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UK–EU Defence: Stronger Together

How damaging is the European union’s rejection of the UK’s attempts to join its SAFE programme; SAFE Is the European Union’s new defence funding programme.

The most succinct report that I can find is on Euroweekly News in an article, entitled, “UK excluded from €150bn EU defence deal” which states that,

On November 28, the UK government announced that negotiations to join the EU’s €150 billion Security Action for Europe (SAFE) defence fund had failed, marking a significant blow to what had been billed as a “reset” of UK‑EU post‑Brexit relations.

However, Euroweekly News, also states that SAFE has a 35% access to 3^rd party countries, which some might consider generous given that the programme is to be funded by ECB bond issue of €150bn. The cap is however per contract which would, almost certainly, for instance, make selling warships ineligible for SAFE funding, not to mention the fact that numerous EU countries can build both warships and warplanes. The EU were asking for a UK contribution, some might say, a large contribution, to the fund, before lifting the cap to 50%. It also interests me that the whole argument is about selling to the EU, and not the UK buying European weapons, although the Euro benefit to this is massively undermined by the UK decision to buy US warplanes and more US nukes.

The UK proving once again that it is “a nation of shopkeepers” walked away from this deal.

Defence co-operation was meant to be the most advanced topic of the EU-UK May reset agreement. Even with defence on the table, cherry-picking is unacceptable to the European Union as is the UK’s insistence that every deal must benefit the UK.

Image Credit: NATO …

Untimely Atlanticism, a note on the UK-US Tech Prosperity Deal

I wrote a response to the US/UK Technology deal which was eventually published in the Chartist Magazine. They entitled it, “Untimely Atlanticism” with a sub title, “US AI data centres drain power and offer little for UK jobs while in Europe opportunities call “. In the Chartist article I say,

One of the few substantial outcomes from Donald Trump’s second visit to the UK is the announcement of a UK-US Tech deal, also named the UK-US Tech Prosperity Deal. TechUK states that the key areas for co-operation are Artificial Intelligence, civil nuclear technology, quantum technologies and network technology & cyber-security.

The most eye-catching proposals are to enable the US Big Tech companies to build some very large data centres to host nodes in their AI configurations. The Government press release argues that this will help research significant bioscience advances.

The scale of some of these data centre builds is enormous. The proposed Microsoft/Nscale data centre is planned to be 50 megawatts with a burst capability of 90 megawatts; these metrics do not include the power draw necessary to run the cooling systems. Google Gemini reports that 50 megawatts could be expected to power 30,000 homes.

AI systems and their Data Centres aren’t a public good; the rules-bases, i.e. the knowledge is owned by the software company, and the data centres compete with people for power, water, land, and capital. The US corporate domination of the sector also acts as a talent sink.

It is suggested that the deal is worth £31bn of inward investment, but the core IT assets are US-owned and supplied. So these UK-based data centres will be stuffed full of US-manufactured computers. I wonder what the net financial flow is in reality.

While they claim that over 5000 jobs will be created and nominate the North East as a location for the new data centres, it doesn’t take very many people to run a data centre and much of the expertise in designing and building them is located abroad.

A final worry is that, in reality, AI has no value. It’s being used to create memes and low-value artefacts. It’s also important to understand what makes it an AI solution, as opposed to just more distributed computing complexes. AI would seem to be the layering of heuristic neural networks on top of big data storage and processing systems. The industry has been using these IT architectures, doing this for a decade or so without calling it AI. It has also been doing complex modelling of weather and physics on supercomputers for even longer.

Furthermore, given that the outputs of AI systems are based on the captured knowledge, which is current (and popular) today, it remains unclear how AI will innovate. Their protagonists suggest that they can replace labour in white collar work, but this is questionable, and if they do, how will invention occur?

More and more people are suggesting the lack of value means that this is a bubble which Is consuming capital and denying it to other, more potentially worthwhile initiatives. The big-tech monopolies are polluting the necessary creative destruction.

At the end of the day, this looks like yet another of Trump’s shakedowns; much of the investment will be spent in the USA, and most of the profits will also be repatriated there.

Another option alluded to in the CNBC article is greater European co-operation. The UK has rejoined the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, and coincidentally reversed Reeves’ 2024 cuts in the supercomputing programme. The EU is now talking about an EU IT stack with which the UK could easily cooperate, and both would increase the UK’s cyber-sovereignty.

In IT, as in defence, the UK’s future is becoming a choice between the USA and the European Union; this treaty is just another piece of untimely Atlanticism, just as is the decision to buy more US fighter planes and their tactical nuclear payload. …

On the autumn statement 2026

Rachel Reeves in front of No 10/1 with a red box

A quick note on the budget, remembering I wasn’t as critical of last year’s as some, at least not on macro-economic grounds. I was obviously against the failure to abolish the two child cap, but also against the failure to properly fund universities, students, and local government.

So this budget is, to me, a bit meh and I agree with Fisher, why wait for a year? Still nothing on HE or Local Government finance, and the wealth taxation is very weak and poorly focused. No capital gains tax equalisation, no financial transaction tax.

The freezing of tax free allowance amounts is probably more damaging to those on the margin of the upper rate tax band but as I read it, it’s a piece of accounting magic. There were no plans to change it for the next two tax years anyway, and they can change their minds, although some of the impact will occur after the next election.

Also the FT reports that leading business people consider it insufficiently stimulating of growth, which in their case is probably not code for, “We need to rejoin the single market and customs union.”, although there are many, including me and Liz Webster, that are saying so; our macro-economic arguments recently augmented by a report from the US non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research and by Ryan Bourne’s recanting of his pro-Brexit position.

Image Credit: from freemalaysiatoday cc 2024 by …

Digital Justice in the EU

Image Sign in front of the CJEU's Palais de la Cour de Justice

The Commission of the European Union has issued a report proposing what they call the digitalization of justice. At the moment, this is mainly about best practise, although it seems they plan to improve digital access to the European court’s case law. A commentary has been made by the EU’s agency for fundamental rights cautiously welcoming the report but highlighting both the risks to privacy and the threat that such schemes will fail to improve justice for citizens, or worse. A further commentary can be found at the EU Observer, taking an equally cautions approach. …

The EU Hokey Cokey

I watched the first day of the EU UK parliamentary partnership assembly. The first session was on general issues & trade and the second on defence. I made some notes which you can read overleaf. Following the agenda of the meeting, I talk of Trade and Defence in two parts. Throughout, I question the UK's half hearted commitment. Use the read more button to see the whole article. ...

Parties need pluralism

I was writing about something else, and wrote this on party management. It’s coherent, but doesn’t belong in what I am writing, and so I thought I’d share it now,

“Your Party” is planning a Sortition based founding conference. It has probably chosen this for reasons of control but, “Your Party”’s problems occur in many parties, and I am reminded of the white paper “The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party…, a white paper to the PSA” by Emanuelle Averil on New Labour, which examines its managerialism and the destruction of its activist commitment and influence.

The paper was published in 2015 before the General Election. I read it in 2017 and strangely ended up sitting next to her at Conference ’19. I posted my comments in a blog, A note on Emanuelle Averil’s “the unintended consequences of New Labour” and in that article I selected some quotes. While being 20 years old, these comments seem equally relevant today, particularly about the Labour Party. I quote her on how suppressing the activist layer was mistaken and led to a failure to connect to the electorate, how factionalism suppresses plurality which made renewal impossible, how triangulation led to voter alienation and its control freakery led to a toxification of its image.

We might debate about the noughties, but it’s clearly true today. …

Immigration based on compassion and dignity

The Government have announced major regressive changes to the Asylum regime. These are all regressive, & vindictive. They must be opposed, and those MPs & Peers opposing these measures supported. This article looks at a couple of statements in opposition, and points at the Momentum model motion. While various press sources seem to have seen the proposals, I can't find the formal government statement. (10:57), see overleaf for more ...

About the AI Boom

Five things

There’s no positive business model, they can’t replace staff, or at least not without new supervisors.
They are now borrowing to invest in each other.
Hallucinations are a feature, it gets things wrong,
The rule base’s ownership is obscure and Code is Law
It’s [deliberately] wasteful of resources which people need to live.

It’s useless as a pillar of a growth/industrial policy. …

Labour’s membership

The Labour Party staff stopped reporting membership to the NEC earlier this year, but they reported the end of year membership to Annual Conference and of course the electoral commission.

A number of years ago, I made a chart showing Labour’s membership from 1989 to 2021; I have just updated it using the end of 2024 figures.

There are stories published that Reform have overtaken Labour in terms of membership numbers; it would take an extraordinary amount of departures for this to be true. This article in the New Statesman published under a pseudonym as a gossip column is headlined as such and points at Labour List reporting the membership in Feb as 309,000. …

The downsides of the A.I. industry.

I have recently, watched the YouTube video, “How tech CEOs are lying to you”, where Karen Hao is interviewed by Aaron Bastani on Novara Media's channel. Ms Hao has just published a book, “Empire of AI” and the interview covers the topics of the book.

At the centre of her arguments are, that large language modules aka AI, and their use of resources, water, power, land and rare metals are a choice, and one that society cannot afford. She questions the business model of the AI industry, sees it as a threat to [US] wealth and notes its scofflaw approach to its own regulation and its oppression of poor and vulnerable communities. She is highly critical of the motivations of the oligarchs funding the AI bubble.

The remainder of this article, which is over 2000 words is overleaf, use the "Read More" button ....

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