Zarah Sultana: Palantir has no place in UK public services
| Ina Fassbender / AFP via Getty Images
Palantir is not a normal software company. It was founded with an explicit mission which remains at the heart of its operations today: to maintain US global domination.
We know exactly what that means. Endless wars. Drone strikes. A vast machinery of surveillance and occupation stretching from Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. A world in which Washington’s military reach grows ever longer, and the UK prime minister increasingly behaves less like an ally and more like a compliant poodle, nodding along to whatever the White House demands.
On an investor call last February, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, said he was “super proud” of what his company does. Perhaps he was referring to Palantir’s role in enabling ICE to target migrant communities and tear families apart. Or perhaps he meant reports that its technology has allegedly helped the Israeli military generate “kill lists” – a practice condemned by human-rights organisations for contributing to the mass civilian casualties we are witnessing in Gaza.
Whatever Karp had in mind, Keir Starmer did not appear troubled. Later that month, he flew to Palantir’s Washington headquarters to kiss the ring of a corporation deeply embedded in the US military and intelligence infrastructure. He did so alongside his then US ambassador, Peter Mandelson – close friend of the late notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – whose lobbying firm, Global Counsel, has long represented Palantir.
Since then, this government has only tightened its embrace. Building on ties established under the Conservatives, Labour is embedding a company accused by campaigners of facilitating human-rights violations deeper and deeper into our public life. Palantir already operates inside the NHS and across Whitehall – particularly within the Ministry of Defence – pulling Britain further into the slipstream of US military priorities and the worst excesses of the American security state.
No company so entangled in foreign military operations and border policing should be anywhere near our public services. Full stop.
Experts and civil liberties campaigners have repeatedly warned about Palantir’s expanding access to sensitive British data, including NHS medical records – data that the US private healthcare industry is eager to exploit. The risks to privacy, accountability and democracy are profound.
Yet, as with the Tories before them, nothing is off the table for this Labour government when it comes to carving up public services for multinational corporations and their lobbyists. Their deference to Washington is now so complete that they barely bother to conceal their enthusiasm for cosying up to Donald Trump’s network of tech-bro oligarchs. We saw this clearly last summer, when Starmer rolled out the red carpet for Palantir and signed off a £1.5bn “strategic partnership” – at the very moment public services across Britain were collapsing under austerity. It begs the question: who, exactly, is Starmer unwilling to roll out the blood-stained red carpet for?
Across the country, libraries are closing. Swimming pools are shutting. Councils are going bankrupt. But somehow, there is always money available for a CIA-funded contractor at the heart of the US war machine.
And it does not stop at Westminster. Palantir’s tentacles are already extending into our communities. In my constituency of Coventry, the Labour-run council awarded the company a £500,000 contract to develop an AI tool for children’s services. Yes – a firm implicated in military targeting abroad and the kidnapping of children as young as five in the US, was hired to shape how we safeguard children here at home.
We fought back. Led by Your Party councillor, Grace Lewis, and backed by our unions and community campaigners, we forced that contract into review. And let me be absolutely clear: we will not stop until it is cancelled entirely.
But this fight is bigger than one contract or one city. We need a politics that draws a clear line: Palantir – and every corporation that profits from occupation, surveillance, genocide and war – has no place in our society and should never again receive a penny of public money.
This country needs a party willing to resist a government that bows to Washington, sells off our public services and hands power to war-profiteering tech giants. That party is Your Party.
And our fight is only just beginning.
Zarah Sultana is the Your Party MP for Coventry South
