Unfortunately for anyone committed to sticking it out for the next few years, Labour seem to have all but abandoned hope of hanging on to lingering British dynamism. OpenAI recently announced that it would abandon its UK Stargate data centre plans, citing the exorbitant costs of energy and the maddening bureaucratic maze that stands in the way of building anything in Britain. While their competitor, Anthropic, seems open to Starmer’s suggestions to scale up its London presence, this has less to do with British competitiveness and more to do with the American Department of War’s combativeness.
Meanwhile, Skycutter, a domestic drone manufacturer, can’t seem to get a callback, and may now have to painfully decamp to America just to keep flying. As their operations director, Vince Gardner told the BBC, “We want to stay here, this is our home, this is where we’ve developed this technology. We don’t want to leave but the opportunities [in the US] are too great to turn down currently.” It’s not entirely obvious why, despite promised government support, the opportunities for a drone manufacturer would be on the other side of the Atlantic from Ukraine, unless, as Gardner says, any promised support simply seems slower than moving an entire company out of the country.
Making Tax Digital is going to do it for me. Six months to get around to doing an annual return? NO! Now it’s three weeks to get a quarterly return in four times a year AND an annual return AND having to trust your bank details and HMRC login details to a sealed piece of software. Sorry, no thanks. That’s me leaving the job market permanently thank you very much.