The Brexit boost Labour won’t talk about

British politics has become a “competition in catastrophism”, says Fraser Nelson in The Times. Nigel Farage moans that the country is “broken”, Andy Burnham says we’ve been “on the wrong path” for 40 years. Things are not nearly as bad as these would-be leaders would have us believe. Between January and March, UK start-ups raised £6bn in venture capital, “more than the next three countries combined”. London’s King’s Cross – once known for prostitution, crime and seediness – is now a thriving tech campus, home to Google, OpenAI and a small army of British tech start-ups.

The “godfather” of the new King’s Cross is DeepMind, the most important AI lab outside America. When the firm was bought by Google and founder Demis Hassabis insisted it remain in London, one of its backers thought he was mad – “like investing in Somalia”. The Nobel Laureate’s bet has paid off in part because of Brexit. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang describes the UK as a “Goldilocks” regulator – not clogged up like the EU, but assertive enough to protect people. Leaving the EU has also helped with drug discovery, which can get stuck for years in Brussels red tape, as well as AI-powered cancer screening and self-driving cars. Credit should go to the Labour government for using these Brexit powers wisely, as they have on cutting low-skilled migration and attracting the high-skilled kind. But Brexit squeamishness means Rachel Reeves would rather talk about “alignment” with Europe, which is also why she and her fellow ministers won’t brag about their success cutting migration. Governments usually lose power because they don’t know what they’re doing wrong. “It would be ironic if Labour implodes because it doesn’t know what it’s doing right.”

🏛️🥙 Hassabis talks movingly about how, as a student, he’d buy a late-night kebab in Cambridge and walk down King’s Parade at 2am, “thinking of all the incredible people who had walked down that same exact street, probably looking pretty much as I saw it”. He was mindful that the university buildings and cobblestones had been there for centuries. “It’s like visiting a Buddhist school where monks have meditated and prayed for hundreds of years. Their efforts are layered on top of each other and together they have left a residue in the rocks.”

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