Green party leader Zack Polanski (Green Party of England and Wales). Image: Bristol Green Party Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
As the consultation on Jackdaw, a major North sea oil and gas project ends, the Green Party leader calls out Prime Minister Burnham’s ‘weasel words’ on approval of more North Sea drilling and says it is a clear breach of Labour’s manifesto pledge.
Last week, the Green leader called an emergency press conference to urge Andy Burnham to act, and was joined by a firefighter, a GP and an ex soldier, all outlining the devastating impact the climate crisis is having in their areas of public service. Sky News have reported that the Government has rejected his call for COBR to be reconvened, with the Government ‘insisting supply chains are resilient’.
Zack Polanski said,
“We are now facing the fifth heatwave in months following the recent deaths of 3,000 people in our country from extreme weather conditions.”
“This is the greatest crisis this country has faced since the Second World War and to complacently dismiss the demands for immediate action by saying everything is under control is gross negligence, blatantly untrue and misses the severity of the crisis”
“Only days after dedicated public servants talked about the need for urgent action, backed up by indisputable science, to secure our food supplies and the health of the most vulnerable, the Labour government says it’s all in hand, and supply chains are resilient.”
On the ending of the consultation for Jackdaw, Zack Polanski says,
“In the midst of a heatwave fuelled by the climate crisis, the science is clear that more North Sea drilling would be a dereliction of duty by Labour. Whatever weasel words are used on drilling within new or existing licences, one of the new Prime Minister’s first significant decisions would be to break Labour’s manifesto pledge.
“In their own analysis, Jackdaw’s owners have themselves said that only 27 direct full time jobs would be created if given the go ahead.
“This has nothing to do with boosting the economy for the people of this country and far more to do with boosting obscene profits for fossil fuel companies and their shareholders. I made clear in my press conference last week, that’s why this needs to be treated for the serious crisis it is, with financial support for homes to keep cool and for fossil fuel giants to pay the costs of extreme weather adaptation.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Green party leader Zack Polanski (Green Party of England and Wales). Image: Bristol Green Party Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Polanski calls for financial support for homes to keep cool, and free cool spaces in every community
Says extreme weather poses threats to safety, food and water supply, and our way of life
Calls for fossil fuel giants to pay cost of adapting to extreme weather and fire risk
Green Party leader Zack Polanski has delivered a ‘reality check’ to the Prime Minister as he ‘sounded the alarm’ about the impacts of extreme heat and wildfires in the UK.
Speaking at the end of yet another heat health alert, Polanski warned that ‘what we’re living through right now are likely some of the least extreme summer temperatures we’ll experience in our lifetimes’ and accused new Prime Minister Andy Burnham of failing to act.
The Green leader set out a series of measures he called on Burnham to take to keep people safe from extreme heat, including financial support to keep homes cool and cool spaces in every area, after an estimated 3000 people died as a result of dangerous temperatures in recent months.
Warning that the crisis risked food and water shortages, Polanski called on the government to bring water into full public ownership – saying that water companies had failed to secure our water supply with leaky pipes and a failure to build new reservoirs.
He also cited farmers warning of the risk of empty shelves, after flooding followed by drought led to the UK facing its worst harvest on record.
Polanski was joined at a press conference by an ex-soldier, a GP, and a firefighter, who described the consequences of extreme weather they had seen in their work – and broadcaster Chris Packham who sounded the alarm about the future risks of the climate crisis.
Polanski said:
“The scenes we have seen play out on our television screens are frankly apocalyptic.
“And yet the response from our government is to pretend none of this is happening. It’s an astonishing dereliction of duty from those whose first responsibility is to keep us safe.
“And from the media – with some brilliant and notable exceptions – we’ve seen more clamouring for North Sea drilling in the last few weeks than raising the alarm on climate breakdown.
“While our country has come together – to offer shelter to those who had to leave their homes due to wildfires, to check in with elderly neighbours, to care for those who are sick because of the heat – the government has been far, far too quiet.”
He went on:
“In the immediate term, we need to keep people safe from extreme temperatures. That means a free, accessible cool space in every local area. And financial support for households to heatproof their home.
“Second, we need a robust wildfire prevention strategy. A fire service with the resources it needs to tackle blazes when they come. That must include firefighting helicopters where needed, and not again seeing the shocking sight of requiring a charity to step in to contract a private firm to help fight the fires.
“And this should be funded by taxing the fossil fuel giants who are profiting from fuelling these infernos.
“Finally, to secure our water supply, prevent droughts and protect our food system we need to bring water back into public hands. Right now, money is flowing out of our hands into the pockets of shareholders – just like water is flowing out of these companies’ leaky pipes in the middle of a drought.”
Carl Benfield, former soldier and engineer, said:
“As a soldier and an engineer, I was used to conducting threat assessments and defensive plans. It is clear to me that climate change is the single greatest threat to human security we face.
“Removing climate resilience from our national defence priorities was an act of complete strategic blindness.
“You cannot defend a nation if you refuse to acknowledge the very force that makes its infrastructure obsolete, burns its countryside, and threatens its food and water supply.”
Green party leader Zack Polanski (Green Party of England and Wales). Image: Bristol Green Party Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
As speculation mounts as to who Andy Burnham will choose as chancellor, Zack Polanski said “The Green Party will tax millionaires and billionaires through a wealth tax. It is reported today that Labour by contrast are choosing to let millionaires and billionaires pick who their chancellor is. That is why we are here to replace Labour.”
Andy Burnham delivers a speech at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, to pledge to give Britain the “circuit-breaker it needs” while unveiling his plans for devolution and the economy, June 29, 2026
THE Green Party called on prospective prime minister Andy Burnham yesterday to cut energy bills by £150 before winter by shifting policy costs off household electricity bills and onto general taxation.
Zack Polanski’s party said a wealth tax should partly fund policies including the warm homes discount, which are currently funded through electricity bills and account for nearly 10 per cent of domestic electricity charges.
Ofgem’s price cap rose by 13 per cent yesterday to £1,862 a year for the average household, with forecasters expecting prices to remain high this winter.
Cornwall Insight predicted a typical household would face a bill of £1,849 from October.
After Chancellor Rachel Reeves moved some policy costs onto general taxation in November’s budget, the Greens urged Mr Burnham and his new chancellor to do the same for the remaining five policies funded through bills, saving around £120 a year on average.
Removing energy debt servicing costs from bills could save a further £35 a year.
Palantir is benefiting from millions of pounds of tax deductions that allow it to pay very little corporate tax in the United Kingdom despite soaring profits, an investigation by openDemocracy reveals.
The controversial tech firm has won at least £670m in UK public contracts in recent years, which have helped to make the country its second-largest market by revenue after the United States, where it is headquartered. Yet despite accounting for 10% of the company’s global revenue last year, its tax payments in the UK amounted to less than 5% of its total global cash tax spend, according to US filings.
The filings suggest Palantir’s UK subsidiary paid less than $1.08m (£820,000) in cash tax in the UK in 2025 – less than it paidin Korea, Japan, France and Germany – after accumulating tax deductions due to stock prices. Palantir’s stock has surged since the company went public in 2020, peaking in 2025 before paring back gains this year.
In 2024, Palantir’s UK subsidiary reported pre-tax profits of £25.3m, but assessed its local corporate tax requirement as only around £2m, according to the latest accounts filed with Companies House. This puts its annual corporate tax rate at roughly 8% – far lower than the 25% usually paid by businesses with profits over £250,000 in the UK.
In 2023, the company’s tax rate was lower still, at 4.7% on pre-tax profits of approximately £19.1m, and in 2022 it was 4.2% on pre-tax profits of around £19.9m. Its UK accounts are not yet available for 2025 onwards. Taken together, that’s just £3.7m of tax on £63.4m in cumulative pre-tax profits over three years.
openDemocracy analysed hundreds of pages of Palantir’s filings in the US and the UK from 2020 to 2025, a period when the company recorded extraordinary growth in revenue and profits. We found the company’s low tax exposure was down to two factors: A structured arrangement that limits the profits recognised in the UK, and a provision in the UK tax code that rewards companies with significant tax breaks in return for compensating their employees with stock rather than in cash.
This strategy, experts say, is legal and very effective. In 2020, the company had already accumulated £32m in tax breaks in the UK, according to Companies House, of which about £26m were due to what the company called “employee share acquisition relief”. Two years later, the total size of the UK tax break had ballooned sevenfold to $303.4m (approximately £230m) in net operating losses in the UK, which its parent company said “can be carried forward indefinitely” in its 2022 annual filings in the US.
The nature of annual filings makes it hard to assess the current size of Palantir’s accumulated tax deductions, but it is clear that the company’s tax deductions in the UK have grown much faster than its profits. The most recent Companies House accounts suggest the company gained about £92m in tax deductions in 2024 alone, of which it used a small portion to reduce its tax assessment for the year from £6.3m at the standard rate of 25% to only about £2m on pre-tax profits of £25.3m.
“When profitable companies are paying very little tax, especially when much of their revenues derive from taxpayers’ money itself, then it’s important to ask why,” said Mike Lewis, the director of TaxWatch. “Is it because tax incentives and tax breaks are poorly targeted? Or is it because companies are shifting profits in ways that our tax system is supposed to counteract?”
In Palantir’s case, the company’s surging stock price created deductions at a scale that would lower its tax burden even if the company recognised more profits in the UK.
The company is far from the only tech firm to have reduced its UK tax burden in this way. Fair-tax proponents have called for the UK to do a better job of taxing tech companies since Meta (then known as Facebook) provoked outrage for paying only £4,327 in corporate taxes in 2014, after paying more than £35m to staff in a share bonus scheme.
“It’s a consistent pattern,” said Nathan Goldman, professor of accounting at North Carolina State University, whose work focuses on corporate taxation. “All of these companies are following the same pattern. They’re not doing anything illegal.”
Goldman said that while there are “lots of knobs you can turn” to get deductions, share-based compensation for employees is the one that can yield significant gains in cases where stock prices rise sharply in a short period of time.
Yet, Palantir’s critics say its case stands out because much of its revenue derives from public sector contracts, including the cash-strapped National Health Service. As openDemocracy revealed back in 2020, Palantir’s work with the NHS went from a £1 contract to £1m. The company’s current NHS contract is worth at least £330M.
“If these findings are accurate, they expose the staggering extent to which Palantir is taking from our country while giving back as little as possible,” said Green Party Deputy Leader Mothin Ali.
“It has pocketed hundreds of millions of pounds in public contracts, yet appears to have paid an effective tax rate that is a fraction of that paid by the doctors, nurses and other public sector workers who keep our services going. Greens have said before that Palantir should pack its bags and get the hell out of our NHS. What will it take for this Labour government to finally show them the door?”
“At a time we are asking for more scrutiny into the Federated Data Platform contract, it is mindboggling that Palantir are siphoning millions of pounds out of the UK,” said Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley, who has been a vocal opponent of the UK government’s work with Palantir. “Our NHS needs to be working with trusted suppliers, and Palantir seem to be consistently undermining that trust. It’s time the government gets serious and builds the offramp.”
“Multinationals like Palantir are able to exploit the defects in current international tax rules to pay lower effective tax rates overall,” said Sol Picciotto, an emeritus professor at Lancaster University and senior adviser with the Tax Justice Network. “This is particularly problematic for those providing services which can be delivered globally, giving them great freedom to decide where and how to declare taxable profits.”
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“Palantir is paying little or no corporate income tax in both the US and the UK, despite its bread and butter being government contracts,” said Paul Monaghan, chief executive of the Fair Tax Foundation. He called the strategy “textbook Silicon Valley profit-shifting” and added that the “generous corporate tax treatment” of these types of share-based payments is “in play on both sides of the Atlantic”.
“Whilst Palantir’s share price grows, these are likely to continue to depress the company’s effective tax rate.”
“It is therefore re-assuring to see an indication in the US parent’s financial statements that they are the subject of a live inquiry by HMRC that encompasses the last two years,” he said, referring to a note in the company’s US annual filing for 2025, which reads that the “Company is subject to potential examination by tax authorities” in “the UK for tax years 2024 through 2025.”
“We do not comment on the tax affairs of individual taxpayers,” said a spokesperson for HMRC, the government department responsible for the collection of taxes. “These are long‑standing rules set by Parliament, and we enforce them rigorously to make sure every company pays the tax that is due under UK law.”
openDemocracy has reached out to Palantir for comment, but had not heard back at time of publication. This story will be updated if the company responds.
Behind the shield
Business leaders insist that the UK’s corporate tax regime stifles investment and cripples economic growth. In 2021, when then-chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that corporate taxes would rise from 19% to 25%, The Times carried an article headlined “Companies ‘will quit UK’ over Sunak’s corporation tax rise”.
Yet an examination of Palantir’s accounts reveals that the UK’s corporate tax regime allows fast-growing technology companies to harvest millions of pounds in tax breaks by richly remunerating their employees with stock options.
Compensating employees in this manner, said Goldman the accounting professor, creates “incentive alignment”, where employees have a stake in the success of the company – improving employee retention rates – as well as allowing companies to preserve cash (as offering stock options doesn’t impact cash flows), and generating future tax deductions if, and only if, the company succeeds.
But if a company succeeds like Palantir, he added, the tax deductions generated in this manner are very large.
The key to this mechanism lies in Part 12 of the Corporation Tax Act 2009, which allows a company to claim a tax deduction relief equivalent to the difference between the market price of the stock at the point at which they are acquired by the employee and the original strike price paid by the employee.
“UK tax policy allows qualifying companies these kinds of deductions,” said Dr Federica Casano, lecturer in business and tax law at the University of Leeds. “The relief under Part 12 of CTA 2009 is broadly neutral as to the type of instrument – restricted or unrestricted shares, options or RSUs [Restricted Stock Units].”
In Palantir’s case, the stock has soared by over 1,000% since the company went public in September 2020, thereby creating hundreds of millions of pounds of tax deductions in the UK as the company’s employees have cashed in.
In 2024, the company’s stock price closed the year at about $77. That year, the accounts reveal, the company generated about £92m in tax deductions. The following year, the stock peaked at $207.52 in November 2025, before paring back its gains, suggesting the company would have harvested a fresh round of multi-million-pound tax deductions for that year. At the time of publishing, the stock is priced at about $107.
“The corporation tax deduction available in the UK is among the more generous. Stock-based compensation is supposed to reduce payroll pressure on cash flow, especially for start-ups,” said Lewis from Tax Watch.
“The fact that it is also available to established, profit-making companies means that it can effectively wipe out very profitable companies’ tax bills for years if share values significantly increase. In an era of almost historically unprecedented tech stock valuations, it may be time to look at restricting the deduction.”
Wittgenstein’s tax rules
Around the world, governments have long struggled to get corporations to pay more tax in their respective countries. Raise taxes in one jurisdiction, the argument goes, and companies will simply restructure to recognise profits elsewhere.
In 2021, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sought to prevent a race to the bottom by establishing a global minimum tax rate of 15%, often referred to as a ‘top-up’ tax. In January 2025, as these rules were being rolled out across the world, the Trump administration not only withdrew from the agreement, but announced it would sanction countries that sought to tax US companies under the framework. Since then, the G7 has struck an uneasy carve-out for the US, the implications of which are still unclear.
Even so, the UK remains an outlier, both in how it taxes multinational Big Tech companies and also in its willingness to contract out vital public services to these companies.
“The case of Palantir clearly shows the defects of these rules, and also highlights the failure to resolve them over the past 13 years through the OECD,” said Lancaster professor Picciotto. “That’s why developing countries launched negotiations for a global tax treaty through the UN. The UK should strongly support this initiative to ensure that multinationals can be taxed where they have real activities, including revenues.”
“It’s notable that the UK government has just agreed, at the behest of the Trump administration, to exempt US-headquartered companies from one key defence against such profit-shifting: the global minimum ‘top-up’ tax,” Lewis said, adding that the Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that this will cost the UK at least £700m in tax revenues every year.
Palantir’s UK subsidiary had to pay this ‘top-up’ tax last year on low-taxed profits within the group, in the most recent year, Lewis noted. “It may not have to in the future. That’s an example of how the UK’s acquiescence to the White House puts UK firms at a disadvantage compared to their US competitors, and costs us much-needed tax revenues.”
Governments in several of Palantir’s other key overseas markets – none of which is as large as the UK – are already distancing themselves from the company. France and Germany have announced they are moving away from Palantir’s products, while the company’s work in Korea remains largely commercial as part of an alliance with the Hyundai group.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Palantir continues to work with government bodies, causing public outcry. And the company’s leadership remains bullish on its prospects and profitability. In a letter to investors in May this year, CEO Alex Karp noted the company had generated $871m in profits on $1.6bn in revenue in the first three months of 2026 alone.
“Our quarterly profit – the largest in our company’s twenty-three-year history – has more than quadrupled in only twelve months,” Karp wrote. “What business in the world, at this scale, has ever accomplished anything of the sort?”
Karp began his letter to shareholders with an enigmatic quote from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen: “And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule.”
Andy Burnham delivers a speech at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, to pledge to give Britain the “circuit-breaker it needs” while unveiling his plans for devolution and the economy, June 29, 2026
