Source: The Register: Biting the hand that feeds
A parliamentary committee has concluded that the UK government cannot meet any of its own ten supply security benchmarks for critical minerals essential to tech manufacturing, semiconductors, and renewable energy—with realistic domestic or allied alternatives still a decade away. This creates a hard constraint on the government's stated tech sovereignty ambitions: you cannot build a genuinely independent semiconductor or EV industry while importing 90%+ of rare earths and other strategic minerals from a single geopolitical adversary. The gap between political rhetoric around "levelling up" tech independence and actual material capacity exposes how dependent Western tech infrastructure remains on Chinese processing dominance, a leverage point Beijing has cultivated deliberately over 20 years.