Cut the Cord: Ending Britain’s foreign Tech dependence

The UK government’s quiet but relentless expansion of digital surveillance is no longer a distant threat — it is happening now. All too often, it is driven by data-hungry foreign companies, providing tools for surveillance in London and other cities. From data retention to AI-driven monitoring, the scope and scale of state visibility into citizens’ lives is growing faster than democratic oversight. Against this backdrop, Open Rights Group and @NewspeakHouse hosted a powerful evening of discussions focused on how to resist this trajectory and rebuild digital sovereignty. Led by Pam Cowburn and Alberico Ricci from the Open Rights team, the event brought together a strong and balanced mix of women and men, technologists, policy thinkers, activists, and engineers — all united by the urgency of the moment.

A central theme was the urgent need for a sovereign UK tech stack, with democratic oversight. Participants argued that data centres and hosting sensitive public-sector infrastructure inside the UK must become a baseline requirement. For now, UK is a hostage to mostly US-based Cloud Vendors. Beyond hosting, the discussion turned to investing in a home-grown UK frontier AI model, rather than remaining permanently dependent on US-based platforms or risk using China-originated Open Source models like Kimi K2.5 from Moonshot.

Where US companies are unavoidable, there was broad agreement that data portability guarantees must be enforced — ensuring the UK can move, audit, and control its own data at any time. No more getting stuck on Azure or locked into AWS.

Another lively debate asked what “sovereign tech” really means in practice: should the UK join forces with France and Germany to pool procurement power and infrastructure investment at the European level, or focus on building a purely UK-funded ecosystem? The answer remains open — but the cost of inaction is clear.

Some participants highlighted a deeper technological shift underway. New Agentic AI tools are running on local hardware — from Mac Mini to compact edge servers, and they are beginning to challenge the dominance of centralised Cloud platforms. This points toward a future where computing becomes more local, resilient, and privacy-preserving. Others proposed an ambitious structural idea: a public digital backbone modelled after the NHS — a “National Tech Service” for government and councils, providing trusted infrastructure, standards, and long-term stability. Many attendees were distrustful of the current government and the notable push for total surveillance. But the scale of the budgets required for the sovereign data stack indicates we will need the government-scale procurement budgets.

Open-source software featured heavily in the conversation too, while it is harder to maintain and requires more tech smarts, many agreed that with strong local support ecosystems, it remains one of the most viable paths to transparent and accountable public technology.

The international makeup of the room underscored how global this concern has become. Attendees from Finland, Poland, Hong Kong and the UK shared parallel stories of growing discomfort with US-centric technology dependency and surveillance-heavy governance models. What emerged was not fear alone — but momentum. Momentum to redesign public digital infrastructure, to reclaim control, and to redefine what technological independence really looks like. Roadmaps are needed, a long-term view is necessary, and it planning must start now.

If this conversation proved anything, it is that the public is waking up. The hope now is that governments follow. Because the future should not be one where we endlessly trade convenience for control and pay our feudal fee to US Cloud owners. It should be one where integrity, democratic values, and national sovereignty shape the technologies we build — and the societies we protect.

Thanks to David Levy, Kimmo Movirtanen, Ed Saperia and many others for joining and  Newspeak for hosting

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