The party’s manifesto includes plans to create a Regulatory Innovation Office to update regulation and reduce others, and ideas to modernize the procurement process within government to encourage more bids from small and medium enterprises. Still, details remain scant.
Those details will need to be implemented—and quickly, says the Oxford Internet Institute’s McBride. “You have crumbling digital infrastructure, you have services that maybe look nice, but behind the scenes still depend on an email. You have incredible amounts of data siloization. You have huge problems with competition between ministries,” he says.
The approach from Labour appears to be to promote from within—which McBride says appears to be a deliberate approach by the party to try and boost the domestic tech sector. “I would expect that we start to see a growth in support for the domestic tech industry,” he says, “which is a positive in terms of the economic benefits for the U.K., but also being able to demonstrate to the international community what the U.K. is capable of.”
The U.K. has already led the way through its online safety bill, which McBride calls “progressive” for its protection of young users and its imperative on data protection and rights. Industry is less happy about it, citing overreach when it was tabled in 2023. “Because the U.K. has left the European Union, it needs to demonstrate to the world that its model for digitalization makes more sense, for example, than what the E.U. or the U.S. is doing,” McBride says.