With the UK and the European Union reaching the last stages of their annual negotiation pantomime and talk shifting with comforting predictability to an imminent Brexit agreement, the recent noise around no deal has obscured discussion of the UK’s future place in the world. Behind the headlines, however, the government’s plans are taking shape. The priority isn’t cars, or even – astonishingly – fish, but data. The consequences for the standards of privacy and protection we have become accustomed to, and increasingly expect, are huge; those for the long-term shape of the UK economy perhaps larger still. Strikingly, Britain’s National Data Strategy, published in December, seeks to “maintain the high watermark of data use set during the pandemic”, which means “positioning the UK as a global champion of data use, and encouraging the international flow of information across borders”. The UK’s first post-Brexit trade deals are organised around this ambition, with the Japan deal, signed in October, a lynchpin for the wider strategy.