Posts on the UK’s decision to withdraw from the European Union and that vote’s impact on the tech and digital sectors. You are probably looking for my side blog, https://afterbrexit.tech, where I monitor individual pieces of EU and post-EU legislation in detail.
As I’ve written on my side blog, https://afterbrexit.tech: With the UK now out of the European Union, it is clear beyond any doubt that Brexit is being used as a means for British policymakers to embark on an open regulatory experiment. Legislators across all parties, think tanks, and media outlets are seeking to fundamentally redraft the legal and social foundations of the open web, our access to it, and our use of it, under the […]
Last week I was interviewed by Samuel Stolton at EURACTIV for his weekly Digital Brexit bulletin. We discussed where UK tech policy is currently standing as we prepare to leave the UK (whenever that is).
I didn’t think we’d be here, but here we are. In my capacity as a Policy Fellow at COADEC, the tech policy body for the UK’s tech startups, I have written a plain-English guide for tech and digital businesses to use to prepare for a No Deal Brexit. While the guidance is aimed at startups and scaleups, the advice is applicable to all tech businesses regardless of where they are on their journey.
I was honoured to be invited to speak at this year's Accessibility Scotland conference on Brexit's implications for web accessibility. The video of the talk has now been posted online, and it is fully captioned.
Sometimes the medium is the message and the backstory is the story. Here is one.
Today Open Rights Group has released a thorough response to the government’s consultation on the Investigatory Powers Act Codes of Practice. They draw particular attention to the process itself, which they rightfully call inadequate: Open Rights Group welcomes the opportunity to respond to these important documents but wishes to express a profound frustration at the consultation procedure and the unhelpful manner in which policy is being formulated. There was no outreach from the Home Office […]
Today Theresa May has pulled the trigger to begin the process of withdrawing the UK from the European Union. (This is likely to lead to Scottish independence and the reunification of Ireland, thereby ending the United Kingdom and reducing England and Wales to an atrophied rump, but we’ll deal with that another day.) We have had nine months to digest what Brexit will mean for the digital industries and for those of us working in […]
Parliament carried on as usual today. Parliament carried on because the people of this country had questions that needed answers. In Parliament’s first hour of business on the morning after, I was one of them. Hansard records that my MP, Kirsten Oswald, put my question forward as this: T8. My constituent Heather Burns works in the digital economy. She has only ever known a borderless, connected world of work. Can the Secretary of State reassure […]
And so we had the government’s Brexit white paper, a document so vapid that it inspired my MP to tweet that it reminded her of a high school student stretching out an essay to meet the required word count. Eagle-eyed readers spotted the date stamps on many pages of the PDF version indicating that the paper had been finished between 3 and 4 AM on the day it was due to be published. That stunt […]
There were some intriguing developments announced regarding the UK’s Brexit negotiations and the Digital Single Market strategy on Friday the 20th of January. I can’t imagine why we all missed it. These developments came in a report published by the Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy Committee of the House of Commons. The full report is fourteen pages in pdf, also available in one page of six-point type. Keen readers will recall that the committee’s predecessor, […]
A Parliamentary hearing into Brexit's impact on the organised digital professions provided valuable lessons for the unorganised web industry to follow.
Labour has released 170 questions for the government concerning Brexit and policy. Here are their questions regarding digital and the tech industry.