Nick Clegg

What in Whitehall?

What you need to do in the case of the UK government is you need to sit down and take a cold towel over your head and think very carefully.

And if I was still in government, I would have said to some of the best people in the cabinet office, I want you to come back to me over a month or two with a full analysis of all the different levels of the tech stack.

From applications at the top right through to, you know, base foundational infrastructure at the bottom.

Cross-analyze that with the functions of the state and society that you care about.

From our hospitals to our intelligence services, from our kids to whatever.

And then decide over the next 10 years where we feel the dependency on other technology is.

whether it's Chinese or American or others, needs to change and what we can do to build towards that.

You don't need to do that with everything.

I don't think we need to build our own mobile phones.

I don't think we need to build our own social media apps.

I definitely think you need to look at cloud computing.

I definitely think clearly there are aspects of defence and intelligence where we need to have sort of air-gapped sovereignty.

It's partly because the sort of bien pensant debate, the sort of broadsheet reading centre-left debate, which still dominates the sort of media and political elite, is all, it's the sort of Burnham stuff.

All the, you know, the last 40 years has all been dreadful, or in the case of Labour, everything was dreadful since we left government in 2010.

It's such an infantile way of talking about tricky things about, I mean...

Boy, do I know it.

In the second half of the coalition, it was the last time, 2012, 13, 14, 15, that this country sustainably, quarter after quarter, grew faster than anywhere else in the developed world.

In 2014, we grew faster than the US, would you believe it?

Every quarter.