There is so much to say about what has taken place over the past eight weeks in the UK. I’d probably find it easier to write about those things if I wasn’t just taking the time to enjoy the feeling of fourteen years of stress evaporating off of my shoulders. Seriously, I’ve been the smiling sunglasses emoji since the 22nd of May. 😎

I want to break my mellow vibe for just a few minutes, though, to offer my quick take on the King’s Speech, which took place this morning. The Speech itself, of course, is just the pomp and circumstance in front of the policy slate which Labour has prioritised for their earliest days in government.

My take isn’t about the policy particulars per se: it’s about the bigger picture. And that is why I, the sunglasses emoji, am rejoicing today, as should you.

The important thing about the King’s Speech, as pertains to tech and digital, is that it delivered the paradigm shift that so many of us have wanted for years.

Where tech and digital issues were raised, they were raised holistically within the wider offline areas where those issues live: crime and policing, AI, cybersecurity, and so forth.

As opposed to what we endured for too long, which was those issues being raised through, and centred in, massive unwieldy Online Safety Act-type legislation which held tech responsible for creating the problems and policing the fixes, as an outsourced social safety net.

(In fact, the Speech’s background notes do not mention “big tech”, “social media”, or “platforms” once. Imagine that happening just one year ago.)

Yes, there are still problems with tech, most of which now live with Ofcom as the administrator of the Online Safety Act, whose advocates are learning the hard way that sometimes you get the very thing you asked for. And yes, those problems – and our responses to them – need to be viewed with an eye towards the inevitable second Trump administration, and the tech dystopia it will usher in; of which I’ll have plenty more to say later on.

So we do have quite a few domestic policy battles ahead, particularly in the revised DPDI. But we will be able to fight those battles knowing they are being fought in the right places, and that the role tech has to play is only a part of a bigger societal picture.

It’s also good to know that when tech and civil society show up to the table, they will be just a few of many people there who have a role to play in making things better, as opposed to being shouted at to nerd harder or called a bunch of child abusers.

Even better, when tech and civil society show up to the table, it’s amazing to think that we’ll be able to sit down with a grown adult with whom we can agree to disagree and yet still move things forward in the right direction, as opposed to sitting down with a swivel-eyed culture war provocateur tasked with keeping the party’s psychodrama going for the two months they’re going to hold the digital brief.

So in that light, Labour has already fixed the biggest policy problem in tech before a single line of draft legislation has been printed. Thanks for that. Seriously.

And it’s safe to say that the doctrine of Mayism, which has driven policy thinking since 2016, has been consigned to the history books.

At last.