Speeches by Maynard.

“Mr Grady, what do you think the UK can learn from the remarkable steps that China has made in innovation in your sector? What should we be doing given what you see it has been doing?”

“It is percentages.”

“We need to live with it.”

“I mean in the public domain. I worry that we need to discuss it publicly because otherwise none of us is going anywhere.”

“If we accept that the UK Government are exactly as you describe them—I am not arguing—how would you compare that with the EU and the US, which are grappling with the same problem? Is either of those further advanced? Do they have better ideas or better plans? Is there anybody out there to look at? Does anybody else hav…”

“If I may play devil’s advocate, you just mentioned that we are 1% of your entire global market, so we are kind of irrelevant. If we are only 1%, does it really matter that much? You just go after the talent; we want to be the best talent and do the best research, so the 1% seems a bit like retribution.”

“How do we do that, apart from saying, “Please come”? We are outside the large market of the EU, so we are not necessarily the first on the call list.”

“What about beyond that?”

“I take all those points, but we previously had the WTO rules, which were a way of policing these sorts of things. We have now lost them, effectively. In some ways the argument might be that the UK is a mid-sized economy and China is a behemoth, so we should get out of the way of the things that it is producing; we cann…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) for securing this important debate. We have all received casework on this issue from so many residents who are so worried and have been impacted by what has happened as a result of Trump’s…”

“That would be helpful. What about on grid connection queues?”

“The EU’s position on copyright is not globally competitive in that context. Is that what you are saying to us?”

“If I have an AI data centre at gate 2 and something else there, do you think there is a case that the data centre should win through in that discussion?”

“Running with that a little further, could you give more detail, Matthew? Obviously, there are a lot of people wanting that power, some in data centres and some for other AI reasons, but lots of other sectors want that power. First, do you think there is a case for AI or data centres going to the top of that queue? Seco…”

“Can you take that apart a bit for us? There is GDPR and this is post Brexit. Where are the gaps compared with the EU that make it less certain?”

“Putting that into a geographical context in the UK, a lot of power is increasingly generated off the North sea, so further north. I hear arguments about latency and the need for a data centre in the south-east, otherwise it is not much use to us. Is that misconstruing the case?”

“I fully concur on those CMA comments. On the AI Safety Institute, now the AI Security Institute, and to your point about UN global governance on AI, what do you think our Government should be doing more of in terms of interacting with those? There are some big risks out there, and I am not sure that the new Government …”

“What should we do about that?”

“I want to ask a different question to each of you. Simon, Professor Neil Lawrence was pretty active earlier in saying how he did not much like the Government’s encouragement of the CMA regime, which has been widely reported as basically going easy on big tech. If that is indeed the case, is that good news, bad news or …”

“Phill, on the UK AI opportunities action plan, I am quite intrigued that the Government very naturally are talking about UK AI opportunities. Is there enough discussion and interest in the threats?”