Shaping Britain's Technology Future. Conservatively.
Joined July 2026
- Tweets233
- Following267
- Followers171
- Likes204
Pinned Tweet
The British state is running on yesterday's technology, with today's bureaucracy, at tomorrow's expense.
Today we launch our second policy paper 🇬🇧 Rewiring Britain: A Conservative Plan for a Smaller, Smarter, and Faster State.
Do check it out 👇
conservatech.io/research-and…
ConservaTech retweeted
What gives me the most hope about Britain is also the most frustrating: our problems are self-imposed.
Regulation is strangling innovation and growth.
As @matthewlesh sets out here: ‘The issue is that business are very frightened of falling into the trap of breaching regulations, so they do not pursue a project because of the risk,’
UK data regulation costs British tech businesses an estimated £5.3 billion a year in compliance alone.
That’s from new research by Freshwater Strategy for CCIA, surveying 113 data-intensive tech businesses. Two-thirds (69%) say compliance costs have risen over the past 5-10 years, while none say they have fallen.
But compliance is only one slice of the ultimate cost to the British economy:
- Half (52%) reported not undertaking a business activity due to data regulation
- Firms are scaling back analytics, delaying products and holding back AI features
- Some are launching new products, including AI agents, offshore to avoid red tape
‘The issue is that business are very frightened of falling into the trap of breaching regulations, so they do not pursue a project because of the risk,’ explained one respondent. ‘Overzealous regulation means that taking that route is simply not worth the risk capital to get the feature up and running – better to place bets elsewhere,’ said another.
62% say uncertainty about enforcement matters more than the rules themselves, while 68% say the risk of getting it wrong is out of proportion to the actual risk to individuals.
The ICO’s newly appointed independent board has an opportunity to shift culture, not just the letterhead.
So much legislative time wasted on ideas many knew would not work.
There are important principles: protecting children is one of them, but the problematic monolith that the OSA became is not a solution.
ConservaTech retweeted
We were repeatedly told the Online Safety Act's primary goal was to make the internet safer for children; now they're admitting it hasn't achieved that goal.
There was never evidence that the 'duty of care' model would work; it was untested, and now it is proving unsuccessful, despite signifigant costs for users and platforms.
We have faced age-gating of legitimate content and hundreds of web forums shutting down because they struggled to comply. It's saddening, if anything, that for all this faff, the law itself has failed.
ICYMI: earlier today, we launched our second paper: Rewiring Britain: A Conservative Plan for a Smaller, Smarter, and Faster State 🇬🇧
One person. One government. One record. Tell government once, for everything 🔁
conservatech.io/research-and…
ConservaTech retweeted
Our second policy paper is here 🇬🇧🚀
There’s a huge opportunity for the next Conservative government to properly modernise the state, fully leverage and protect citizen data and make life easier for small businesses.
Here’s how we get there 👇
The British state is running on yesterday's technology, with today's bureaucracy, at tomorrow's expense.
Today we launch our second policy paper 🇬🇧 Rewiring Britain: A Conservative Plan for a Smaller, Smarter, and Faster State.
Do check it out 👇
conservatech.io/research-and…
We’d also rebuild HMRC’s front door, put GDS back at the heart of government, and get the right people into the right seats.
When the state uses technology to make decisions, the rule is simple: a machine can decide, but a person must answer ⚖️
A state that asks less of its people, uses what it already holds, decides quickly, and answers for what it decides.
Smaller, smarter, faster. That’s the Conservative case 📄 Read the full paper: conservatech.io/research-and…
ConservaTech retweeted
Really looking forward to this!
Do join us👇
We’re hosting our launch reception in November alongside the Shadow Cabinet, MPs and tech companies.
If you want to help shape tech policy for the next Conservative government, we’d love to see you there 👇
luma.com/tk2zywws
ConservaTech retweeted
This is an excellent report from Big Brother Watch on the Online Safety Act — but this foreword from Nadine Dorries is a laughable attempt to rewrite history and deflect responsibility.
Everything that’s happened since the law’s passage was foreseeable and foreseen, the entirely predictable consequence of the underlying design. Dorries’ legislation was not ‘meticulously drafted’. It was always a complete mess that was going to undermine free expression.
It always required age gating for any content that could be considered psychically or psychologically harmful to children. It also always had an extremely long list of duties that would be impossible for smaller web forums to complete with. The amendments made it worse, but they are not to blame for the current mess.
The Online Safety Act has made hosting community forums so laborious that they're closing shop.
Hundreds of forums have shuttered due to piling paperwork and liability risks.
Ordinary speech from ordinary people, gone.
Read our report ⤵️
bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campa…
ConservaTech retweeted
We’re hosting a launch reception for @Conserva_Tech in November with the Shadow Cabinet, MPs and tech companies.
Do sign up if that sounds like you’re kind of evening 👇
luma.com/tk2zywws
We’re hosting our launch reception in November alongside the Shadow Cabinet, MPs and tech companies.
If you want to help shape tech policy for the next Conservative government, we’d love to see you there 👇
luma.com/tk2zywws
As @NeilDotObrien suggests, this is a bad idea for many reasons - but one above all:
How can politicians look at the EU, its sluggish growth and sparse innovation and want to align our laws with it in any way?
It has been to Britain’s great advantage that we are not subject to the EU’s AI Act.
We have so much domestic policy change to get through if we want to genuinely compete in AI. Locking ourselves to a backwater would be a terrible start.
The EU’s new AI law is a bad idea.
Cutting European governments off from using the best AI is a bad idea - and Britain shouldn’t join in.
neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-eus-n…
ConservaTech retweeted
Britain was once a country that embraced extraordinary risks to build extraordinary things.
Today, we seem increasingly preoccupied with finding reasons why things can’t be done.
Kemi’s right - and we’re going to fix it.
ConservaTech retweeted
If we are serious about making the UK an AI superpower, we must resolve power supply delays, or we will see huge investments and world leading companies walk out the door. The @Conservatives are the only party with a real plan to fix this problem, we can't afford not to act.
'Microsoft has reportedly pulled out of a planned £2bn data centre in Loughton, Essex, after being told power won't arrive until the 2030s,' says shadow business minister @PeterTFortune, MP for Bromley and Biggin Hill
'If a project this big can't get plugged in, what does that tell firms hoping to expand in Britain?' standard.co.uk/news/london/m…
ConservaTech retweeted
Whatever your view on data centres, everyone should be concerned that the inability to provide grid connections is throttling our economy.
Microsoft has pulled out of an Essex data centre deal in a blow to British company Nscale’s plans for a multibillion-dollar listing.
The decision threatens to undermine Nscale’s attempts to push ahead with a Wall Street flotation worth up to $35bn (£26bn), despite a brutal sell-off in AI computing stocks.
🔗 telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
ConservaTech retweeted
Britain has outrageously expensive electricity, an impossible to navigate planning system, an unwillingness to reform key rules like copyright and data — along with a digital competition regulator sending a clear signal that it doesn’t much like successful companies.
In a blast from the past, Britain’s competition regulator has proposed designating Microsoft’s business software, including Windows, Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams, as having “strategic market status.”
It's like 1998 all over again, except this time the CMA is proposing to regulate a single company precisely in the part of the economy where competition has never been stronger: AI. These kinds of fiddly regulatory interventions are bound to scare away investment and turn the entire scheme into a laughing stock.
SMS status lets the CMA impose bespoke conduct requirements on how Microsoft designs, bundles and sells its products. This gives the regulator broad discretion to direct how software used by more than a million UK organisations is allowed to operate.
The CMA's complaint is that the products are integrated, something CMA-commissioned research found businesses see as a “key benefit” and “relatively good value for money” and “more cost-effective than buying and managing separate licences.” Put plainly, people keep using Microsoft because the products work well together and they’re good value. This is very far from a market failure that requires intervention. It’s also a sector facing immense disruption in the era of AI-led software development.
What's particularly mad is that Copilot is in scope too, even though ChatGPT has more than 1 billion weekly users, Gemini has more than 1 billion monthly users, and in UK workplaces, only about one in ten Microsoft Office users use Copilot. Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT together already have roughly as many workplace users as Copilot, after just two or three years. Just a year ago, the CMA kept Gemini out of Google’s designation because AI was moving too fast to call.
The CMA’s legal test is meant to ask whether Microsoft’s position will be entrenched over the next five years. Five years ago, ChatGPT didn’t exist. Anyone confident about who will lead workplace AI in 2031 should be running a hedge fund, not a regulator.
What's also interesting is that, despite the promises made when this regime was created, this regulation isn’t even well-targeted. The CMA’s real concern, from its cloud market investigation, was meant to be Microsoft’s cloud software licensing. Instead of targeting this issue directly, the CMA has opted for the widest possible net: five separate markets bundled into one ecosystem. The result is that nothing will be done till at least February 2027, and even then, conduct requirements aren't yet specified, which will require further consultations, delaying action well into 2027.
Britain wants to be the best place in the world to build and adopt AI. Preemptively regulating the AI tools businesses are only just starting to use is a strange way to get there.
