LABOUR MPs hoping for a “Love Actually” moment in Washington on Thursday are set to be disappointed.
In a particularly cringeworthy fashion, they have been pushing for Sir Keir Starmer to recreate the famous movie scene where the PM takes time out from chasing a tea-lady round the corridors of power and sticks it to a boorish US President live on TV.
Quite aside from the fact that all the lessons in the world from his glamorous actress voice coach will not make Keir Starmer a Hugh Grant, this is Playdough politics.
Thankfully wiser heads in No10 say it will be more love-bombing than Love Actually when the PM arrives at the White House with an invitation for Trump to meet the King at Balmoral in his back pocket.
But while we are on the subject of films and fiction, there is somewhere Sir Keir should be kicking the Americans right now: Silicon Valley.
He does not need to antagonise Trump, but all those tech bros gurning behind the President at his inauguration should be the ones getting a pasting from a plucky PM.
Global arms race
There’s a reason the Metas and Microsofts of the world have had a Damascene conversion away from woke censorship and toward Trump’s deregulating America First agenda — and it’s not because they saw the error of their ways.
They want to steal your brains . . . and feed them to artificial intelligence.
There’s a global arms race to have machines answer everything — soaking up tens of thousands of years of human knowledge then chatting about it back at us.
As that battle gets more and more competitive, the bros currently in charge of the robots are getting sharper and sharper in their pursuit.
Films, books, songs, shows, poems and, dare I say, newspapers are all vacuumed up into the AI hive mind for free, making these firms billions of dollars but leaving the actual content creators short-changed.
Knowledge is porridge, as they say — but it’s British artists, actors, directors, writers, authors and journalists doing the work while parasitic US billionaires coin it in.
The so-called creative industries generate some £126billion every year for the UK, and it’s one of the few sectors left where we are genuinely world-leading.
Our actors, performing in our language and beamed around the world, generate billions in taxes to pay for our NHS.
Now I’ve never been one to jump on luvvie bandwagons given their usual whines normally involve banning stuff or saying we should be nicer to those chaps from Hamas.
But even stopped clocks are right occasionally, as they say — and on this one they really do have a point.
So it does worry me that the Government seems to be siding with the tech bros, who have a long history of not wanting to play by the old rules.
Science Minister Peter Kyle is opening the door to a change in copyright law, which could mean the firms scooping up the internet would be able to pillage human endeavour willy-nilly unless a copyright holder EXPLICITLY opts out.
But with the astonishing pace of development and the sheer number of bots scraping the internet every day to feed the robot beast, critics are quick to call this a non-starter.
Experts say it is the equivalent of putting up a sign above your open front door saying please do not burgle my house, along with a list of crooks who are explicitly banned.
Or, to put it another way, it’s about as useful as a ‘please keep off the grass’ sign on a hot sunny day.
We have very strong copyright protections in this country precisely because we have so much good stuff to protect, so any meddling with that should be treated with extreme caution.
A source close to Kyle tells me “no changes will be made unless there is a way to ensure those who are happy for their work to be used by AI will get paid for it.”
However his department’s own consultation, which is due to close this month, specifically states the Government’s “preferred option” is the opt-out model, while others are calling for copyright surrender to be much closer to an explicit “opt-in” model.
Dangle investment
Some of Labour’s own MPs fear the party is too close to big tech and is begging bosses for investment in their desperate pursuit for growth.
A cursory glance at the dozens of meetings Kyle has held with big tech would suggest they are working him hard.
A Labour MP even tells me one slick-suited corporate lobbyist from an online giant was brazen enough to directly dangle investment in their constituency if they got on board with the copyright changes.
But is shooting a golden goose really worth the promise of a few extremely polluting warehouses full of servers on a ring-road somewhere?
They might employ a few security guards and a caretaker, but risk far more lasting damage to our economy if we fail to protect one of our leading industries.
There won’t just be no Love Actually moments if MPs aren’t careful with this one, but no Love Actually ever again.
GIVEN she turned up 20 minutes late to her first Cabinet meeting in 2022, blaming the traffic, Kemi Bandenoch has never been far from timekeeping jokes.
But frustrated with her lateness, aides at Tory HQ have started to use the code “KMT” when organising an event, meaning it will actually start 30 minutes later . . . “because Kemi has her own timezone”.
DEFENCE spending will be the talk of the week as Labour scrambles to keep up with Donald Trump’s new world order, but is it too little too late?
So cash-strapped are the Treasury, they suggested lumping the entire budget for our spy agency GCHQ into UK defence spending to make it a higher proportion of GDP.
But I’m told that cooking the books has been given short shrift.
The authors of Labour’s Strategic Defence Review have concluded that defence spending will need to rise to three per cent of domestic output by 2030.
But they are waiting to see if that makes it into the final report that is being hastily redrafted after President Trump upended 70 years of European security policy.
With the PM poised to signal this week how he can finally eek it up to 2.5 per cent, in reality things are actually going backwards.
Not least because the MoD is down for £3billion in “efficiency savings”, also known as cuts, from April 1.
Add to that the pain of public sector pay rises, the employer National Insurance raid and inflation blighting arms manufacturing, and things look rather bleak.
I love you Ma!”
