Mexit, Not Brexit, Is The New Priority For The Uk

Opinion One of the dangers of stories based on big cash numbers is distraction. The numbers get all the attention, the bigger story behind them gets missed.

The fact that at the current rate the UK state is likely on the hook for nigh on £9 billion over five years in Microsoft licenses is a sterling example. How we got here, and where we’re going if we don’t start planning a Microsoft Exit, is much more than a $12 billion question.

Faced with £40B budget hole, UK public sector commits £9B to Microsoft

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The numbers look horrendous, and they are. This year’s UK State Of Digital Government Review (SODGR) says that the country spends £26 billion ($35 billion) year on digital technology, so Microsoft gets one pound of every 13 spent. It’s a truism that moving to open source doesn’t save much money, as proprietary licensing spend is replaced by training, support, and local development costs, but reliable data is hard to come by in a field dominated by financial and political interests.

In any case, Microsoft is so deeply entrenched in state digital infrastructure that it seems a practical impossibility to do anything about it. The company has a good 20 years’ lead on its competition in bending the ears and getting its feet under the desktops of enterprise and state decision makers. While the UK government has had spasms of promoting open source — most recently in 2017 — these have seen little enthusiasm and less adoption. As SODGR notes, UK state IT lacks co-ordination, leadership, funding, talent and executive influence. 55 percent of personnel budget goes on outside contractors, analysts and consultants rather than full-time staff.

This state of play explains much. Lacking these things, individual departments are big game for the professional hunters of corporate IT suppliers. It’s not so much a matter of signing contracts as dividing the carcass’ meat after the kill. Why do so many big state IT projects fail? Much better to ask why some slip through the net and succeed.

SODGR has to be positive, and it duly notes the move to off-prem and AI as positive. It’s not strong on how these counteract the structural flaws, but it seems the way is clear for Microsoft and the hyperscaler-led private sector to continue to up its fees even as its previous promises have led to public sector productivity decreases. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s all in SODGR.

Perhaps we could all live with that, as we have done forever, were it not for two facts and one inescapable conclusion. The cloud and AI, as currently configured, imply and require huge data flows into American owned datacenters. Those datacenters, even those within UK jurisdiction, cannot prevent US government access. Therefore, the UK cannot consider them suitable for state data.

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

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This might seem hyperbole, but the facts are indisputable. The US is not trustworthy – Trump’s tariffs break existing World Trade Organization-governed treaties, a cornerstone of international regulation. Likewise, Trump supports the removal of regulatory or legal barriers to AI development, so what would happen if the AI lobby asked for access to national data from outside the US? SODGR is silent on this, because it seemed fantastical even six months ago. It doesn’t seem fantastical now.

You don’t have to look too far to find how deep that blind spot goes. Ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s think tank has just opined that the UK should leave AI model development to China, the Gulf States and the US, because they’ve got all of the money. That none of them has a rule of law which respects the data we’d have to send to them for training doesn’t factor in Blair’s thinking, let alone the strategic competences the UK would cede. Plus, we have common interests with the well-regulated EU, even if Brexit makes that hard for politicians to admit. This is breathtakingly dangerous thinking.

The current UK government isn’t much better, mistaking a fondness for magical AI and datacenters for a digital strategy. A proper one would be built around three parallel and interdependent goals.

The first is to identify where critical data is flowing to untrustworthy entities, and set a deadline for all such data to be held and processed in legally secure locations. As a necessary part of this, a unit with sufficient expertise to get full visibility of all such systems and provide guidance for implementation, both inside the government and with suppliers. This implies a third goal, being the creation of a national digital infrastructure that is structured to be resilient to any supplier owning the full stack.

None of this can happen without involving all IT professionals that SODGR says work in the state sector. Their knowledge and experience is the ground truth without which nothing can happen. An expensive start to a very expensive process, one with a hugely valuable result.

The talent, leadership, influence and unified vision this would provide will be ideally placed to manage the next stage. The evolution of a 21st century digital infrastructure answerable to the people of the UK and nobody else. If that true vendor independence means an internal market and mindset where open source can be deployed freely and a final goodbye to gargantuan bills, that’d be a good side effect.

Mexit means Mexit, and that means more than money. ®

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