UK tech sector missing from democratic process

10:30 Tue, 28 Jul 2026

The UK may well have the strongest, most talented and most unique tech sector in all of Europe.

Nonetheless, the majority of the UK voters appear to be under the sway of corporations like Google, Facebook and X/Twitter who are all run from the west coast of the USA.

The reason for the problem is simple to understand: those very same companies have divided the UK into silos. Tech workers themselves make a post on social control media or they publish a video on Youtube and the web site tells them thousands of people saw it. In fact, what this means is thousands of people scrolled past it. Some of those people may have read it.

People discussing the current Clacton-on-sea by-election are facing the same problem. Every minute spent on social control media is a minute wasted.

In student union elections back in the 1990s, it was common practice for students from one university to go and visit other universities and spend time assisting an allied group in the other campus by having fake discussions with their rivals. This was called "stooging". For example, a stooge from the far left in the Melbourne University Student Union would go to Monash University for a day and pretend to be interested in the far-right candidates. The far-right candidates would lose hours talking to these fake students who were never going to vote for them anyway.

Social control media is a similar waste of time, like a virtual version of stooging.

The alternative to social control media is for people to go and speak to any contacts they have in the region on a one-to-one basis, to meet like-minded groups in the region or attend events in the region and start discussions with people.

Even for those who don't vote in the district, engaging in a face-to-face campaign is a vital way to learn and practice campaign skills that will be useful in future elections.

The alternative is quite scary: the UK tech sector runs the risk of waking up one day and finding out the people in charge have signed away our ability to do basic things like modifying apps on our phones or installing Linux on a new computer. As the saying goes, the price of freedom is eternal vigilence. In this case, the price of freedom is local campaigning in every by-election.

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