Hinton, is known as a godfather of AI). Many co-founders and top executives at leading labs are British, from Jack Clark at Anthropic to Mustafa Suleyman at Microsoft. Wayve is part of a clutch of promising AI firms massing around DeepMind, Google’s AI company led by Sir Demis Hassabis, and based in London’s King’s Cross. The world will be far less informed about the risks of frontier AI if AISI, the British government’s pioneering AI Security Institute, continues to be locked out of Anthropic’s latest models. Nor does Britain need to be entirely dependent on America. Jensen Huang, the boss of Nvidia, a chipmaker, talks of the AI stack as a layer cake made up of energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications. The greatest economic benefits, he says, lie in the top tier—where Britain is best-placed to succeed. Although in the long run access to frontier AI is imperative, most applications do not need the latest models to be useful. Data from Artificial Analysis, a benchmarking firm, suggest that DeepSeek V4 Pro, a Chinese open-source model, offers roughly three-quarters the performance of Fable 5, but at less than a 60th of the cost. To truly prosper in the world of AI, however, Britain must think bigger. It will need to fix the planning system and upgrade the grid in order to build more AI infrastructure. The government may need to stump up more than the £1.1bn it recently pledged for AI hardware. At the application layer, making the most of AI will require solving other governance challenges, such as joining up data in the health system. Britain will have to do all this in the midst of a growing public backlash. A recent survey by researchers at King’s College London found that 57% of the British public thinks AI will lead to widespread unemployment and 22% that it will lead to civil unrest. In speeches, ministers shift awkwardly between AI’s risks and its opportunities. A better response has been to set up an AI Economics Institute, modelled on AISI, the first institute of its kind to track how AI may affect productivity, the labour market and the wider economy. In time, the government will have to grapple with social reforms as a result of the upheaval from AI. For now, there is other work to do. “The
technological revolution is already here,” says Mr McBride. Britain has an opportunity to be a player, but it risks becoming a spectator.■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/06/17/what-britain-needs-to-do-to-grasp- its-big-opportunities-in-ai
Rejoiners, Britain’s real conservative movement They want to turn back the clock on Brexit. Winning campaigns deal in the future June 18th 2026 There is a touch of historical re-enactment to the events thrown by the losing side to mark the tenth anniversary of Britain’s Brexit referendum. A march in support of rejoining the European Union (replete with blue flags, no doubt) will wind through Westminster. The organisers, among them an anti- Brexit dance troupe from Swindon, have returned from a 255-mile pilgrimage on foot to Brussels, where they gave lawmakers messages of regret from Britons. For the truly nostalgic, the New World, a tabloid, is hawking passport covers in pre-divorce burgundy, bearing the legend: “European Forever—Bollocks to Brexit”. Eitan Hersh, a political scientist, posits that political activism is often motivated by hobbyism more than
ideals. Some re-enactors like to dress as Napoleonic infantrymen. For others, reliving their defeat of 2016 makes for a fine weekend. There lies the problem for Britain’s pro-European cause. Some 55% of Britons, and 79% of Labour voters, say they would vote to re-enter the bloc. Still more an idea than a campaign, Rejoin has rushed from the fringe to the centre. Wes Streeting, a putative prime minister, has joined his rival Andy Burnham in wishing that Britain would one day return. The rising Green Party supports it. But it will fail unless its advocates adhere to an essential rule of politics: winning campaigns trade in what Gordon Brown, a former prime minister, called “the future business”. Rejoin is often a backwards-looking cause, its adherents still animated by what they see as a fraudulent referendum and by the damage that followed. But if the case against leaving the EU is damning and easy to litigate, it is not the same as a prospectus to rejoin. On that, the intellectual spadework has barely begun. That Brexit is a growth-sapping error hardly guarantees its reversal: from housing policy to taxation, Britons are adept at living with expensive mistakes. The anti-Brexit movement has a reactionary streak. That is a paradox, since its supporters skew to left-wing parties. But it emerged only in response to the chaos of 2016; EU flags were rarely seen on British streets before. Its aim was restorationist more than transformative: first halting the divorce, and after that was lost, turning back the clock. This is a trend seen everywhere, notes Ben Ansell of Nuffield College, Oxford: as right-wing radicals have turned on institutions such as courts, central banks or the European Commission, groups that once stood for change have found themselves those bodies’ unlikely defenders. Populism has turned progressives into conservatives. And many of those who marched against Brexit could have been natural Tories: older, whiter and better educated than the general public. (Testiculi ad Brexitum, ran one proudly erudite t-shirt, as Morgan Jones notes in a new study of the movement.) At its worst, it was possible to detect the same horror for ill-informed Leavers that Edmund Burke felt for the French revolutionary mob: “Learning will now be thrown into the mud and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”
But Europe has advanced only when it was synonymous with the future. For Edward Heath, who led Britain’s accession to the club in 1973, only in a continental market could Britain compete with America and Japan in aircraft, computers and nuclear energy. To quit after joining would be to “shuffle off into the dusty wings of history”. For many Britons, Europe meant cultural modernity: foreign holidays, Gaggia coffee and Marks & Spencer wine. Then Eurosceptics learned the power of the future. Many Brexit voters, and some Tory MPs, pined for empire and the Blitz spirit. Yet Vote Leave, the official campaign, cast the EU as a relic of the age of the tower block and the telex, incapable of handling technological change and mass migration. “Take back control”, in its telling, meant genome editing and clinical trials. It worked. If that second referendum ever came, this is the terrain on which supporters of keeping Britain out would fight again. When it comes to AI and low- carbon energy, they would argue that the EU is more risk-averse and more protectionist than Britain, and they would have a point. And what then is Rejoin’s rival vision of an industrial future in Europe? They might reply that Britain would be better off writing the AI laws of the entire European market. But the public case that influence beats autonomy, defeated in 2016, will not be easy to win; for Rejoin’s hobbyists, relitigating Boris Johnson’s big red bus is easier and more fun. Nor are today’s European leaders helpful salesfolk when it comes to “the future business”. Not a month goes by without someone warning the continent will become a museum without reform. Rejoin’s advocates sometimes promote the Europe of a decade ago, in which Britain would reclaim its special status outside the single currency and “Schengen” passport-free zone, among other opt-outs. It is theoretically possible, but the squeamishness about the crowning achievements of European integration does suggest that Britons’ appetite for the actually existing EU is not so great. (In the same spirit, it is also possible to go to Scott’s and order only the green salad, but if you insist on making a scene about it perhaps oyster bars aren’t for you.)
And it misses the point. The EU that Britain knew has evolved, through years of crises. Some changes would be uncomfortable for British elites: the bloc now issues common debt, and is centralising bits of capital-markets supervision. Others may be attractive. It is gripped by geopolitical competition and the fate of Ukraine. It takes competitiveness more seriously and is hard-headed on migration. It will spend less on farmers and more on defence. Hence Bagehot’s advice to Rejoin. Winners campaign in the future tense. Forget the Europe of 2016, and sell the Europe of 2046. Who knows? Britons may even prefer that version. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/06/18/rejoiners-britains-real-conservative- movement
Meet the world’s new peacemakers Autocracies are taking over conflict mediation. The deals they are making look different June 18th 2026 PAKISTAN IS TYPICALLY viewed more as a source of geopolitical problems than as a salve to them. Yet over the past few months it has done more than just about any other country to bring about an end to the war between America and Iran. And it is not the only unlikely peacebroker to have interceded in recent conflicts. In just the past five years Turkey has mediated between Russia and Ukraine, Ethiopia and Somalia, and Pakistan and Afghanistan. China is also trying to reconcile Afghanistan and Pakistan. Qatar has served as a go-between for Hamas and Israel and America and the Taliban, as well as playing a role in America’s deal with Iran.