Tech trials and why Britain will be okay, eventually
Gloom pervades the UK. Yet all is not lost.
Welcome to my weekly newsletter, which went out to paying subscribers yesterday. This week, I’m making the lead item free to read as a sample, and beyond that the stuff on books, Menzies Campbell and the tyranny of WhatsApp is for paying subscribers. If you enjoy my newsletter and want to upgrade, well, that would be much appreciated.
A friend who works in tech in a senior capacity made an observation so striking, yet simple, the other day that it made me wonder why the rest of us have not grasped the economic and cultural import of such a basic concept.
The language of AI is going to be primarily English, he said, and trained on texts largely written in English. While other countries are developing multilingual LLMs (Large Language Models) and versions in French and Chinese, Artificial Intelligence “leans” English.
As the Apple Machine Learning Research project puts it:
“Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, and even the few that are multilingual tend to exhibit strong English-centric biases.”
Just as English is the world’s most spoken language, with 1.5 billion souls speaking it as a first or second language, with Chinese in second place, English is the global business code. Even though China is developing its own LLMs and may yet win the race to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) - though let’s pray it does not - the common denominator language of international trade and exports will be English, not Mandarin.
That outsiders see this helps explain the slew of American big tech investments in the UK, particularly of late. During the recent State visit of President Trump assorted deals were announced.
The Americans are not doing this out of a spirit of sentimental Anglophilia or a love of Downton Abbey, though soft power helps. Britain has the people because it still has a disproportionate number of top rank universities, particularly compared to other large European countries, and we produce skilled technologists, software engineers and innovators who will help produce growth, if big government doesn’t get in the way.
Tech is a rare bright spot in Britain at the moment, where there is an all enveloping air of gloom around politics and business.
A Labour government that should have come in and realised with the economy starting to recover it needed to do nothing at all that might jeopardise growth instead pursued policies via the Treasury that have made the situation worse.
Inflation has decoupled from the European path in the last year after a UK public sector spending splurge and tax rises on business that are passed on to consumers. The state is spending too much and the parts of the economy that can grow us out of the mess are over taxed.
Meanwhile, an administration elected with a landslide majority appears to be coming apart at the seams little more than a year later. Andy Burnham - Andy Burnham! - is being touted as an alternative Prime Minister, which if it ever happens will be a development beyond surreal. Burnham has been a Blairite, a Brownite, a Corbynite, and now a who knows what. He is the media-obsessed mayor of Manchester, though the credit for that great city’s success and revival does not go to the mayor of the “combined local authorities.”
Nationally, the populist party Reform, led by Nigel Farage, is leading in the opinion polls and it looks as though the two old parties may be dying, the Tories because of their record on immigration and assorted shenanigans, and Labour perhaps because Tony Blair and the modernisation project delayed the long term decline of a party rooted in organised labour which no longer exists in the way it did in the 1960s.
The voters are furious and disillusioned with the lot of them, though not enough of us are in a mood to be told the truth or vote for anyone explaining that welfare bills, entitlements and spending must be cut.
Oh, and we are in a war era and not spending enough on defence to deal with the looming war of the future, of which we have been given a glimpse in recent weeks when Russia buzzes European airspace with drones and cyber warfare rages against businesses and national critical infrastructure.
And yet, we have serious advantages and strengths in depth.
This is not some vainglorious, flag waving attempt to claim that all we have to do is sit back because our future success is guaranteed thanks to innate British genius. It is simply the case that even if we are in a mess, and my goodness we are in a mess, we have a gift for reinvention and our language being the language of the next economic wave means we have extraordinary opportunities if we grab them and if - another big if - our political class stops producing policies which make recovery harder.
On holiday on Italy, I read Tom McTague’s terrific deep history of Brexit, a balanced account of the years from 1945 to 2016, during which Britain struggled to work out its relationship with the rest of Europe. Even accounting for confirmation bias, as a Brexiteer it confirmed my view that we were as a more individualist minded crowd, with a different legal tradition, ill-suited to the integrationist project and lying to ourselves from the start about what the EU project is really for.
In the age of AI, with the high regulation EU struggling to adapt to what is coming, being outside the EU regulatory orbit is a huge advantage. It would be quite mad, having left, to now volunteer to have Brussels set the rules for our industries of the future. Instead we should develop the technological relationship with the US and other like minded nations (some in the EU), while having as good a relationship with our neighbours as is feasible outside the bloc.
McTague’s captivating new book - Between the Waves - drew me back automatically in the final days of holiday towards my favourite fiction, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, for perhaps the tenth time. Sword of Honour is ostensibly a grimly amusing declinist book, in which all that Guy, the main character, values and loves is traduced. Incompetent Britain sinks into penury and pettifogging bureaucracy as the barbarous Soviet Union is mid-War put on a pedestal.
In the closing pages of Sword Honour and in the epilogue, there is hope, there is redemption and recovery. Life begins anew deep in the English countryside. England, Britain carries on and things turn out very conveniently for Guy.
Not okay computer
Existing AI is far from infallible. In Venice on the 7 September on the first leg of our
Italian holiday, as tourists we found the perfect spot to watch the Regatta, the annual festival of traditional racing and pageantry. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection - the museum in an uncompleted palazzo right on the Grand Canal - has a canal-facing terrace in front of the gallery space. Inside is the collection of 20th century art bought by Guggenheim in Europe just before and during the outbreak of the Second World War. Famously, her collection had been intended for a gallery space in Paris and had to be moved to the south of France to escape by a matter of days the impending arrival of the Nazis. Then it was evacuated to New York. After the War she brought the uncompleted palazzo and moved the art there. Also famously, Guggenheim had a hyperactive love life. There were more than 1,000 partners, she said.
On a more mundane level, her gallery today has the best museum cafe going.
Standing on the terrace after lunch, watching the boats warm up for that afternoon’s Regatta, we wondered when the races proper might begin. How long would we have to wait? Did we care that much about the racing or is one Venetian traditional boat much like another and had we got the general idea in the warm up and should go elsewhere for a Campari Spritz? We had got the general idea.
Even so on the way out I decided to check and asked Google what time the races would start that afternoon. The AI Overview on my smartphone told me: “There are no races at the Venice Regatta Storico today, 7 September, as the main event is held on the first Sunday of September, which this year already passed on 1 September.”
Er, no… the previous Sunday was the 31 August organisers and there it was the Regatta 2025 right in front of us clearly happening in real life. Google AI was wrong.
The computer was also wrong during our holiday when it came to securing tickets to see Radiohead on their short tour later this year. Having attained an access code, and then another access code, it kept blocking me, and thousands of others judging by the furious response later on social media, on the basis that we were “bots” when we were not. On finally making it through, ten times in a row I selected seats successfully and then at the moment of payment they were “no longer available.”
Radiohead’s best album is the landmark OK Computer from 1997, with its prescient, dystopian lyrics about what awaits us in the future in a consumerist, doped-up, digital world coming into being about… now.
Perhaps none of the “tour” or the doomed ticketing system is real, said a disappointed friend who also failed to secure tickets to see the greatest band of their generation. The tour and ticketing must be an art installation, which would be very Radiohead.
What’s up with WhatsApp
On Friday I made the mistake of calling an old friend who was overdue a rant having finally surrendered to the demands made by his family that he join WhatsApp, the extremely useful yet insidious messaging application that now dominates most of the time we humans spend awake. After a few days he reports that WhatsApp is driving him mad. Why - he asks - are people sending him all these messages? What is the point when the correspondents sending the messages are often telling him things he already knows or duplicating information and then replying to each other with funny little squiggles, love hearts, or mini-cartoon characters (emojis)?
What - he explodes - is going on with the ****ing world?
It is a very good question. What is going on with the world?
In anthropological terms, my friend being new to the WhatsApp communication revolution makes him resemble Rip Van Winkle, the American-Dutch gentleman who fell asleep for two decades and woke up having missed the original American revolution. Or he is a member of an ancient lost tribe, emerging from the forest blinking in wonder at the flashing lights and trinkets of the tech transformation.
Or more properly his bafflement and fury is a straightforward reminder that, before WhatsApp and other such messaging applications took over, the world in certain ways was a better, nicer place to live.
WhatsApp was only launched as recently as 2009. In October 2010 it had just 50 million users. When it was bought by Facebook in 2014 it had 500 million active users. Then, Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp and set about making it the dominant global messaging app. Today it has three billion users.
The upsides of being a user are obvious, not least ease of contact with family, children and friends to check on their wellbeing and make arrangements. And there is the chance to share jokes and observations.
The downside is that it (and other social media) has turned many of us into hopeless smartphone addicts, engaged in endless rolling conversations online.
The WhatsApp phenomenon only made sense to my friend when it was pointed out that he must have noticed the regular drum beat of stories in the newspapers about the rise in mental health conditions, reports of a “busyness” epidemic, dire productivity, much of the population no longer having sex, distracted youngsters finding it hard to form relationships that become households, and so on. And most of us in the country constantly on our smartphones, poking away at the pathetic little screens. Now he is on WhatsApp has he noticed a potential connection - I asked my friend - between these growing social problems and the ubiquity of smartphones, social media and WhatsApp itself?
Ah, he said.
Ming the merciful
The death at 84 of Menzies “Ming” Campbell, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, on Friday is the end of an era for a very particular kind of Scottish politics embedded in Britain. Fraser Nelson wrote a good tribute to the “vanishing gentleman politician” on his Substack in which he said: “He spoke carefully, dressed properly, lived dutifully and carried himself with an integrity that now seems from another age. It did not make him a great party leader, but it did make him a great public servant. In his gentleness, his ambition, his decency, he embodied the kind of politician we once took for granted - and sorely miss now.”
Campbell was at Glasgow University in the early 1960s alongside the late Labour leader John Smith, who died in 1994, and former Scottish First Minister Donald Dewar, who died in 2000, and Derry Irvine, the original mentor of Tony Blair and former Lord Chancellor.
When Scottish devolution in the 1990s was being implemented and in the years immediately afterwards I was pretty critical in print of Ming and that crowd who had told us with such confidence that a Scottish Parliament would be a great success and see off the Scottish Nationalists.
In a spirit of youthful exuberance, I was immoderate and spiteful in my criticism. Many years later, we talked about that time and he was gracious and humane. When the London Defence Conference launched he sought us out and wanted to attend, and wrote an encouraging note afterwards saying London and Europe needed a conference like this.
As Fraser Nelson said: he embodied the kind of politician we once took for granted - and sorely miss now.
What I’m reading
A lot, during our holiday in Italy. As well as all of Tom McTague’s deep Brexit history and Waugh’s Sword of Honour, I reread my friend Gerald Warner’s outstanding new novel A Fateful Promise.
The third volume of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin’s biography is coming soon and having spent some time with the great historian in the last week, I’ve gone back to the beginning by rereading volume one. A biography of Stalin is really a history of the world in that period, taking in revolution, technology, warfare, industry, diplomacy, ideas and mass murder, as the author says. Kotkin is a master stylist, blending biography and intellectual history. Indeed, near the beginning is the best and most succinct description in just a few pages of the intellectual development of that terrible system - socialism.
And if you like Prince - or if you are interested in the music of the 1980s - I highly recommend my friend Johnnie McKie’s ace new book - Prince: A Sign O’ the Times - about the making of his greatest album.
Have a good weekend.