Former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has slammed the billions of kilos’ price of American tech funding into the UK introduced throughout the US president Donald Trump’s historic second state go to.
The Guardian has reported that, throughout a Cambridge-based Royal Tv Society occasion, Clegg described a current spate of US-UK tech commerce offers as Silicon Valley offering Britain with its “sloppy seconds” and as “mutton dressed as lamb”. These offers embrace £11bn from Nvidia and $30bn from Microsoft into Britain’s AI sector.
Clegg, who additionally beforehand served as president of worldwide affairs at American social media big Meta, warned that the UK shall be beholden to the US because of the funding.
He additionally recommended that, as an alternative of specializing in homegrown know-how corporations, turning to Silicon Valley corporations means Britain shall be “defanged”.
Elsewhere in his speech, Clegg alluded to the offers serving solely America and its tech elite by describing them as “one-sided”.
He additionally revealed that Britain’s ex-US ambassador, Peter Mandelson, who was not too long ago sacked over alleged ties to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, approached Clegg for his ideas on American tech corporations ploughing their cash into Britain – to which the previous Lib Dem bigwig urged warning.
Nevertheless, Clegg admitted {that a} lack of UK-based “development capital” accessible to home tech corporations usually leads to them leaping on a airplane to Silicon Valley as a way to safe the funding wanted to serve their “scale or ambition”.
He additionally stated: “In a way, this US-UK tech deal is simply one other model of the UK holding on to Uncle Sam’s coat-tails.”
