This week, I listened to a podcast in which former government adviser turned substacker Sam Freedman complained about the relationship between government and media.
Newspapers don’t give enough thought to the effects of policy, he said, and are only interested speeches and announcements.
“The government have tried to make use of that by feeding that beast with a lot of trivial stuff that allows them to control the media agenda,” Freedman said.
“But over time you’ve seen it shift to the comms becoming the whole point and government starting with the comms – what can we announce, what can we say – and working back towards the policy.”
Shortly after listening to this, a press release from the government’s tech department, DSIT, arrived in my inbox.
In it came a bold announcement. “UK’s AI Safety Institute becomes ‘UK AI Security Institute’”, it proclaimed.
I winced at the thought of how many hours of Civil Service time was spent weighing up whether to change the name of a small government institute – and how many drafts they got through before sending out the press release.
It is one of a mountain of announcements I have received from DSIT and other departments over the past few months, about how the government is planning this, and has a new strategy on that.
It’s encouraging that Downing Street is being proactive. Inertia was one of the worst traits of the previous government, where it felt like after 14 years, they’d simply run out of ideas.
But most of the news we receive is about plans to do things in the distant future. Things like the AI Opportunities Action Plan, which will take at least a decade to bear fruit, or a commitment to East West Rail, a train line linking the tech hubs of Oxford and Cambridge, which is unlikely to run its first service before 2040.
Long-term projects are to be welcomed, of course. It’s why, as I wrote last week, I’m bullish about the UK’s energy security in the 2030s, despite the ridiculous prices we all pay today. But that shouldn’t come at the expense of action in the short term.
Across the pond, the new US administration is barely a week into office and has already made sweeping changes – erecting tariffs here; dismantling unwanted arms of the state there.
Many of the changes are stupid, of course, and some are downright evil. Erecting tariffs on Canada will push up energy prices on consumers and could kill what’s left of the US car industry (the CEO of Ford has said as much) while the decision to freeze funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief will literally lead to many avoidable deaths.
But no one is in any doubt that the government is getting on with doing things. Trump is not announcing a name change for a government department or releasing an ‘action plan’ – he is taking action.
The UK government could do with some of this urgency. It has (at best) four more years in office before the next election, and looks like it will have very little to show for it, beyond a collection of proposals and initiatives.
So enough words please, DSIT. Time for some deeds.
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