EP33: Shaping the Future: Jeremy Hunt on How Britain Can Lead the Next Tech Revolution

Rethinking British Influence

Sir Jeremy's book grew out of a simple but ambitious exercise: reviewing what independent experts say about Britain's influence across the world's biggest challenges — European security, AI, climate change, democracy, human rights, pandemic preparedness. In every case, the UK ranked among the top ten most influential nations globally, out of 193 UN member states. His central argument isn't jingoistic, he stresses, but a warning against underestimating national influence at a genuinely dangerous moment in world affairs — arguing that countries with real influence, including the UK, have a responsibility to actively help solve global problems, rather than retreating into pessimism.

Why the UK Could Be "The Next Silicon Valley"

Sir Jeremy traces his belief in the UK's tech potential back to discovering, as Chancellor, that Britain had become the world's third-largest tech ecosystem, after the US and China — and, in 2021, only the third country in the world with a tech sector valued at over a trillion dollars. He famously declared an ambition for the UK to become "the world's next Silicon Valley" during a difficult 2022 Autumn Statement, expecting ridicule — and instead found genuine resonance, pointing to the UK's world-class universities, the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle, and a tech sector spanning life sciences, deep tech, creative industries, and gaming.

The Pension Fund Problem Holding Back British Tech

One of the most concrete points Sir Jeremy raises is a structural weakness in how British capital funds its own growth companies. Unlike in the US, Canada, and Australia — where domestic pension funds readily invest in IPOs — UK pension funds hold less than 4% of their assets in UK investments. He highlights a striking imbalance: British venture capital funds backing UK growth tech businesses receive around 45% of their funding from North American pension funds, but just 3% from British ones. Citing Australia's pension system, which delivers roughly 1.6% better annual returns through more aggressive investment in high-growth businesses — compounding to roughly double the pension pot over a 40-year career — he argues UK pension reform (building on the Mansion House reforms he introduced as Chancellor) remains one of the most important levers for unlocking homegrown tech growth.

Energy Costs and the Looming Data Centre Challenge

Sir Jeremy also flags the UK's high energy costs, among the highest in Europe, as a serious constraint on the country's AI ambitions — particularly given projections that global data centre energy consumption will exceed the entire Indian economy's electricity use by 2034. With AI infrastructure increasingly energy-intensive, he argues competitive energy pricing is essential to attracting continued data centre investment in the UK.

Fixing NHS Procurement Through Decentralisation

Drawing on his record as the UK's longest-serving Health Secretary, Sir Jeremy identifies a structural flaw undermining health tech adoption: the NHS is the world's most centralised and heavily-targeted major healthcare system, leaving decision-making concentrated at ministerial level, where there's little capacity to properly evaluate emerging technology from smaller companies. He points to the transformation of English state schools — achieved through delegating budgets and authority directly to headteachers, with outcomes measured via Ofsted and exam results — as a model the NHS could learn from, arguing that reducing centralised targets and genuinely decentralising decision-making would meaningfully improve both innovation adoption and patient care.

A Distinctly British Approach to AI Regulation

Asked whether the UK should follow the US's lighter-touch regulatory approach or the EU's more precautionary model, Sir Jeremy leans toward minimising regulation while remaining ready to address problems as they emerge — criticising the EU's heavy-handed approach as incompatible with producing its own major tech companies. However, he's clear the UK shouldn't simply copy the US model either, citing UK-led initiatives like online pornography age verification as examples of proportionate, pragmatic regulation he's genuinely proud of — while flagging the addictive design of short-form content like TikTok and YouTube Shorts as the next area needing serious attention.

On the deeper philosophical questions around AI — consciousness, autonomy, and its long-term relationship with humanity — Sir Jeremy positions himself as an optimist, rejecting the "stochastic parrot" framing of AI (and, implicitly, of human cognition) popularised in a notable exchange between AI researcher Emily Bender and OpenAI's Sam Altman. He argues human beings remain fundamentally distinct from computers, favouring light-touch regulation applied with genuine awareness of AI's risks and open questions.

The UK-US Tech Partnership: Investment, Not Dependency

Responding to concerns that the recent £150 billion UK-US tech investment deal might increase dependency on American technology at the expense of Britain's own industry, Sir Jeremy pushes back firmly — pointing to genuinely world-leading UK innovation emerging from university spinouts at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Manchester, and Edinburgh, and figures like Tim Berners-Lee and Demis Hassabis. His solution isn't to resist US investment, but to make it easier for emerging British companies to access domestic capital and scale into globally significant companies in their own right — citing reforms to London Stock Exchange listing rules, allowing founders to retain control post-IPO, as one practical step already taken.

Defence Spending as a Catalyst for Tech Innovation

Drawing a historical parallel to the origins of Silicon Valley itself — born from Cold War-era Department of Defense and DARPA investment into Stanford-area companies — Sir Jeremy argues the UK's growing defence budget represents a genuine opportunity for tech innovation, provided funding doesn't flow exclusively to established defence primes. He points to university-based innovation, including AI-powered technology with potential dual civilian and defence applications, as exactly the kind of investment that could replicate Silicon Valley's original innovation dynamic within the UK's own defence spending increases.

Politics in the Age of Social Media

Reflecting on his own political career, Sir Jeremy candidly acknowledges that traditional politicians — himself included — have struggled to adapt to how social media has reshaped political communication, contrasting his own limited, carefully-managed media appearances as Chancellor with the far more constant, direct communication style that helped drive recent political successes elsewhere. He describes personally experimenting with short-form video content, and the humbling discovery that even a 51-second video needs to be considerably shorter to hold audience attention.