“In today’s digital age, a cartel of technology giants – Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple – wield extraordinary influence over our lives online. These platforms have become so embedded in daily life that meaningful participation in society depends on using their services.”
A handful of tech giants are shaping the future in their image. AI is already transforming society and without bold intervention, it will entrench a new era of corporate rule and worsening wealth inequality as power and profit concentrate in the hands of a tiny elite.
Neil Duncan-Jordan MP recently led a debate in Parliament on AI; read his speech edited for publication below:
AI is a transformational technology with the potential to bring many benefits to our society. To fully realise those benefits, the Government must look at radical changes to taxation, welfare and our industrial strategy.
Everyone in the UK needs to benefit from a managed AI transition that puts workers and human dignity at its heart. It must make the world fairer, not more unequal, and it should give UK citizens a meaningful say in decisions that will affect their lives.
Evidence from the New Contract, a pro-worker AI campaign organisation, reveals that the public are deeply suspicious about AI. Around six in 10 people expect the gains to flow to wealthy investors and big corporations, while just 7% think they will be shared fairly across our society. Understandably, seven in 10 workers are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs.
In today’s digital age, a cartel of technology giants – Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple – wield extraordinary influence over our lives online. These platforms have become so embedded in daily life that meaningful participation in society depends on using their services. Similarly, the digital infrastructure that facilitates our work and public services is now an essential layer of the economy, but that gives oligarchs like Elon Musk enormous power to distort public discourse. We have effectively subcontracted our right to information to a handful of big tech gatekeepers.
We should ensure that, like a socialist Government’s approach to energy or water, the public have a stake in the development of AI technology, to ensure that the value it creates is captured and shared for the good of society as a whole. Previous waves of technological change have brought with them huge economic disruptions, but the human and social costs that followed were not inevitable. They were the product of political choices, as Governments left workers and communities to absorb the shocks alone.
We can already see the first signs of AI impacting on work here. We have record numbers of young people not in employment, education or training because many entry-level jobs have disappeared. We need the Government to introduce a raft of measures to manage AI‑driven changes to work:
- An employment levy on companies that replace large numbers of workers with AI
- Training subsidies for displaced workers
- Redeployment programmes to move workers into sectors with skills shortages
- A job subsidy scheme for workers and companies at the sharp end of industrial change
- Stronger social security support for those who face unemployment
We know that if it is left to the market, firms will often reach for the crudest form of automation, stripping out roles and degrading the work that remains. The alternative is that we start to advance the case for dignified work and recognise that that will mean having meaningful worker involvement in every step of the process. The involvement of workers in adoption is often what turns a promising tool into a productive one. That is why I agree with the TUC that the Government should strengthen the Employment Rights Act 2025 to give workers a real say in decisions. There should be a duty on employers to disclose their use of AI, and a right for the workforce to be consulted and negotiate over how AI is introduced.
Big tech corporations in the US stand shortly to become some of the wealthiest and most powerful private actors in history. Their wealth has been built on public research and public investment, as well as all our shared written inheritance, which has trained the models they use.
The fact that our tax system taxes income from work far more heavily than income from capital gives firms a direct tax incentive to automate a worker out of a job rather than employing them, and could see AI facilitate a further shift of national income away from labour and towards capital, eroding the tax base that funds the public services that we all need and want.
The Government could seek to equalise tax treatment, actively explore widening the digital services tax to include AI companies, which it currently excludes, and raise the level of the tax from 2% to the European average. We cannot allow the use of machines to be made artificially cheaper than employing people.
It is also important to look at AI sovereignty. The UK is growing increasingly dependent on US tech and owns little of the data infrastructure and AI models on which the future economy will increasingly rely. This repeats the pattern of recent decades in other sectors, whereby essential national infrastructure has passed into overseas ownership and money has flowed offshore, leaving British people with less and less control over the essentials of a good life.
We need to give UK companies a meaningful chance to compete. The Competition and Markets Authority should take on the concentration in the cloud market, which underpins the AI companies’ business models. A progressive sovereign AI programme should involve an industrial strategy that seeks to expand public investment in the sector and impose strict conditions on private access to public assets, alongside active support for models such as co-operatives, public interest companies and other democratic ownership models, so that the gains of AI can be captured and shared throughout the UK.
At the heart of this debate is the role of the public. Big decisions about AI, such as where data centres are built and how AI is deployed in public services, are being taken with little democratic input.
One data centre uses the same amount of electricity as 100,000 home and very few run off renewables. The communities that host the infrastructure see the costs, in water, energy and land, without the benefits.
The Government must embed ongoing public and democratic oversight of the AI transition and legislate for community benefit where infrastructure is built, including a share of the value created locally.
We must ensure that the AI revolution does not lead to more power being in the hands of a few who can determine our future. Governments must build independent, publicly funded alternatives to ensure that AI is developed for the common good. Only public investment can support AI that prioritises social and environmental challenges.
We need an “AI for the people” strategy. One that starts to recognise the challenges we face and has the ideas to meet those challenges head on.
- Neil Duncan-Jordan is the Labour MP for Poole. You can follow him on Twitter/X, Facebook and Instagram.
- You can read the debate in full on Hansard here.
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