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The Ministry of Justice has sent a clear signal to the legal world: the era of the dusty ledger is over. The government is, rhetorically at least, leaning into the potential of technology to tackle the Crown Court backlog, as it has in other departments. As a founder who has spent years building tools to navigate these very challenges, I back the intent.

It’s a vision the Prime Minister feels strongly about.

He has publicly shared his frustration with the culture of paper files during his time running the Crown Prosecution Service. I’ve spoken with him directly about the truly transformational potential home grown technology has for public sector reform.

However, as any founder who has tried to sell a transformative idea to a government department will tell you, the “what” is often inspiring, but the “how” remains the bottleneck.

While Whitehall stumbles forward, there is revolution brewing in town halls. Local authorities across the UK are increasing spending on UK-born innovative technology at a rate that puts central departments to shame.

AI is increasingly being used by social care teams to create accurate, compliant social care documentation, saving over-stretched frontline workers over a day per week. Faced with the tightest budgets in a generation, councils have become the ultimate friends of innovation. Their fiscal constraints and little press coverage for their work show they don’t harness new technology to make a point or because it gives them a headline. They buy it because it secures them much-needed efficiencies, enhances their thin resources, and improves their services for the people they represent. It allows them to do more with less.

They are proving that harnessing tested and secure technology isn’t about replacing the soul of public service. It is about stripping away the administrative sludge that prevents human beings from doing their jobs.

My own experience with government procurement has been a mixed bag, which is a sentiment shared by many in the tech ecosystem. On one hand, there is a genuine desire to engage with SMEs. On the other, state machinery still favours the safe, the slow, and the scale of legacy providers.

The centre of government talks a good game about harnessing technology in its quest to bring services closer to people. In some areas, there’s been decent progress. The use of Claude in the gov.uk app is one. But there is a massive opportunity being missed by treating tech as a procurement exercise rather than a partnership. To truly reform public services, we must move beyond the buyer-vendor dynamic. We need a system that values the speed of a startup and the sovereignty of British-built AI, rather than one that bogs us down in eighteen-month tender cycles that risk outliving the technology itself.

This byzantine system is not only holding back government ambition. It also risks undermining the ambition of UK tech founders. Many of my fellow founders are ramping up focus on selling technology in the US, Europe and Australia, where it is already driving public service reform. It is somewhat absurd that UK tech is driving efficiencies in over a dozen countries around the world before Whitehall wakes up. 

Political will is needed to demand change in the boiler room of Whitehall.

The whole of the UK tech ecosystem has ideas about how to jump this barrier, including changes to the procurement process so specialist startups can compete; increased risk tolerance, accepting that not every pilot will work, but the ones that do will save billions; and a call for buying in proven technologies to be considered on level pegging with building from scratch in-house.

Systemic change is needed, but the first step is in many ways far simpler. We need to ensure Whitehall allows a turbocharged AI-enabled reform of services, to be accompanied by a celebration of UK innovation. UK plc stands ready.

Alex Stephany is founder and CEO of Beam

Iran says it has bombed wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in Israel. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are also claiming that they have attacked the Israeli air force headquarters.

Palestine Chronicle reported that:

According to Tasnim News Agency, the Public Relations office of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced that the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the location of the commander of the Israeli air force were attacked in what it described as “targeted and surprise attacks.”

The Times of Israel has reported that:

Israel says there were no injuries in the strikes.

And, Netanyahu’s office have dismissed Iran’s claims that the “fate” of the Israeli PM is unclear. As yet, details remain entirely unclear – Iran’s assertions have not been verified, nor has Netanyahu’s location.

At the weekend, Netanyahu – along with various co-criminal Western leaders – crowed about the assassination of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and his family. It’s hard to argue that turnabout is not fair play. However, it will be no surprise to see Keir Starmer and other ‘leaders’ condemn Iran for ‘disproportionately’ retaliating for what Israel did to it – just as Starmer did on 1 March after the US and Israel slaughtered Iranian schoolchildren and bombed hospitals.

Featured image via the Canary

The US military has admitted that its ally Kuwait shot down three US fighter jets that crashed in Kuwait in a so-called ‘friendly fire’ incident.

Footage of one of the fighters as it crashed also appeared to show pilots ejecting via parachute. The BBC reported that:

US Central Command has just now said three of its F-15 jets “flying in support of Operation Epic Fury” – the US operation against Iran – “went down over Kuwait due to an apparent friendly fire incident”.

All six crew ejected safely and have been recovered, it says.

The news is a massive embarrassment for the US, though it may suggest its other allies may have taken a leaf out of Israel’s book. The genocidal colony murdered hundreds of its own people on 7 October 2023 under its ‘Hannibal directive’. This was admitted by former Israeli defence secretary Yoav Gallant and has been common knowledge in Israel since a few weeks after it happened. Israel also killed the Bibas family, three escaping Israeli captives and numerous other Israelis in Gaza.

However, UK and other western media continue to ignore both facts.

Featured image via

Nick Sitter and Ulf Sverdrup look at the lessons that the UK could learn from looking at Norway’s relationship with the European Union. 

As the United Kingdom recalibrates its post-Brexit relationship with the European Union, Norway’s experience offers a revealing case study with some important lessons. As a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), Norway (together with Iceland and Liechtenstein) occupies a very distinct position – a member of the single market but excluded from the EU’s political decisionmaking processes.

For British observers, Norway’s case provides a crucial insight: alignment without representation may be a politically stable arrangement, but one with mounting costs that are difficult to sustain in an era of geopolitical turbulence.

Since the narrow defeat of EU membership in a referendum in 1994, Norway has charted an unusual course in European affairs. Its strategy of maximum integration without formal membership has been a triumph of pragmatism over ideology and polarisation. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Labour Prime Minister at the time, did not resign, but set about salvaging Norway’s relationship with the EU. The EEA agreement between the EU and the EFTA states (minus Switzerland) that had entered into force the year before would prove a durable basis for a workable compromise.

Three decades later Norway has become thoroughly Europeanised, incorporating the vast majority of EU rules and policies in EEA-relevant sectors (agriculture and fisheries are not fully covered; Norway never entered the customs union due to a desire to protect its agricultural sector and maintain independence in foreign economic policy), and fully integrated in terms of free movement of goods, services, capital and labour. Through a raft of additional agreements, Norway has adapted to the EU’s new policy areas. In many cases, it has voluntarily aligned itself with EU standards even in areas where no formal agreements exist. In most sectors, policy developments have largely mirrored those in neighbouring EU members Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

This compromise of participation without representation allows Norway to maintain its formal sovereignty, and the political truce between its pro- and anti-EU blocs. The EEA model has proven a surprisingly durable political compromise, because it rests on stable patterns of Euroscepticism in both the party system and the electorate. The two main parties, the pro-EU Conservatives and somewhat more divided Labour, have both had to rely on Eurosceptic parties to form government coalitions. The 1994 referendum mirrored both the result and voting patterns of the 1972 referendum, and even today opinion polls do not indicate much of a change.

But four other factors have helped sustain the EEA compromise. First, Norway’s fossil fuel-funded prosperity has insulated it from the kind of economic crises that pushed many others along the path to EU membership. Likewise, its NATO membership has provided a security umbrella, and no need to seek EU membership for geopolitical protection.

Second, the EEA model has worked well, enabling economic integration while safeguarding sensitive sectors like fisheries and agriculture that are central to Norwegian identity and the country’s centre-periphery political dynamics. The model has also held together reasonably well constitutionally and administratively.

Third, because the EEA model works well, many struggle to identify compelling additional benefits from full membership. Likewise, a high tolerance has developed for the costs of remaining outside.

Fourth, there is little ideological pressure to join since Europe hardly resonates as a political project in which Norway participates and holds a meaningful position. If anything, the continent has become even more peripheral to Norwegian identity than before.

The main lesson here is the importance that a compromise with a broad political base, anchored in both the political left and right, plays in sustaining an EU arrangement (a lesson lost on UK policymakers in the wake of the Brexit referendum). But it helps if the arrangement works well.

A defining feature of the EEA agreement is that it is a dynamic arrangement. Not only did Norway immediately adopt all relevant EU legislation; it also effectively agreed to adopt all new relevant EU legislation. (Although there is a procedure whereby an EEA state can reserve the right not to adopt a new policy, this is a potential deal-breaker and has consequently never been used.)

However, today Norway faces unprecedented challenges. First, the EU complains about Norway’s backlog in terms of transposition of EU law. The primary irritant in EU relations stems from Norway’s decision not to implement remaining portions of the Fourth Energy Package, because this is a clearly stated government policy rather than an ordinary capacity-induced backlog.

Second, the EU’s changes to its budget may generate unintended problems. If resources shift from areas where Norway does not participate (such as agriculture or cohesion funds) to areas where Norway participates (or wishes to) and contributes on a program-by-program basis, it could mean that the mode of association becomes more complicated and expensive.

Third, the strategy of patchwork expansion, whereby Norway buys into new arrangements as the EU expands beyond the core single market areas covered by the EEA, is increasingly difficult. This is particularly challenging in substantial new sectors such as health and crisis management, not to mention geopolitics, trade and economic security.

Nevertheless, despite cautious public opinion, Norway’s technical path to full EU membership is very short. Because Norway is so closely aligned to the EU, it satisfies requirements for membership in most of the 35 negotiation chapters involved in accession. Even under the current rules, negotiations could be completed quickly. Moreover, the geopolitical realities brought about by Russia’s war in Ukraine is causing the EU to reconsider its enlargement and accession procedures. Although this is at an early stage, it could lower the membership threshold and create new opportunities for exemptions and flexibility.

For the United Kingdom, the Norwegian experience offers multiple sobering lessons. Alignment is not a fixed state. It is a continuous, demanding process of adaptation that requires constant political attention and administrative capacity – and cross-party support for dynamic alignment. Norway has demonstrated that maintaining a deep, stable relationship with the EU from outside is possible, but costly. Moreover, as global volatility intensifies and the international order fragments, the Norwegian model increasingly looks like a strategic liability – expensive, constraining, and offering diminishing returns.

The path to Norwegian EU membership faces no insurmountable technical obstacles. The barriers are primarily political: a pragmatic calculation of when the costs of remaining outside finally exceed the benefits of the status quo. In the current security environment, with American guarantees uncertain and European integration accelerating in defence and security domains, that inflection point may be approaching more rapidly than anticipated. The question is no longer whether Norway can join the EU, but whether Norway can afford to remain outside.

By Nick Sitter, Professor at the Department of Law and Governance, BI Norwegian Business School and Ulf Sverdrup, Professor at the Department of Law and Governance, BI Norwegian Business School.

This piece first appeared in our report ‘UK-EU alignment and divergence: the road ahead‘.