IT Essentials: Lose the narrative, lose the fight

Quiet wins don’t win votes

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Wins mean nothing if no-one knows about them

I’m writing this editorial on Polling Day. By the time you read it, the results will be in. Will Keir have kept it, or has Labour lost it at a local level?

As a figment of the distant past (yesterday), I can’t tell, though I predict a swing towards the latter. Not only because Labour doesn’t have a big Brexit-shaped drum to keep banging when attention moves elsewhere, but because it’s consistently failed to shout about its success.

Many of the government’s achievements over the last two years, particularly in tech, have passed quietly by. Datacentre planning reform, the National Data Library, the Data Act and an increased investment in public sector IT are all important, but not the big whizzbang stuff that captures the public imagination.

And Labour’s wins are counterbalanced by its controversies, particularly in its heavy-handed approach to online safety. More has been written about the Online Safety Act than all the topics above put together.

Labour’s problem is in two parts. First, quiet technology reforms aren’t going to win hearts and minds. Digital infrastructure investments are important and necessary, but rarely a vote winner. Making it easier to build datacentres in a local community might actually have the opposite effect.

Second, Labour has consistently failed to tell a coherent story about its success, instead allowing scandal to crowd it out. In every way that counts, its opponents are setting the narrative while the government simply reacts.

As any cyber pro could tell you, a defence that only reacts has already lost the fight.

We’ve published an editorial whitepaper based on our latest quantum research, asking what is rapidly becoming one of the most important questions facing IT leaders today: Is the UK ready for Q-Day?

Building on his presentation at our recent Security Leaders Summit, John Leonard explores how UK IT and security leaders are thinking about the quantum threat, and what’s (not yet) happening behind the scenes.

We’ve also looked at the EU’s decision to delay the implementation of some rules from its landmark AI Act. For a law already criticised for its speed and unwieldy nature, a further 16–24-month delay on implementation – to as late as August 2028 in some cases – is unlikely to be the innovation booster the EU claims.