A former senior US government official, speaking privately in the House of Lords, recently offered a bleak three-word assessment: "democracy was broken." The diagnosis, they explained, rests on a substantial body of research showing that governments - regardless of which party holds power - reliably represent the interests of the wealthy rather than the interests of voters. Nowhere is that failure more legible than in the relationship between elected governments and the technology sector.
How the Lobby Machine Works
The mechanics of tech industry influence are not mysterious. Powerful companies fund thinktanks, commission sympathetic research, and deploy dense networks of lawyers, consultants, preferred academics, and government relations professionals. The narrative they construct is carefully calibrated: technology is simultaneously too complex to regulate competently and too economically vital to restrict. The goal is not a world without rules. It is a world in which big tech writes them.
This lobbying infrastructure took root in the United States, where most of the major platforms are headquartered, but it has spread wherever those platforms operate - which is everywhere. In the United Kingdom, the past two years of technology policy offer a detailed case study in what that influence produces when it encounters a newly elected government.
Labour entered government having staked out clear positions: meaningful protections for children online, defence of creative copyright, support for workers threatened by automation, and a commitment to treat publicly held data - including the vast stores accumulated by the NHS - as a national asset rather than a commodity to be transferred to Silicon Valley. Each of those positions was subsequently softened, qualified, or abandoned. One insider described the process to a colleague as the government being "swaddled" by lobbying from the very beginning - wrapped in it before it had a chance to act independently.
What Has Already Been Given Away
The practical consequences of that influence are now visible in the public record. Since the start of 2025, the government has signed multiple memorandums of understanding with technology companies with minimal parliamentary scrutiny. It has pledged to discount energy costs for datacentres, an arrangement that disproportionately benefits American multinationals. It has opened military satellite contracts to a US company for the first time. And it has granted access to highly sensitive health and defence data to firms including Palantir - a company with a documented history of large-scale citizen surveillance - with little transparent debate about the terms or the risks.
Each of these decisions, taken individually, can be framed as pragmatic. Collectively, they represent something more significant: the transfer of control over critical national infrastructure and irreplaceable public data to private foreign entities, completed at speed and largely outside the mechanisms of democratic accountability that would ordinarily apply to decisions of equivalent strategic weight.
The framing deployed to justify these transfers - innovation versus regulation, progress versus obstruction - is itself a product of lobbying. The real choice is starker and more straightforward: either the United Kingdom imposes its own terms on how technology operates within its borders, or it accepts the terms of service written in California. The costs of the latter - to mental health services, to education, to the creative industries, to domestic businesses competing against platforms that pay little tax on their UK revenues - are borne by the public, while the profits flow elsewhere.
What a New Settlement Must Look Like
With a change in Labour leadership approaching, the incoming leadership faces a foundational question about what it means to govern in the national interest in an era when so much economic and social infrastructure is controlled by a small number of foreign private companies. Pope Leo's recent 245-paragraph document setting out a framework for technology's role in human society received wide attention precisely because so few governments have been willing to articulate anything comparably principled. The bar for political leadership on this issue is, in other words, not high.
Three minimum commitments would constitute a credible starting point. First, an unequivocal guarantee that any technology deployed in the United Kingdom will respect the privacy, safety, and rights of children - with no carve-outs for commercial convenience. Second, a clear commitment to ensuring that the data held by public institutions - the BBC, the NHS, the assets of British innovators and creators - is used to generate value for the UK rather than gifted to multinationals. Third, sustained investment in domestic infrastructure sufficient to ensure that no single foreign company is in a position to exert undue influence over British defence, national security, or the decision-making of elected government.
These are not radical demands. They are the minimum conditions of meaningful sovereignty in a digital economy. The argument that prioritising national interest over Silicon Valley convenience will inhibit innovation or economic growth deserves scrutiny rather than deference: replacing a taxpaying, locally spending worker with an AI system whose profits flow largely untaxed to a foreign parent company is not, by any reasonable accounting, a net gain for the country that bore the cost.
The Deeper Accountability Problem
The official in the House of Lords was not simply describing a British failure. The pattern - wealthy interests shaping policy at the expense of citizens - is structural, and the technology sector has perfected it more thoroughly than almost any other industry in modern political history. What makes the tech case distinctive is the degree to which the sector has embedded itself into services that were previously public, critical, and sovereign. Energy, defence, health, communications: the boundaries between private platform and public infrastructure have been progressively dissolved, often by design.
No incoming government can claim genuine control of the country it governs if it does not control the infrastructure on which that country runs. The swaddling, as the insider put it, must be unwrapped. The question is whether any leader will have the clarity of purpose - and the resistance to the considerable pressures that will immediately follow - to actually do it.
