Actually yes, that would be an ideal intervention of state into computing infrastructure.
It could even be revenue generating as, once developed, it could be sold out to the private sector, instead of essentially being taxed by foreign corporations for such basic digital infrastructure as hypervisors and key/value stores.
It could also act as a buffer and wage-stabiliser for people like us, who work in tech, by providing guaranteed employment when the private sector implements layoffs.
I don't know why anyone in our position wouldn't support that.
The UK also needs better distribution of data centers. Ireland is off the table for some services, like police etc. So all data ends up in London, and you need to distribute between AWS and Azure, but you don't get the regional distribution.
So, yea, build some data centers in Scotland and somewhere in the midlands, setup some good cloud services, starting with the basics - Compute, DB, and storage.
I mean, you can work for government, it's excellent (if underpaid) work. But they absolutely don't have the long term scale, focus, or investment to build something like Databricks/Foundry over several decades.
Which, they could - in fact, government (specifically meaning Civil Service) is the ideal environment in which to manage long-term scale, focus, and investment - it's just that private (in fact multinational) interests have weaponized politics against "government", which in practice means "good governance".
The UK absolutely, categorically has the talent to build something like AWS. They should do this, but I feel like the government doesn't have the talent to fund and execute on a project like this.
Choice would be a fine thing ... I understand there is a move in some European countries towards more open source. How successful that'll be is debatable, but at least they're trying ffs.
But they've been trying for fourty years and not got very far. You can argue government should all be running Linux all you want, but if you want to deliver services, sometimes it's okay to just buy something off the shelf that works.
The irony of course being that the "off-the-shelf" something in fact needs to be adapted to an ever-shifting set of requirements, and then does not "work".
