British politics is hooked on flashy fake numbers – and the AI investment debacle proves it | Jonathan Portes

A claim that the UK is attracting billions of pounds in AI investment has been debunked. That’s no surprise when our establishment runs on dubious ‘good news’ One trillion dollars. That’s the amount of financial aid Gordon Brown triumphantly announced at the 2009 London G20 summit. (I contributed my own two cents here.) Except it wasn’t exactly real: the number was a mixture of already promised apples and aspirational future oranges. So it should hardly be a surprise that when ministers procl...

By Jonathan Portes