Digital and Technology Policy: National Sovereignty

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 23rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate and for a powerful and incisive introduction which rightly identified that what we are talking about today is a constitutional issue—among the many that the British state currently faces, which has a lot to do with the state of Britain today. Governments must be able to make decisions and laws for the good of the British people, not for the profits of a few foreign Governments or at the behest of a capricious foreign regime.

That is not what is happening in the digital area. As the noble Baroness outlined, and others have referred to, we see a situation where decisions are made once. A contract is awarded in a choice between two or maybe three giant companies out of the handful that might have put in for it. Then we are locked in, unable to go anywhere else because the costs of changing horses would be too great.

We must acknowledge that the UK has a terrible record on sovereignty. This is not an isolated issue, and here I respectfully entirely disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell. The slogan “Take back control” in the last decade showed that the public understood this problem very clearly. That concern was entirely misdirected—it was directed to the east when it perhaps should have been directed to the west—but none the less the public could see the problem that was arising. Another example which fits nicely with this is the issue of secret courts for ISDS—investor-state dispute settlement procedures. A study from April said that the UK was the worst among European countries in empowering this profoundly undemocratic procedure that stops Governments making decisions in the interests of their people.

Digital sovereignty is particularly important here because the digital realm has taken so much control over our lives, our data, our infrastructure and the very actions of our Government. Meanwhile, many of us are left behind. This is the reality; we are told how great these systems are, but tell that to someone trying to get a system to recognise that this is a photo of them and that it should therefore give them a card—yes, I am reflecting on a recent personal experience.

I will make two key points about who we have handed control to and the nature of that. For the first, I draw on the work of a Danish academic, Ali Rıza Taşkale, who has looked at the Silicon Valley tech bros—the owners of the handful of companies we are talking about that have such a place in the British state—and sees in them an attachment to a philosophy of reactionary futurism, or

“the deployment of science-fiction aesthetics to advance anti-democratic political projects”.


They explicitly set out that they want to engineer a return to an idealised, brutal past—19th-century frontier capitalism with radical individualism, unregulated markets and a rejection of democratic government, but armed with all the technology of the 21st century. This is a handful of men—they are all men—who have control over much of the operation of the British state and British society.

In many areas of the country now, as I canvass for the Green Party, I see Ring doorbell after Ring doorbell. Behind that door, I speak to NHS patients who are acutely aware that Palantir, which they know is a concern, very likely has control over their data and private details. We also see stacks of Amazon packaging waste—often beside, not inside, the bins because they will not fit in them.

To put this in the international context, these are individuals who operate in close, often obsequious, contact with the American regime. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, spoke about the “activist White House”. I want to put this in the context of a piece published in the Guardian yesterday by Robert B Shpiner about three speeches given in one day. The Secretary of State said that the counterterrorism architecture should be directed against left-wing political activists—peaceful people. He said that, if they claim that their human rights are being denied, anyone who believes them must be on their side. The White House deputy chief of staff spoke about “left-wing political terrorism”, suggested that you could tell who these people were by what they looked like, and said that any appeal to human rights must “fall on deaf ears”. Then, the American President called the American election system indefensible, claiming that a foreign power had control over it through digital means.

Let us think about the situation that we are in. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, that we cannot have autarchy in a digital world. But we must decide who we are lined up with and partnered with. Crucially, to come back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, we must have the power to change our mind, to move and to not get locked in.