Beyond Techxit: Why Technology Sovereignty Begins with Honest Debate

We are four years into the Ukraine war and two weeks days into the latest Iran, Israel, and US conflict. At the start of the year, the US seized the President of Venezuela; a few weeks later, President Trump was demanding Greenland from Denmark. The world has never felt more uncertain and insecure. For the first time since I became an MP, global insecurity is an issue on the doorstep in Newcastle. As if this were not enough, we are also undergoing a data revolution and an AI automation revolution. In the face of these challenges, we must be honest with our constituents about what we can and cannot control, and the implications for our industrial, civil, and defence policy. That is why I called a Westminster Hall debate on Technology Sovereignty.

Too often, people feel Big Tech is controlling, not empowering, their lives. Techno-feudalism and techno-serfdom may not be commonly discussed in the pubs and playgrounds of Newcastle, but it is a fear many have. It has been suggested that Big Tech needs to be treated as states, not companies—if so, who are their citizens? Is it us? We certainly did not elect them, so are we just their serfs?

Currently, cloud services in Britain are dominated by AWS, with a 40 to 50 per cent share, and Microsoft, with 30 per cent. Both now claim to offer a ‘sovereign cloud’, though they do acknowledge the difficult part is in the title. In artificial intelligence, there is no British LLM, yet there is an ambition to transform our public services and industry through AI. The major AI companies—Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, DeepSeek—are all headquartered abroad. We must ask what capability the UK has now in AI, and what minimum capability we require.

We must also address the UK’s reliance on global supply chains. Critical minerals are the obvious example, but I also want to highlight CIMs, or the Common Information Model. They enable ‘Internet of Things’ devices to communicate with each other. By 2030 there will be 6 billion CIM connections globally, and China controls 70 per cent of the market. This creates significant risks of disruption, from traffic systems to home security, interference with energy grid operations, or large-scale data extraction. Do we need to be we CIM sovereign?

This is not academic, it directly affects our public services. The NHS has the largest and most comprehensive patient-level datasets in the world. And yet, a growing share of NHS data flows through US companies. The Federated Data Platform contract places core NHS data operations on Palantir’s proprietary systems. Palantir’s founder has a political worldview which is at odds with British values. The same is true of Elon Musk. It does our constituents’ sense of agency no good to see their Government so dependent on these companies. Nearly half of adults say they would opt out of NHS data sharing if the platform is operated by a private foreign provider.

The situation in defence and data governance is equally concerning. I am certain President Trump would not allow British companies to control US defence data. Why are we allowing American ones to control ours? Furthermore, the US Cloud and Patriot Acts expand data-access powers to compel US companies to hand over data even if held overseas, here in the UK.

The last time our sovereignty as a mid-sized power was seriously debated was Brexit; the slogan ‘Take back control’ reflected the sense that too much sovereignty had been ceded to the European Union, without an honest debate with the British people. I know we are stronger together, and that can require some loss of autonomy to deliver results which do actually make people more secure. But this must not be done without an honest debate. We need to understand what we can own, control, and lead on ourselves; what we can access that is in the hands of allies we trust; and how we manage the things we must get from those we do not trust.

The UK has extraordinary technological human capital resources. Because of our human capital, we are not just any mid-sized country. I think we can aim higher than intelligent dependence. I urge the Government to be honest about where we are. We do not want to sleepwalk into technology serfdom or some kind of techxit—a technology Brexit.