UK Politics

Energy firms and tech giants will meet Government ministers on Tuesday for the first round of talks on how to power the UK’s plans to expand its AI infrastructure.In January, the Prime Minister laid out plans to make the UK a “global superpower” in AI by expanding on the data centres and compute needed to power the technology, as part of the Government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan.The plan included the creation of an AI Energy Council, which will meet for the first time on Tuesday and, chaired by the technology and energy secretaries, will also discuss plans to boost the UK’s clean energy production.The Whitehall gathering will have representatives from the energy sector, including EDF, Scottish Power, Ofgem and the National Grid.They will be joined by tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and British semiconductor firm Arm.The first meeting is said to be about members agreeing on the council’s objectives, specifically around improving clean power generation and improving AI and compute infrastructure.AI is seen as one of the key innovations of the coming years, but development of new technologies in the sector are notoriously power-hungry, as AI models require large amounts of energy to process data and help complete tasks they are set.The Government has set out plans to place the UK as a world leader in the sector to help boost the economy.Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said: “The work of the AI Energy Council will ensure we aren’t just powering our AI needs to deliver new waves of opportunity in all parts of the country, but can do so in a way which is responsible and sustainable.“This requires a broad range of expertise from industry and regulators as we fire up the UK’s economic engine to make it fit for the age of AI, meaning we can deliver the growth which is the beating heart of our Plan for Change.”Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said: “We are making the UK a clean energy superpower, building the homegrown energy this country needs to protect consumers and businesses, and drive economic growth, as part of our Plan for Change.“AI can play an important role in building a new era of clean electricity for our country and as we unlock AI’s potential, this council will help secure a sustainable scale-up to benefit businesses and communities across the UK.”Andrew Bowie, the acting shadow energy secretary, said: “Labour may claim they are supporting UK AI, creating another quango will not disguise the fact that their net zero zealotry and punishing tax hikes are slamming the brakes on growth and investment.“The UK has the highest electricity prices in the world, and the government’s plans are going to send bills soaring even higher.“Businesses and families across the country are paying the price of Labour’s ideology first, national interest second approach with firms like Microsoft warning they might have to pull investments due to their inability to secure grid connections.“Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives are telling the truth about net zero by 2050 and what it will cost the country. Labour need to come clean.” More

Share prices plunged across the world on Monday as Donald Trump doubled down on trade tariffs despite warnings from economists of the growing risk of a recession in the United States and around the globe.The president dismissed market turmoil over his plans – saying “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something” – and threatened to raise import fees even further against China unless Beijing dropped its retaliatory measures. But banking giant Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, the US’s largest investment bank, warned the escalating trade war risked tipping the US and other countries into recession. Britain’s FTSE 100 index dived to a one-year low after Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell more than 13 per cent, and there was similar turmoil on Wall Street.Sir Keir Starmer pledged to “shelter British business from the storm” as he called for “cool heads” to prevail. Speaking at a Jaguar Land Rover plant in the West Midlands, the prime minister said: “These are challenging times, but we have chosen to come here because we are going to back you to the hilt.”Land Rover boss Adrian Mardell said his company faced “a significant threat” from the US tariffs.(PA Graphics) More

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to back British businesses “to the hilt” amid the growing fallout from Donald Trump’s damaging global trade war. Days after Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was forced to suspend shipments to the US, the prime minister visited the carmaker’s largest production plant to outline the government’s plans to support UK industry. With British and international markets suffering historic falls, the PM acknowledged Britain was facing “challenging times”. Keir Starmer vowed to back British business ‘to the hilt’ More

The prime minister has doubled down on David Lammy’s criticism of Kemi Badenoch after she defended Israel’s right to deny entry to two Labour MPs. Downing Street backed the foreign secretary’s criticism of the Tory leader, after he accused Mrs Badenoch of “cheerleading another country for detaining and deporting two British MPs”.The deepening row began after Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed were denied entry to the country, which Israel justified by claiming they planned to spread “anti-Israel hatred”.The deepening row began after Mrs Badenoch defended Israel’s decision to deny entry to two MPs More

Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to slash the number of days it takes to set up a clinical trial from “over 250” to 150, in a bid to strengthen the UK’s medical sciences industry.The Prime Minister also announced new investment of “up to £600 million” by both the Government and the Wellcome Trust, a health research charity, in a new health data research service.Sir Keir’s announcement came as he eased targets on some electric vehicles and after Donald Trump’s tariffs began hitting the car UK industry.Britain’s life sciences sector is a “shining example of British brilliance, absolutely pivotal part of our export economy”, Sir Keir said as he visited Jaguar Land Rover’s West Midlands plant.The Prime Minister said: “We’re going to rip up the red tape, cut the stifling bureaucracy that slows down clinical trials. Now, Britain used to be so much better than this, but we’ve taken our foot off the pedal.”Plans to standardise the contracts used to set up clinical trials are among the steps the Government will take, which it says will eliminate the need to negotiate a new agreement each time a trial is begun.In a bid to improve transparency across the NHS, trust-level data on clinical trials will be published for the first time.Sir Keir said: “The latest data says it takes over 250 days to set up a clinical trial, but I’m going to slash that to 150, and on top of that, I can announce a new investment: up to £600 million in new health data research service, a welcome partnership with Wellcome Trust, strengthen the genome cluster in Cambridge, making sure that patient data in our NHS is unlocked for the public good, an opportunity for growth, but more importantly, to save lives with cutting-edge medicine – and Britain is so good for this.”He added: “We saw that in the pandemic and now we need to pick up the pace again; this country has never waited around for history to shape us. We’ve shaped history, and we will do so again.”The new health data research service announced by Sir Keir will be based at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire.It will bring together access to different medical research data in one secure location, allowing researchers to study it without having to make several applications.The Government believes this could speed up research into diseases such as cancer, dementia and arthritis, but insists patient confidentiality will continue to be held to a gold standard of security.John-Arne Rottingen, chief executive of Wellcome, said: “There is so much more we could learn from health data in this country by joining it up better.“The new service will give researchers a way to easily harness the data held across different parts of the NHS.“The simpler it is to analyse data or identify patients to join clinical trials, the more quickly we can improve our understanding of illness and develop new treatments.“Providing a single, secure service for approved researchers will take away the significant overhead associated with locating, accessing and comparing disparate datasets.“It will create opportunities for patients to access new treatments through trials that would otherwise have been hard to arrange or conduct.”The announcement was welcomed by medical research charities, with Cancer Research UK describing it as a “much-needed investment from the Government”.The charity’s executive director of policy, Dr Ian Walker, added: “The information held within NHS data could help to improve our understanding of diseases like cancer and contribute to the creation of effective new treatments.“Despite its huge potential, access to this data has long been a significant challenge for the research sector, and anything that unleashes the power of NHS data, whilst protecting the security and anonymity of patients, will help enormously.“The UK can lead the world in data science for the benefits of patients both at home and abroad. It will be essential to consult with patients every step of the way.”Kieran Winterburn, Alzheimer’s Society’s head of national influencing, said: “Dementia is the UK’s biggest killer. Research will beat dementia, but we need to make it a reality sooner – through more funding, more partnership-working, better access to data and more people taking part in dementia research.“That’s why Alzheimer’s Society welcomes the Prime Minister’s announcement today that red tape will be slashed for researchers, with a new secure, single access point to NHS data.“Dementia researchers can face gridlock with a lengthy and complex process to access NHS data, navigating through various systems to gather the information they need for vital population and clinical studies.” More

With the normally brisk Easter season around the corner, the mood in Switzerland’s chocolate business is bittersweet, thanks to high cacao prices and — now — the newly added U.S. tariffs on imports.Many Swiss, from the government to chocolatiers to watchmakers and other businesses, are sensing “shock” over the tougher American position on trade, but many are also taking a wait-and-see stance.At the Festichoc chocolate festival in Geneva over the weekend, the Trump administration tariffs announced last week were on many minds, though they seemed to do little to sour the mood on Switzerland’s most famous sweets.Julie Jammes, marketing manager for Canonica, a Geneva chocolatier with three stores in San Francisco, said her company hasn’t yet made any decision on what actions might be taken. “We’re waiting a little longer, but it’s clearly a shock for us,” Jammes said.That meshes with Switzerland’s overall approach: Despite hefty 31% U.S. tariffs slapped on Swiss goods — well more than the 20% faced by exports from European Union – the government in Bern is taking a cautious approach for now. But it has warned of the impact on crucial Swiss industries like watches, coffee capsules, cheese and chocolate.“An increase in trade tensions is not in Switzerland’s interests. Countermeasures against US tariff increases would entail costs for the Swiss economy, in particular by making imports from the USA more expensive,” the government said last week, adding that the executive branch “is therefore not planning to impose any countermeasures at the present time.”The government said Swiss exports to the United States on Saturday were subject to an additional 10% tariff, and another another 21% beginning Wednesday. The United States is Switzerland’s second-biggest trading partner after the EU – a 27-member-country bloc that nearly surrounds the wealthy Alpine country of more than 9 million – and U.S.-Swiss trade in goods and services has quadrupled over the last two decades, the government said.The Swiss government said Switzerland abolished all industrial tariffs on Jan. 1 last year, meaning that 99% of all goods from the United States can be imported into Switzerland duty-free.The atmosphere remained bubbly at Festichoc, where eager shoppers nibbled chocolate squares and ogled at chocolate Easter bunny and egg sculptures at the annual gathering in the Geneva town of Versoix.Jammes, of Canonica, expressed hope that the “loyal clientele” in the United States would remain faithful, but she said “I put myself in the consumer’s shoes” and realized a pocketbook pinch might dissuade many shoppers.“I don’t see why I would pay $45 tomorrow for a box (of chocolates) that I’d pay $30 for today,” she said Saturday. “It’s still a very complicated issue.”The Swiss chocolate industry association Chocosuisse has expressed its disappointment over the Trump tariffs, even though it can still count on the domestic market: The Swiss are among the world’s top consumers of chocolate, scarfing down more than 10 kilograms (22 pounds) per year.“It is completely incomprehensible that Switzerland is targeted by these tariffs,” Chocosuisse said, adding that it was taking the situation “very seriously” and decried how the U.S measure “hits our businesses hard and represents a heavy burden that will weigh on exports to the United States.” Philippe Pascoet, a chocolatier from Geneva, lamented a sharp increase in cocoa prices over the last six months, and said the U.S. market has always been tricky for smaller producers. “Trump now has wanted to impose taxes on imported products. But it has always been complicated to send chocolate to the United States, just for sanitary reasons,” he said. “They want to control what is imported into their country. So even people who used to order chocolate from us online often found it blocked at customs.”___Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten contributed to this report. More

The UK should “notch up” its threats of retaliation towards Donald Trump after he imposed 10 per cent tariffs on UK exports, a former ambassador to the US has said. It comes as the government scrambles to boost support for British businesses and negotiate a trade deal with the US that would give Britain a carve-out to avoid the sweeping tariffs, which have been slapped on all major economies. While the UK has said nothing is off the table when it comes to responding to the tariffs, Sir Nigel Sheinwald said the UK should have gone further, earlier with its threats. “I think it’s right that we should say we’re going to think about retaliation. We might indeed have said that a little bit earlier on”, Sir Nigel told Sky News. “I think it’s always wrong to take that off the table or sound as if you don’t mean it, because in the world of trade policy and trade negotiators, this is a tough world where you’ve got to brandish those weapons and seem as though you’re prepared to use them.”Sir Nigel Sheinwald said the UK should have made threats of retaliation ‘a little bit earlier on’ More

A former National Farmers’ Union (NFU) chief who previously warned the so-called ‘tractor tax’ would “wipe out the family farm” has been hired by the government to lead a review into British farming. As part of the government’s latest attempt to show they are listening to farmers and rebuild trust within the community, environment secretary Steve Reed has now hired Baroness Minette Batters, who has previously voiced opposition to the extension of inheritance tax to family farms, to lead a review of farm profitability.The review, which will see the cross-bench peer provide recommendations to the department, is aimed at helping to ensure the farming sector is “more viable, self-sustaining and competitive in the long-term”. National Farmers’ Union (NFU) President Minette Batters speaking during the National Farmers’ Union annual conference (Jacob King/PA) More