Published: September 19, 2025 at 9:19 am
The widely-reported landmark Technology Prosperity Deal signed between the UK and the US during Donald Trump’s State Visit has been billed by ministers as the start of a “next Golden Age of Innovation”.
However, former Meta executive and ex-deputy Prime Minister, Sir Nick Clegg, has dismissed the mammoth investments as “sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley”.
Speaking at the Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge, he described the relationship as “all one-way traffic”, arguing that the announcements largely reflected infrastructure projects already in motion by US firms, merely accelerated to coincide with the state visit.
“We’re a kind of vassal state technologically, we really are,” he warned.
“The moment our companies, our tech companies, start developing any scale or ambition, they have to go to California, because we don’t have the growth capital here.
“In a sense, this US-UK tech deal is just another version of the United Kingdom holding on to Uncle Sam’s coat-tails … which is basically just taking sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley.”