Read:

You've talked before about the concept of sovereignty. How would you say that has changed? And how does it look in the 21st century?

I think this is the area in which we there is perhaps the most important debate to have. Sovereignty was very easy back in the 1920s when you had an ironclad battleship, and you could go out and rule the waves. Sovereignty today is very different. Because with sovereignty today the challenge comes in a much more subtle way. For example, if you want to deliver a public service in the UK, you are probably going to have to do it via a smartphone. What's on that smartphone, if you don't control your own sovereignty, is either determined in California, or in Korea, or in China. And that's for basic public services. What can you do?

We've had the whole debate about our network. Without getting into the details of whether China is a threat, isn't it a great shame that we didn’t have sovereign technology for something that's so fundamental to the operation of this country. Same for vaccines and the ability to supply drugs. It’s crucial that we have the things that we have to defend, but we also have to have the ability to have the opportunity. Look at ARM, its processors are in almost everything. If someone comes along to us, in this football card game of technology that now goes on, and says ‘we want you, Britain, to do this and if you don't, we're pulling the plug on that’. The only way in which you can defend your sovereignty, the ability to actually make your own decision is to say, ‘well, sorry, but if you're going to be like that, we'll pull the plug on this’. Of course, it never happens and then everyone has a sensible conversation.  

Sovereignty is the ability to be able to make your own decisions and to have influence. You have to have some key technology, you don't have to have every football card in the pack, but you have to understand that you have to have enough. And you have to have the ability to actually to have say tax conversations. The fact that tax receipts are all being generated in another country and no tax is being generated for the UK exchequer. Again, fundamentally at the bottom of it, that's a technology standoff. What do we want to do about that? Same for protecting our children from harm online. Do we have enough influence at the table to actually call how we want to do it in the UK, on our own cultural basis of what we consider acceptable?

We have to have technology sovereignty in these matters. We have to have enough influence, and be important enough and controlled enough, that it becomes a conversation not a diktat.