Morning Star Editorial: Why Burnham needs pressing on the Palantir problem
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/why-burnham-needs-pressing-palantir-problem
NHS staff blockade the entrance to NHS England’s headquarters in central London demanding the cancellation of its contract with Palantir, which supplies advanced technology to Israel’s military, April 3, 2024ANDY BURNHAM is not “minded” to grant contracts to CIA-linked tech firm Palantir, we learn from Westminster briefings this week.
The Makerfield MP’s impending coronation leaves us in a strange transitional period where his reported preferences are the stuff of gossip, rather than policies being demanded as the price of support. He has delivered a pitch to the nation of sorts: but no questions were taken, and pinning the PM-to-be down is much harder in the absence of a leadership contest.
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[T]reating Burnham’s premiership as a foregone conclusion allows him to be troublingly vague.
His allies can reassure the left that he isn’t keen on Palantir, citing his record as Manchester mayor in which role he never awarded it a contract; he himself avoids any specific commitments either on future contracts or — significantly — existing ones.
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Thiel is a plutocrat as sinister as Elon Musk, with whom he shares an upbringing in apartheid South Africa: an advocate of “post-democracy,” arguing that democracy is incompatible with human (by which he largely means corporate) freedom and, also like Musk, pitching his own tech companies as future mechanisms of rule.
Palantir’s facilitation of horrific racist policing methods in the US, and still more horrific war crimes by the Israeli military, is well known but cancelling its contracts is not simply a question of ethics.
We have to question the idea that companies as powerful as this provide services on a politically neutral basis, given their founders are explicitly hostile to public services as such.
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It’s good that Burnham is not “minded” to favour Palantir, but a comprehensive rejection of outsourcing policies which now threaten democracy itself is what’s required.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/why-burnham-needs-pressing-palantir-problem
dizzy: Reading the whole Editorial is recommended.
There are competing narratives on Burnham’s approach to Palantir. Apart from or possibly above anything else, reports that Palantir’s system has apalling performance even after optimisation should be adequate and sufficient to abandon Palantir in the NHS.
Labour leadership hopeful Wes Streeting – who recently resigned as health secretary – has said that Palantir is “absolutely critical to the future of the NHS.”
But a briefing prepared for NHS England senior leaders in February said that Palantir’s NHS platform is eight to ten times slower at analysing data than the current NHS tool in use.
“Processing time is reported as taking 4-5 minutes compared to 30 seconds [in the current system]” the briefing states, even after making “optimisation” changes to speed it up.
