{"id":34,"date":"2026-08-03T10:28:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T09:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/?p=34"},"modified":"2026-08-03T12:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T11:15:08","slug":"a-new-prime-minister-the-same-information-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/2026\/08\/03\/a-new-prime-minister-the-same-information-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"A new Prime Minister, the same information ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Burnham approaches the British information ecosystem can make or break his premiership. Without a national strategy \u2013 and without addressing collapsing public trust \u2013 piecemeal fixes to problems will misfire.<\/em><\/p>\n

Andy Burnham is taking the helm of Great Britain inside a highly contested information environment \u2013 one in which technology, public trust and national security are becoming ever more tightly intertwined. This \u2018information ecosystem\u2019 \u2014the web of people, tools and institutions through which a society produces, consumes and makes sense of information , is \u00a0increasingly a site of political struggle. Questions about the sovereignty of the British information ecosystem were raised numerous times during his predecessor\u2019s short time in office. While these concerns centred on the role of American big tech, Keir Starmer\u2019s downfall was in part due to his disastrous appointment of an ambassador with ties to American, Jeffrey Epstein. That\u2019s the point: the connections between the British and American information ecosystems run deep, and they can make or break a Prime Minister. If Burnham hopes to succeed where others have failed, he will need to look past individual threats to take stock of the information ecosystem in which they occur, and from that vantage point devise a national strategy.<\/p>\n

Looking beyond digital sovereignty<\/strong><\/p>\n

For months, British policy circles have called for greater digital sovereignty<\/a>. The worry is foreign influence and the country\u2019s over-reliance<\/a> on imported cloud, social media and artificial intelligence services. In June, the Mayor of London blocked<\/a> a \u00a350m deal between Scotland Yard and Palantir, an American big data analytics firm. British MPs have also urged<\/a> the government to break its NHS Federated Data Platform contract with the firm. The instinct is right, but the diagnosis is too narrow. Britain\u2019s information ecosystem is not just a stack of foreign-owned platforms; it is the whole web of people, tools and institutions through which the country collectively comes to decisions. Focusing only on the digital stack<\/a>, while public trust in government is in freefall, is a costly mistake. What is needed is a national strategy for the information ecosystem \u2014 and the case for one becomes obvious when looking past the latest technologies.<\/p>\n

The British information ecosystem consists of more than a single service provider, like Palantir. It includes the people, the tools and technologies they use, the content that flows between them, and surrounding conditions that shape that ecosystem, such as economy, institutions, and culture. Like any ecosystem, its health depends on the relationships between these different parts, which means problems that surface in one layer are usually symptoms of dynamics across the whole. For example, all the sovereign AI in the world does not matter if just 42% of Britons are willing to trust<\/a> it. Such are the limits of approaching an information ecosystem piecemeal.<\/p>\n

The UK\u2019s growing dependencies<\/strong><\/p>\n

Policymakers have long worried about Chinese kit and the harms of social media. Newer is the concern about dependencies<\/a> on American technology, given Washington\u2019s increasing diplomatic unpredictability. Britons are right to be uneasy. Microsoft and Google together hold 93%<\/a> of the UK office software market. Most adults<\/a> (92%) use WhatsApp and 80% use Facebook; messaging<\/a> is now the dominant form of communication. 82% use Google Search. Amazon, Microsoft and Google together hold the majority<\/a> of the UK cloud market.<\/p>\n

That much is in most sovereignty briefings. What rarely makes it in is how much further the dependencies go.<\/p>\n

Take the devices people use. Apple and Samsung together account for more than 80% of the UK smartphone market<\/a>, with Apple alone holding around half. Two of the country\u2019s largest internet service providers<\/a>, Sky Broadband and Virgin Media O2, are owned, in whole or part, by US firms (Comcast in Sky\u2019s case; Liberty Global, alongside Spain\u2019s Telef\u00f3nica, in Virgin\u2019s). Of the roughly 65 undersea cables that carry most<\/a> of Britain\u2019s communications, around half are British-owned, but the UK is also a global landing-point for traffic flowing between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas \u2014 including data that originates and ends in other countries. That makes the ecosystem a strategic target<\/a> in any future great-power tussle.<\/p>\n

The picture in news media is similar. Sky UK is owned by Comcast, a company often in the legal crosshairs<\/a> of the Trump administration. News UK, publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun, is part of Australian Rupert Murdoch\u2019s News Corp, headquartered in New York. And as parts of the country slip into so-called local news deserts, the surviving titles are concentrated in fewer hands. Two companies, Newsquest and National World, now control more than half of the UK\u2019s local newspaper titles<\/a>; Newsquest is a subsidiary of the American group Gannett, which rebranded<\/a> as USA Today Co. last November. Whether for better or worse, Britain\u2019s information ecosystem is now wired into America\u2019s.<\/p>\n

This is to say nothing of the recent takeover<\/a> of The Telegraph by the Germany-headquartered Axel Springer media group, which also owns Politico and has been criticized<\/a> for \u201cbending journalistic ethics for right-wing causes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trust underpins an effective information ecosystem<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here is where the standard sovereignty pitch starts to fall short. An information ecosystem is not just hardware and platforms; it is also the people in it, and the trust that binds them to the institutions trying to govern the system. On that count, Britain has some challenges.<\/p>\n

Nearly half of British adults (45%) now say they \u2018almost never\u2019 trust<\/a> any government to put national needs above party interest \u2014 up 22 points since 2020. Only 27% report \u2018high or moderately high\u2019 trust<\/a> in central government. 85% think society is divided, and more than half (55%) regard those divisions as harmful<\/a>. Most strikingly, the V-Dem Institute\u2019s 2026 Democracy Report<\/a> lists the United Kingdom as one of ten countries newly classed as \u2018autocratising\u2019.<\/p>\n

That last data point matters. Sovereignty, properly understood, is not only the ability to control the technologies a population uses; it requires that the population recognise the controlling authority as legitimate. This remains a problem, regardless of who is the prime minister or what party wins any level of election in the UK. Pouring money into \u2018sovereign\u2019 clouds and chips while voters drift further from the state achieves rather less than the brochures suggest<\/p>\n

A strategy for the whole ecosystem<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a further risk worth naming. Each time the state securitises another corner of the information ecosystem \u2014 another platform, another bit of hardware, another category of online speech \u2014 it offers citizens fewer reasons to trust it and more reasons to suspect overreach. Done piecemeal, the cure can worsen the problem.<\/p>\n

This is why Britain needs a single, coherent strategy that maps the whole ecosystem before reaching for individual tools. The government already has separate action plans for AI<\/a>, cyber<\/a>, undersea cables<\/a> and online harms<\/a>. What it does not have is a strategy that joins them up \u2014 one that asks not only which technologies the country depends on, but who its citizens trust to make those decisions, and how the answer to the second question shapes the first. Until that exists, every billion spent on digital sovereignty is a bet placed without reading the table.<\/p>\n

Dr. Alicia Wanless<\/strong> is a Canadian scholar and the director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which aims to foster evidence-based policymaking for the governance of national information ecosystems. Alicia is the author of The Information Animal: Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality<\/a>. She holds a PhD in War Studies from King\u2019s College, London and is an international visiting fellow at the Bath Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Burnham approaches the British information ecosystem can make or break his premiership. Without a national strategy \u2013 and without addressing collapsing public trust \u2013 piecemeal fixes to problems will misfire. Andy Burnham is taking the helm of Great Britain...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2089,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":true},"categories":[9,6,10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-behavioural-science","category-cybersecurity","category-digital-technologies"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/idsb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}