Meeting my Minister to mash monopolies
Last Friday I had a meeting with the UK’s Minister for Safeguarding, Jess Phillips MP. (She’s not actually my Minister, but she is my constituency MP). I wanted to talk to her about my concerns that the current government are being bewitched by the snake-oil of Artificial Intelligence salesmen, and also my deep worries that the Prime Minister and Chancellor plan to hamstring the Competition and Markets Authority’s investigation into Big Tech, just as the CMA finally gained statutory powers to deal with anti-competitive over-reach.
The UK’s Head of Money, Rachel Reeves, recently ousted Marcus Bokkerink, the highly-respected Chair of the CMA. He was immediately replaced by Doug Gurr, who headed up Amazon UK where workers had to piss in bottles rather than go to the toilet during their shifts.
The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said
This government has a clear plan for change – to boost growth for businesses and communities across the UK. As we’ve set out, we want to see regulators including the CMA supercharging the economy with pro-business decisions that will drive prosperity and growth, putting more money in people’s pockets.
What really worries me is that Big Tech has enchanted the upper echalons of government with tales of streets paved with AI gold and environmentally lovely data centres springing up all over the UK, employing thousands of happy and lavishly-compensated British workers (all of whom clutch plastic bottles of yellow liquid). Then they said “Wouldn’t it be sad, Keir, if we had to build those data centres in Moldova instead – because your evil regulators stopped us napalming our competitors and strip-mining UK citizens’s data?”.
It would be rude of me to report more of our conversation, as it was a private meeting. But given that MP Jessie P (to user her street handle) is still getting death threats because Elon Musk told terrible lies about her to his squillion fans on X, it’s reasonable to assume she’s not a fan of Broligarchs or an unquestioning cheerleader for Big Tech.
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