My letter to the editor, speaking to the need for innovative public policy to support the development of ambitious public-good technology, appeared in The Guardian on October 14, 2026 with the headline “To unlock Britain’s innovation potential, Labour needs to think outside the box”
Gordon Brown wants Britain to invent, invest in and own the future (British households would be £5,000 richer if we were more innovative. Let’s unleash our talents, 9 October). But invent what, and for whom? His hunt for “lost Einsteins” rests on a narrow vision: a lone genius invents, commercialisation scales, the problem is solved.
That may suit a cancer drug, but not the wicked problems of our time – social care, education, climate – which demand not silver bullets but new technologies and practices for collaboration, distributed ownership and collective innovation.
The current struggle to retrofit governance, accountability and benefit on to AI exposes the fiction of genius-engineered “solutions”. Nor do trillion-dollar companies make every household £5,000 richer. They concentrate short-term gain in a narrow founder-investor class; the rest of us carry the work and cost of long-term cleanup.
It’s a vicious cycle: the government worries about big tech yet incentivises more of it, competing with Silicon Valley by doing the same – just not quite as well. My organisation is a community interest company with an asset lock, built for competitive innovation in the public interest.
Labour created this structure in 2005 to enable a new generation of public-good companies, but innovation policy has yet to back it. UK Research and Innovation is closed to us: we aren’t a research organisation. Innovate UK now deems our community interest company ineligible for a knowledge transfer partnership, despite previous success with the University of Edinburgh. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency backs lone inventors. The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Enterprise Investment Scheme reward only uncapped shareholder returns.
Much is made of Palantir and the NHS, yet current policy doesn’t let a competitive British alternative emerge: one that tackles systemic data problems while letting trusts and communities retain ownership and agency. With funding, that is five years away, not a fantasy. If the government wants innovation that tackles the hardest problems, benefits all citizens, and competes globally, it must look beyond the models it rewards today.