Palantir in the UK: From the Ministry of Defence to the NHS

by Corporate Watch / Arms Trade, Companies, News, Palestine, Public Services, Slider, Social Control, Technology / 22 Mar 2024

Palantir in the UK

This is the second of two articles investigating US tech company, Palantir. Part one explores the company’s history and its work in the US and internationally. Part two charts how the firm expanded into the NHS and consolidated its power in the health service.

Palantir hit the spotlight recently after winning the contract to lead on NHS England’s £330m Federated Data Platform (FDP). Set to run for at least five years, this is the largest ever single NHS IT contract, and an extension of two years following that is likely. The FDP claims it will overhaul and update the NHS patient data system, valued at £5bn per year, for the largest public health service in the world. Data has often been described as the new oil, but some commentators say it’s far more valuable.

Health data is some of the most sensitive there is, and it’s just been handed over to a company which seems unable to keep even its own sensitive information under wraps. Successive Tory and Labour governments – and their private sector mates – have decimated the NHS, and now officials are pointing to technology being the answer to the problems they created. Health Workers for a Free Palestine told Corporate Watch that awarding Palantir this contract amounts to “a threat to patient safety, the reputation of the NHS, and the ethical principles of healthcare”. Given Palantir’s history, significant questions also emerge over the way it made moves into the NHS.

We charted Palantir’s rise to power in the UK and found:

Palantir gained a foothold in the NHS via emergency Covid-19 contracts awarded without normal competition or transparency.
It has been working in the UK since at least 2014, enabling the Ministry of Defence to execute its digital defence strategy, and surveilling UK borders with the Home Office.
Palantir’s UK branch is headed by Louis Mosley, grandson of British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley. Mosley has played a critical role in Palantir’s expansion from defence work to the UK public healthcare sector.
The company’s reputation and relationships have been aided by Global Counsel, a consultancy and lobbying firm set up by Peter Mandelson.
Palantir’s path to power has been facilitated by cultivating close relationships with senior NHS staff and government officials, and funding think tanks such as Policy Exchange and Institute for Government.

Just a Giant US Spy Company Moving Our Data Around. Nothing to See Here.

NHS England insists that it needs an FDP to solve its data management problems. NHS data has historically been kept on many different systems across Trusts and regions, and this is one of the reasons the health service has struggled to effectively share and use data across England. Past attempts to set up IT and data systems within the NHS have been massive – and very expensive – failures, and low patient trust in the systems led to big opt-outs. Palantir will now lead on making and running the FDP with support from other NHS darlings Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), North of England Care System Support (NECS) and Carnall Farrar. Privacy campaigners, healthcare professionals, and patient groups, have kept the pressure on by continuing to challenge this controversial deal.

A few months into its new contract, it seems that the giant American tech company has already shot itself in the foot. In Dec 2023, non-profit legal campaigners, the Good Law Project, found that Palantir had potentially already broken the terms of the FDP contract. The latter had hired a Tory-linked PR company, Topman Guerin, and a marketing and social media influencer agency to secretly discredit the Good Law Project after it had spoken out against it. The influencers hadn’t done their homework and had sent an email inviting Julia Patterson from the NHS campaign group EveryDoctor to join in the social media smear campaign. If they had looked a little harder, they would have seen that she had previously collaborated with the Good Law Project and had been vocal about not wanting Palantir in the NHS. By Jan 2024, NHS England had announced that it would investigate Palantir’s potential breach of contract.

Palantir in the UK

Executive Vice President of UK and Europe, Louis Mosley (grandson of British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, and former Tory party activist) recently said that the company has secretly had ”a very large presence here” in the UK “for over a decade”. Reports link them to the UK’s intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), as far back as 2008. Palantir’s fascination with the NHS and healthcare data has been growing in recent years; sped up, like many other private companies’ involvement in public healthcare, by the pandemic. Crisis capitalism at its finest….

Palantir Technologies Ltd. employs over 900 people in the UK and has been based in London since 2009. London is its European headquarters, and it’s where the company does research and development for its software, Foundry. The company is planning a second base in Northern England soon.

Westminster green-lit Palantir’s NHS involvement under the guise of helping during the pandemic. However, the company already held contracts with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and has secured more with the Home Office, DEFRA and the Department for Levelling Up. From looking at the company’s publicly available contracts, we know that it has been carrying out work for the UK government since at least 2015, when it signed up to run a pilot of its Gotham software with the Government Digital Service. It didn’t take long before the company upped its game and started working with the Ministry of Defence and the NHS.

Mosley described the company’s NHS strategy in 2021 as ‘buying their way in’ and “hoovering up” small businesses working with the NHS to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance”. But this wasn’t the only strategy Palantir had for working in the UK, as we shall see.

Palantir and the Ministry of Defence

Palantir’s second public contract in the UK was with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), a £1.6m deal for a Royal Navy Data Science Pilot in 2018. The MoD awarded Palantir several more contracts for digital and medical defence services in the following years, all worth millions. The company currently has a contract worth £75m with the Defence Digital unit of the MoD. The deal will see Palantir power the digital strategy, enabling the MoD to use data faster and more strategically both at home and in international military operations. But where did Palantir’s relationship with the MoD come from?

Looks like this guy has something to do with it: Sir Graeme Lamb. Lamb is a retired British Army officer and former Deputy Commander of the US-led coalition in Iraq. He also served in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s, during the most recent period of armed struggle against ongoing British occupation, and in Afghanistan. He now works as a consultant for Skarbek Associates management consultants, whose customers range from government, healthcare, cyber security and defence. Skarbek was founded by fellow ex-British army paratrooper and GlaxoSmithKline Vice President, Paul Heugh. The company was invited to speak at the 2019 conference for the Centre for Army Leadership along with Capita. In 2019, Lamb’s managing partner Charles Antelme left Skarbek to become Head of Defence at Mitie (see our 2023 profile of Mitie here).

Lamb, presumably in his Skarbek role, has been advising Palantir since he retired from the military in 2009 and name-dropping the company at official meetings as far back as 2014. In one 2014 defence committee hearing, Lamb spoke highly of working with Palantir, stating how the technology it specialises in could potentially transform the use of data for the armed forces. Four years later, Palantir got its first contract with the Royal Navy. John Woodcock, or Lord Walney, former Labour MP and Defence Committee member, also gave evidence at this meeting. Ten years later, Woodcock is advising Palantir about office spaces in Leeds or Manchester.

Palantir is good at maintaining strategic relationships, and its connection to another individual, former chief of secret intelligence service MI6 , Sir John Sawers, is an important one. Sawers – who now also enjoys a directorship at BP – set up Newbridge Advisory in 2019 to advise corporate clients on geopolitics and political risk. In July of that year, Sawers set up a meeting between Palantir Cabinet Office permanent secretary John Manzoni (a private sector guru who spent 24 years in BP and other oil and gas companies). Following on from this meeting, Karp met Michael Gove, also a cabinet minister at the time. The company gave a free trial of its Foundry platform and a year later, in August 2020, was awarded a £27m contract with the Cabinet to monitor the flow of goods in and out of the UK post-Brexit. This deal was for the company to run Foundry as part of a border management project which listed Amazon Web Services, Proofpoint and Datadog as “subcontractors or partners”. The company currently oversees the post-Brexit UK border development, integration with other systems and data analytics on goods and people entering and exiting the UK.

Newbridge Advisory was investigated in 2023 by the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists about this as the firm was not legally allowed to lobby on behalf of clients. Apparently, the fact that Sawer introduced Karp to Manzoni was deemed to be an “incidental exception’’ by the investigators and no further action was taken.

Palantir also has a foothold with local government and Levelling Up contracts and in early 2022, it began working with Michael Gove on a contract to run the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which is built on Foundry. Similar to its Covid contracts, Palantir offered a free trial of its platform for the initial running of the housing scheme for displaced Ukrainians. Since then it’s received two 12-month contract extensions, without competitive processes, worth £10m. An investigation by the National Audit Office in late 2023 reported that the Cabinet Office, in its own report, found that changing providers from Palantir would be more costly and time consuming than extending.

UK complicity in Palestinian genocide

Given Palantir’s open support for the Israel state as it commits genocide in Gaza, it’s perhaps little surprise to find further links to Israel in the company’s UK operations. Sir Daniel Lincoln Bethlehem is a lawyer and has been a director of Palantir UK since 2013. He was the legal advisor to the UK foreign and commonwealth office for the government between 2006 – 2011 under Blair, Brown and the Cameron-Clegg coalition. He was also an external legal advisor to the Israeli government, working with Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, and has represented Sharon and Netanyahu’s government at the Hague. In 2002, he advised Sharon not to cooperate with the International Court of Justice’s investigation into the battle of Jenin in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Two years later, he defended the construction of the apartheid wall on Palestinian land; the ICJ found the wall to be in breach of the Geneva Convention and ordered Israel to cease construction and make reparations to those affected. Bethlehem is renowned for developing international law regarding ‘pre-emptive’ self-defence, the Bethlehem principles, the same law that Israel is currently using to defend its genocide in Gaza.

While Palantir ‘helps’ the National Health Service better manage sensitive patient data in the UK, its tech is also being used to facilitate attacks on Gaza, attacks which have resulted in the utter devastation of medical facilities there.

Former British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould was one of the main people involved in discussions about Palantir getting emergency NHS data contracts during the pandemic. As CEO of NHSX, he recommended to Ministers that they ‘’used emergency powers to award the contract to Palantir’’. Gould also had meetings with Palantir in 2019, months before it got its first NHS contract. This was part of a wider pattern during the pandemic which bypassed normal legal processes for granting big public contracts. He admitted this to the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments in 2023, when he went to work with Quantexa, Palantir’s rival for the FDP contract. While Gould was CEO of NHSX he oversaw the creation of the UK-Israel Tech Hub in 2011. This Hub – based in the British Embassy in Israel – is where Israel supports the UK with tech advancement, in areas such as Cyber and Health.

Strategic Relationships

Strategic relationships have been key for Palantir in its UK business. Mosley hosted events for some of the most high-level government and NHS officials, all before his company’s first NHS contract at the start of Covid. In 2019, Mosley held a watermelon cocktail dinner with senior NHS official David Prior (Prior is a Conservative Peer, an NHS chair and was head of NSHX, the digital arm of the NHS). Afterwards, Prior copied Mosley into an email with Gould, then-CEO of NHSX. Then in early 2020, just before the global pandemic was declared, Prior brought a group of NHS experts over to San Francisco to meet Mosley and get a demo of Palantir’s software. Perhaps those watermelon cocktails did the trick…

Mosley went on to meet with Antonia Romeo in late Jan 2020. Romeo, now secretary at the Ministry of Justice, was then secretary for International Trade. In her time in that role, she attempted to start a campaign called #datainGREAT which sought to promote Cambridge Analytica in the US. Mosley hosted Romeo at the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2020 at Palantir’s special pavilion .Notes from Romeo’s briefing beforehand show that the UK’s senior trade official was expected to be extra accommodating to the tech giant.

Some talking points given to Romeo for the meeting included saying that she knew Palantir had been in contact with Gould and Lord Prior and about the latter’s visit to San Francisco for a demonstration of Foundry software. She was advised to mention NHSX as the organisation that brings together digital, data and tech in the NHS. And she was asked to propose introducing Mosley and Palantir to the tech director for the Crown Commercial Service, Dr Philip Orumwense. In further emails, Romeo was told to offer help to the company with UK recruitment, real estate and visas.

Two months after those meetings, Palantir got its first NHS contract.

Romeo might not have linked Palantir up with Orumwense then and there. But they did eventually end up on the speakers list together at the Public Sector Data Summit 2023, along with James Austin (Director of Data Strategy and Policy, NHS Digital).

Palantir’s Pandemic Profiteering

Like any good profit-making corporation, Palantir keeps looking for new customers and areas of work. Plus, sticking to the murky spy worlds of defence, security, policing, and intelligence isn’t too great for your public image. Palantir set its eyes on the NHS, but how did it end up with so many Covid-19 contracts from the Cabinet and NHS?

On March 11th 2020, as the global pandemic was declared, tech consultant, Dominic Cummings, and NHS chief exec Simon Stevens reportedly called a meeting with tech companies, including Palantir, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon about how to tackle Covid-19. The next day, Palantir signed a deal with the NHS for its software to be used to set up a Covid database for just £1 for an initial three months.

A few months later, Palantir got two more emergency contracts while usual procurement processes were suspended. The first contract was to run a £900k Test and Trace Data Analysis Platform with Foundry for three months. The software was used to manage the Covid data store, support the vaccine roll-out, predict Covid hot spots, allocate PPE and ICU equipment, and manage staff and patients. They subcontracted Amazon Web Services to host the data in their data centres. The company also won a six month, £1.5m contract to pilot its Foundry platform with the NHS until Dec 11th 2020. As soon as the pilot ended, the NHS signed a contract with the company for £23.5m for two years. At the end of that period, this contract was extended to support the procurement of the FDP at a cost of £11.5m for six months. The next part of the company’s winning streak came in June 2023 with a contract for £24m to prepare the systems it had created to be handed over to another company, should the latter win the upcoming FDP contract. By Nov 2023, Palantir had earned £60.5m and went on to win the FDP contract itself.

The FDP is going to be the world’s largest centralised healthcare data platform. This data consists of “personal health records, clinical data, and public data’’ – some of the most sensitive data there is. The NHS – being the biggest public health service in the world – has a lot of data, so it makes sense that there needs to be systems in place to manage this. But Palantir co-founder and chair, Peter Thiel, has famously said that people’s love for the NHS is like Stockholm Syndrome – a term meaning the feeling of trust or affection of a hostage for its kidnapper. The privatisation-loving, American nationalist thinks the NHS needs to be ripped up and started over.

Circling the NHS

Ahead of moving on the NHS, Palantir was heavily involved with US multinationals and healthcare giants. It had big investments in American healthcare company Babylon Holdings Ltd before it filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Babylon Health was its UK-based subsidiary and a lot of the company’s global healthcare experience came from working with NHS England. M att Hancock endorsed the company regularly, and it later turned out that some of its shareholders were donating directly to him and the Tories while he was Health Secretary.

Ali Parsa founded Babylon in 2013. The former Goldman Sachs tech investor spoke in 2021 about Babylon’s use of Palantir’s software, Foundry. Parsa was also the CEO and founder of private healthcare company Circle Health Group, one of the UK’s largest private hospital providers, famous for its disastrous takeover of Hinchingbrooke Health Care Trust 2012. Hinchingbrooke was the first ever NHS hospital to be taken over by a private company. It was a massive, expensive failure.

Scandal-ridden, US multinational tech company IBM is another of Palantir’s partners. They have been working together with NHS Digital (now merged with NHS England) as part of IBM’s data security services.

Global Counsel

Palantir’s NHS connections started long before Covid and Cummings. Another layer of the company’s strategy emerged through its use of lobbyists and consultancy firms, and by funding influential think tanks. International consultancy firm Global Counsel (GC) is one of these. The company claims that it does not lobby, instead helping their clients to navigate ‘’politics, business and policymaking’’. However, political commentators commonly refer to GC as a lobbyist. If it looks like a duck…

Blairite Peter Mandel son co-founded Global Counsel in 2010, and the firm is brimming with staff that have worked in Westminster and Whitehall. Palantir first became a client of GC in 2018 just as the firm began to employ senior influential figures from the NHS.

Matthew Swindells, once named the 4th most influential person in the NHS, was one of the first NHS ‘stars’ to join GC. Leaving his NHS role as deputy chief executive and director of operations and information, he joined the team at GC as a senior advisor in 2019. Just two months later, Swindells was working with Palantir in his new position. And all this after having agreed to not use the knowledge or contacts he made within the NHS to the unfair advantage of his clients.

But this wasn’t Swindells first experience of working in the private healthcare sector. He had joined the NHS in May 2016 after leaving his role as senior vice president at Cerner, one of the world’s largest private healthcare IT companies.

Swindells was very busy after leaving the NHS in 2019. As well as GC, he went to work as an advisor to consultancy giant, Accenture (which also just got the FDP contract) – to keep those revolving doors turning, former Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould (as NHSX CEO) took over all his responsibilities. Swindells also set up his own private healthcare consultancy firm, MJS Healthcare Consulting which – surprise, surprise – offers strategic consultancy on healthcare tech. He isn’t a stranger to the rest of the FDP team either, and in the past few years has been working as an advisor with healthcare management consultancy firm Carnall Farrer, and PwC via the Imperial College Healthcare Trust.

Since 2022, Swindells has acted as chair for four Trusts in London while continuing to work advising private multinationals on how to get ahead in the NHS. All of the Trusts he chairs use Palantir software, but Swindells has agreed to be excluded from any decisions that involve Palantir in at least one of the Trust meetings he chairs. In March 2022, Swindells became a director at Prism, another NHS consultancy partner.

In July 2022, GC’s Swindells, Tom McArdle, one of Palantir’s UK health leads and the NHS’s Victoria Otley Groom appeared on an NHS Confederation webinar to discuss “Looking at strategies for ICSs to make integrated care ‘work’’’. The NHS Confederation is an arm’s-length organisation, made up of public and private partners that influence policy on behalf of their members in the NHS. Its current CEO, Matthew Taylor, was Tony Blair’s chief adviser on political strategy. The organisation boasts a who’s who of private interests in the NHS, and events are regularly sponsored by corporates.

In March 2023, as Palantir was working on the transition contract to the FDP that it had just won, GC hosted a panel discussion and drinks reception called ‘Rebooting the NHS’. The lineup featured shadow health secretary and, privatisation fan, Wes Streeting; former health minister Patricia Hewitt; and Palantir’s UK health lead, Joanna Peller along with Swindells and Peterson. We wonder if there were watermelon cocktails at the drink’s reception for this event too?

Many Hands Make Palantir Work

Palantir has also directly hired some well-connected ex-NHS staff. Many of them had to agree not to tell any industry secrets that could unfairly advantage the tech behemoth that had just won a £330m public healthcare deal.

Dr Indra Joshi was director of AI for NHSX and led on the creation of the NHS AI Lab from its inception until 2022. She then took on a role as director of health, research and AI with Palantir. Joshi was working with the tech company while director of AI for the NHS in 2020. They worked together on NHS Covid contracts alongside Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Faculty. She had worked in the NHS since 2006, except for a short stint (2014 – 2015) as senior policy advisor for the DWP. Her role at Palantir includes working to improve tech and data in health and care. Her social media tells the story of someone who supports diversity and equality. Yet, Palantir technology is being used to racially target vulnerable migrants and more effectively target Black and Brown people globally.

Palantir’s list of staff with connections to the NHS, government, consultancy firms and lobbyists, and companies it has funded is extensive. But here are a few more standout names:

Harjeet Dhaliwal has been a deployment strategist at Palantir since 2022. She was Deputy Director of Data Services for NHS England from 2019 – 2022 and before that spent the previous 12 years either working with health commissioning in England, or working directly with data in NHS roles.
Mike Spiers, has been a senior manager at Faculty AI since 2022 (a private company which has worked with government departments and corporations on AI and tech). Spiers worked with the UK’s Health Security Agency from 2020-22 and oversaw Covid Testing at the same time as Palantir got its first big NHS contract. Before this he worked with Palantir and for had a senior position at the Home Office.
Sal Uddin became Palantir’s commercial lead in December 2022 after leaving the civil service a month earlier. The government put conditions to mitigate potential conflicts of interest and made Uddin promise to not use his knowledge or contacts for at least two years for the benefit of Palantir. While Uddin worked with the civil service, his office signed at least three procurement agreements that pre-approved Palantir to work on government contracts.
Ben Mascall has been Palantir’s UK comms lead since last 2022. Before that, he worked in numerous top-level comms roles for the Tories.
Political strategist, Isaac Levido, is a founding partner of Fleetwood Strategy, lobbyists who have been working with Palantir since at least 2021. Levido spent time as a Tory campaign director, helping Boris and Rishi do their thing. He is tipped to rejoin the Sunak campaign team for the 2024 election.
Salma Shah, non-executive director of Mitie and director at Kraken Strategy Consultants, is a former advisor to the government (including to Sajid Javid) and has also worked as a consultant with Palantir. She spent time as a Home Office senior advisor and also did a stint as a Tory press officer. Shah’s husband is Andrew Paul Smith, former Lord Mayor of London. They were ranked 34 on Britain’s political power couples list in 2022, along with Boris and Carrie Johnson and Dominic Cummings and Mary Wakefield.
Duncan Roberston of tech firm, Dogtooth, was working as Palantir’s UK Government Lead at least between 2014 and 2019. While there, he worked on a Crime Risk Forecasting (or Predictive Policing) project which mentions Amazon, Google, Citibank, Motorola and Microsoft (to name a few). This was patented by the US government and the document shows that there were communications with Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the UK about this patent between 2014 and 2015. He also used to work with HM Forces and the Met Police.
Julian Glover’s Derbyshire and London Ltd consultants is also working with Palantir, according to government records. Glover is a freelancer and writer who spent from 2001 – 2011 as a Guardian lead writer and columnist. He spoke alongside Palantir at a fringe event during the 2021 Tory Party Conference on the theme of Levelling Up, Reforming Government.
Harry Leadbeater, former ITV journalist and producer is now Palantir’s central government lead – perhaps his media connections still come in handy?
Notorious right-wing think tank, Policy Exchange has hosted Tory and Labour events sponsored by Policy Exchange also wrote a report which praised Palantir’s Foundry platform used during the pandemic.
And finally, but definitely not the last of Palantir’s many connections, there’s the Institute for Government. This think tank, funded by a range of corporate interests including Palantir, PwC and Accenture, has held at least three events since 2022 on “Getting things done with data in government’’. Palantir specifically funded these events and it was included on the panel alongside top government and NHS officials. The themes were data in Levelling Up, the NHS and Defence.

Opposition

“Over £60m have now been handed to Peter Thiel’s spy-tech firm with zero competitive tender, zero consultation, and next to no public engagement. This is poor practice for the spending of public money. It’s also a serious risk to patient trust.”

(Cori Crider, a director at tech campaign group Foxglove)

The FDP contract has given Palantir a massive boost. It’s the first big health contract of its kind outside the US, and company reports show a 267% increase at least in healthcare profits for the firm between 2020 and 2022. But this hasn’t happened unopposed. Several social justice organisations in the UK have recently launched a legal action against the government challenging Palantir’s FDP contract award. The legal case highlights patient data privacy fears. The campaigners have also highlighted the lack of sufficient evidence to show that Palantir’s software brings any value to the NHS.

A report by Foxglove and the Doctors’ Association UK gives more detail about the company’s failed pilots and poses serious questions about how and why the company was a ‘shoo-in’ for the FDP contracts. Activists took the government to court in early 2021 demanding an end to Palantir’s continuing NHS involvement without the usual public consultation, competition and further investigation. An additional argument was that sensitive health data should not be handed to secretive spy-tech companies. They won, and the government said there would be no extension of contracts without public consultation. Yet, in June 2023 NHS England went on to award Palantir another £25m to transition to the FDP.

Emails have revealed that officials were discussing Palantir, back in 2020, as a sure thing to win a contract that hadn’t yet gone to tender. NHS England denied this interpretation of the emails. However, each contract given to Palantir from this point onward appears to have strengthened the likelihood of the company securing further follow-on contracts. Evidence suggests it may have had advantages during the tender process, helped too by the fact that during this time, many NHS contracts were awarded under emergency arrangements.

Palantir gained more negative publicity when Health Workers for a Free Palestine picketed its London headquarters in late December 2023. They protested the company’s complicity in the occupation of Palestine, and demanded the NHS sever ties with it and bring vital public services back in house. They told Corporate Watch:

It is almost always detrimental to patient care for NHS contracts go to private companies with vested interests, often with little experience in healthcare, when the NHS is full of highly skilled professionals who could be empowered in-house to transform our health system for the better. Palantir snuck its way into the NHS during Covid-19, and continues to exploit powerful connections and procurement advantages to expand its reach. Palantir openly opposes the NHS as a public service for the people.
Through companies like Palantir and their insidious relationship to the British State we see how our rights to healthcare in the UK are linked to justice for the Palestinian people, and it is through identifying these connections that we find avenues of resistance.
As health workers for a free Palestine, we call for the cancellation of Palantir’s contract, for the NHS to have no contracts with companies complicit in the Israeli occupation or other human rights abuses, and for all data services to be brought in-house

Campaigners have also warned of the creeping scope of the FDP, the monopoly lock-in of the private sector to our NHS, Palantir’s track record and reputation, the questionable procurement processes and the company’s cosy relationship with government and NHS figures.

Conclusion

Palantir has used money, power, and influence to get to where it is in the NHS and across the UK. At times it has sponsored right-wing think tanks, hired lobbyists and hired ex-NHS management. It gets name-dropped by influential defence and government figures, goes on to host key people in power, and then plans a social media strategy that seems aimed at undermining campaigners. Is winning big contracts when normal procedures are paused fair?

Palantir is now firmly embedded in the NHS, yet simultaneously earns millions from selling software and services to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) as it continues to kill rising numbers of Palestinian adults and children. It also makes money through selling products to police and border forces who use it to more effectively racially profile and deport people. If you want to join in the fight against Palantir in the NHS, you can follow campaigns and actions with Just Treatment, Foxglove, The Good Law Project, Health Workers 4 a Free Palestine and others.

Tech and data are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and like most things, they could be used for the benefit of the majority — not just the profit of the few. Instead of selling off the NHS to billionaires who seem intent on profiting from war and destruction, the government could listen to the patients, workers and the general public who are pushing for life-enhancing services to be brought in-house.