A firm obsessed with dominance like Palantir shouldn’t be at the centre of our state

You would think this might be an uncontroversial concern. After all, Palantir is a US spy tech firm whose chair and founder, Peter Thiel, has said he does not believe freedom and democracy are compatible.

It is a firm obsessed with “dominance” – and specifically, US technological dominance: “We built Palantir to ensure America’s future…we build to dominate,” reads one of its ads. In this, it stands shoulder to shoulder with a US President who has openly set out his plan for “the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance”.

From this, it seems reasonable to assume that Palantir perhaps does not have our best interests at heart. And reasonable to question whether firms like this, whose loyalties and priorities are so clearly elsewhere, should be given a role at the heart of the British state: not only in our NHS, but with growing numbers of contracts with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), with policing, in finance, and at every level of Government from national to local.

The UK has, on the whole, been worryingly slow to wake up to this concern – sometimes known as ‘digital sovereignty’. Our European neighbours have been publicly worrying – and in some cases acting – for some years on the concern that the US could, if it chooses, ‘pull the plug’ on vast swathes of their tech infrastructure.

With a US administration that is increasingly bullying and hostile, the UK government needs to wake up too. Instead, the trend in the UK has moved in the opposite direction: in the past year, Palantir has expanded its contracts with the MoD and in UK policing (although, encouragingly, London’s Mayor has pushed back on this when it comes to the Met).

There is, however, a key opportunity for ministers to now escape the firm’s clutches, at least when it comes to the NHS: they have acknowledged that there is a ‘break clause’ in the NHS contract which would allow them to kick Palantir out of our health service next year. The MPs on this committee have rightly called on the government to seize this opportunity.

This would be welcomed not only by anyone with concerns over Britain’s independence from US tech giants, but also by NHS medics and patients who do not see Palantir as an appropriate partner. Last year, the British Medical Association passed a motion describing Palantir as “an unacceptable choice of partner” for the NHS, and warning that their role “threatens to undermine public trust in NHS data systems”.

Palantir’s other customers understandably raise alarm bells – not least, Trump’s ICE paramilitaries responsible for violence across the US.

Palantir has a formidable, well-funded lobbying operation - including work with the firm previously led by the now-disgraced Peter Mandelson. The Government must resist the overtures of this influence machine, and instead listen to the cross-party concerns of MPs, the medics in our NHS, and all of those many members of the public who’ve raised concerns, and take the chance to free England’s health services from Palantir’s growing power.

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Donald Campbell is the advocacy director at tech justice non-profit Foxglove.

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