Palantir UK: Capture of the British State – Contract by Contract

Palantir: How a US Spy‑Tech Firm Took Control of Your NHS, Firearms & Defence Records

Palantir holds your NHS records, your defence secrets, and now your firearms data. Its CEO says the product is used to kill people. Its technology is alleged to have helped power the war machine in Gaza. And a British Prime Minister visited its Washington headquarters, accompanied by a lobbyist whose firm was on the company’s payroll, with no minutes taken and no record kept. Ask yourself why.

---

There are moments in public life when the accumulation of facts becomes impossible to explain away as coincidence. This is one of them.

Palantir, the American data analytics corporation founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, has this week been selected to build the new National Firearms Licensing Management System for all 43 police forces in England and Wales. The contract, worth an estimated £9 million and running for up to ten years, will hand Palantir control of licensing records for nearly half a million British citizens, covering close to two million registered weapons. It will also hold Home Office data on explosives, explosive precursors and poisons.

Let that settle.

A company born from military intelligence and embedded, contract by contract, across the vital organs of the British state now manages or is being handed: NHS patient data for over 65 million people; a £240 million Ministry of Defence contract; a Metropolitan Police data agreement (blocked by the London Mayor, only for the Met to receive Palantir access through the back door via this very firearms system); and now the most sensitive domestic licensing database the Home Office holds.

And it so happens that on 27 February 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Palantir’s Washington headquarters, accompanied by his newly appointed ambassador to the United States. That ambassador was Peter Mandelson, whose lobbying firm Global Counsel had Palantir as a paying client. No minutes were taken. No transcript was kept. Seven months later, Palantir was awarded the MoD contract. The meeting was off the official record. Unscheduled. Invisible to any transparency register.

This is what the corporate capture of the British state looks like in real time.

ONE CONTRACT AT A TIME: PALANTIR’S QUIET TAKEOVER

To understand what is happening, you have to resist the temptation to see each contract as a discrete transaction. The government and its defenders will insist upon exactly that framing. They will tell you that procurement rules were followed. They will produce the reassuring language of competitive process and value for money.

They are not entirely wrong. The old firearms licensing database, built with software company Anite and running since the mid-2000s, had been failing for years. A report published by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation last July found the system deeply inconsistent in its delivery, with licence holders facing a postcode lottery in turnaround times and decision-making across forces. Something had to change.

But the question is never simply whether a system needs updating. The question is who ends up holding the keys, and how they came to hold them, and what they can do once they do.

One contract at a time, the operating system of the British state is being quietly handed to a small ring of private corporations whose first duty is not to the public, but to shareholders and power.

Palantir is not a neutral technology supplier. Its founders are not disinterested engineers. Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir, once described the NHS as something that ‘makes people sick’ and suggested Britain should ‘rip the whole thing from the ground and start over.’ His company holds a £330 million contract to manage NHS patient data. Chief executive Alex Karp has written a public manifesto arguing explicitly for the subordination of democratic governance to American technological power.

And Karp has said something else. Something that rarely appears in the polite coverage of Palantir’s expanding British portfolio. In one of his more candid moments, he stated plainly that the company’s product is used, on occasion, to kill people.

He was not apologising. He was explaining a philosophy. Palantir, in Karp’s framing, exists to give Western states the decisive advantage in the application of lethal force. That is the company now holding the records of every licensed firearm in England and Wales.

The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee published a cross-party report this week describing Palantir’s growing presence across British public services as an ‘unacceptable point of weakness.’ The committee warned that the government’s dependency on a small number of large American technology corporations, Palantir chief among them, left public institutions ‘seriously exposed.’ It recommended exercising a 2027 break clause in the NHS Federated Data Platform contract and seeking alternative UK-based providers. The committee’s language was measured and parliamentary. The reality it describes is not.

PALANTIR’S ISRAEL PARTNERSHIP: WAR CRIMES ALLEGATIONS

Palantir's AI systems are used in war, health care, immigration, and more. And in each of these systems, their software is costing real human lives. pic.twitter.com/vSSalWssIK

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) June 4, 2026

It is not possible to write about Palantir in 2026 without writing about Gaza. Attempts to separate the company’s domestic contracts from its record abroad are precisely the kind of compartmentalised thinking that allows power to go unexamined.

In January 2024, three months into Israel’s assault on Gaza, Palantir’s board of directors held its first meeting of the year in Tel Aviv, in what the company described as an act of solidarity with Israel. They then formalised a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defence. The company’s executive vice president Josh Harris stated: ‘Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.’

In a conflict that had already killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, those three words require no elaboration. War-related missions. The UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has stated there are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir supplied ‘core defence infrastructure’ and an AI platform to the Israeli military. The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre has documented allegations that Palantir’s systems were involved in AI-driven targeting operations. Palantir contests the specific scope of these allegations. It does not deny the strategic partnership, nor that its technology was deployed in the field during operations that resulted in mass civilian casualties.

That is the company’s own position: it provided technology to a military conducting war operations, and disputes only the precise details of which components were used in which role. Critics, including human rights organisations and former Palantir employees who raised internal objections, argue that a corporation which purpose-builds military intelligence platforms for active combat operations cannot simply step back and say it bears no responsibility for outcomes. Palantir’s CEO has not claimed to be a neutral party. He has expressed open support for Israel and for the application of Western military power through AI, and markets the company’s products on exactly those terms.

Palantir did not drop the bombs on Gaza. The controversy is that its technology may have helped build the data systems behind the war machine: surveillance, intelligence, targeting and operational decisions. That is why people are asking why the British state keeps handing this company access to our NHS, our defence systems, our police infrastructure and now firearms licensing. This is not just a tech contract. It is the quiet privatisation of state power.

The British government has not been asked to justify the continuing expansion of Palantir’s public sector contracts in light of any of this. Parliament has not debated it. The press conference announcing the firearms database contract made no mention of it. The procurement notice is silent on the matter. Working-class communities whose members serve in the armed forces, pay national insurance for an NHS now embedded with a company that markets itself on its capacity to kill, and whose children’s health records sit in Palantir’s data infrastructure, deserve to know what kind of company the British state keeps calling back.

MANDELSON’S PALANTIR LOBBYING: THE UNRECORDED VISIT

The tangled web is sticky with corruption and deceit: Mandelson co-founded Global Counsel, a lobbying firm that listed Palantir among its clients. He was appointed UK Ambassador to the United States in October 2024. On his fourteenth day in post, he accompanied the Prime Minister on a visit to Palantir’s Washington headquarters, the second stop on Starmer’s American itinerary after the White House itself. The visit was arranged by Mandelson’s embassy. No official record was kept. It was not on the public schedule.

In February 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer travelled to Washington DC, ostensibly to manage relations with the incoming Trump administration. On his itinerary, a ten-minute drive from the Oval Office, was an unannounced stop at the headquarters of Palantir Technologies. The visit was described subsequently by the Cabinet Office as an ‘informal visit,’ involving a tour of the company’s facilities, a question and answer session with staff, and a meeting with Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp.

No official minutes were kept. No transcript exists. The Foreign Office told the Good Law Project that it holds no record of any emails between Palantir and the Ambassador’s office. The meeting did not initially appear in the Prime Minister’s register of visits and was acknowledged only through subsequent disclosures prompted by freedom of information requests and parliamentary questions.

The visit was arranged through the British Embassy in Washington, headed at the time by Lord Peter Mandelson. This is the detail that transforms an unusual meeting into something that demands a public reckoning.

Mandelson founded Global Counsel, a lobbying and advisory firm, in 2016. He is its president and chairman of its International Advisory Board. He has retained a financial stake in the firm. And Global Counsel has listed Palantir Technologies among its clients over a period spanning years, including the period during which Mandelson arranged the Prime Minister’s visit to Palantir’s headquarters.

Jo Maugham of the Good Law Project put the conflict plainly: ‘It is obviously in Palantir’s, and it is likely in Peter Mandelson’s, financial interests that it gets exclusive face time with the British Prime Minister. The failure to keep a minute of the meeting he arranged for the PM shows a kind of contempt for the public interest.’

The lobbying firm’s client arranged to meet the Prime Minister. The Ambassador arranged the meeting. The Ambassador founded the lobbying firm. No one wrote anything down.

Seven months after that unminuted meeting, Palantir’s UK chief executive Louis Mosley was appointed to the Ministry of Defence’s Industrial Joint Council, described by the government as its ‘main strategic mechanism for defence sector engagement.’ Four months after that, the MoD announced a strategic partnership with Palantir, valued at £240 million, awarded without competitive tender. The same month, Palantir won the largest contract it has ever held with the British Ministry of Defence.

The sequence has not been explained. The government insists it followed procurement rules. It declines to explain why the rules permitted a direct award, without competitive bidding, for a contract of this scale with a firm whose chief executive had recently been placed on the department’s own strategic engagement council.

Mandelson has since resigned from the Labour Party following separate revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, including US Department of Justice bank records suggesting payments to accounts linked to him. Starmer has ordered a Cabinet Secretary inquiry and indicated he believes Mandelson should be stripped of his peerage. The government will say these matters are separate. The Epstein class is so close-knit that separating the threads requires more than ministerial assertion.

YOUR NAME IS TAKEN. YOUR THREAT IS CALCULATED.

There is an observation that will sound extreme to those who have not thought it through, but which becomes harder to dismiss the more carefully you examine what Palantir’s product suite actually does. It is this.

A state whose intelligence, health, defence and policing functions are all flowing through the same private corporation’s data infrastructure does not need a traditional apparatus of repression to know who its potential challengers are. The data tells it. The correlations are automatic. The risk assessments run in real time.

Palantir’s core business is not database management. It is the integration of disparate data sources to produce actionable intelligence about populations, individuals and networks. That is what its Gotham and Foundry platforms were built for, first in counter-terrorism and military intelligence, then transplanted into domestic applications. It is the same logic, applied to different subjects.

The firearms licensing database now being handed to Palantir is not simply a list of gun owners. Combined with the NHS data Palantir already holds, the defence intelligence contracts it is building, and the policing systems it operates or is attempting to acquire, it becomes something considerably more significant: a cross-referenced profile of who, in this country, has the means and potentially the motive to resist.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a description of what the technology does, applied to the contracts Palantir already holds. Palantir’s CEO wrote a book about exactly this capability. The company markets it explicitly to governments and military agencies. The question is not whether the capability exists. The question is whether British citizens consented to having it assembled, piece by piece, about themselves, by a foreign corporation with no democratic accountability to anyone in this country.

The answer to that question is no. They were not asked.

HOW BOTH PARTIES KEPT HANDING PALANTIR THE KEYS

None of this began with Starmer’s Labour. Boris Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings held an undisclosed meeting with Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel in August 2019, months before the pandemic. When Covid arrived, Palantir was awarded more than £60 million in NHS contracts without competition, beginning with a deal issued for a nominal £1. It was never supposed to be permanent. It became permanent anyway.

Under the Tories in November 2023, Palantir won the £330 million NHS Federated Data Platform contract. Foxglove had previously uncovered internal Palantir documents showing the company discussed buying up smaller NHS suppliers to deepen its footprint without scrutiny. They called the strategy, in their own words, ‘buying our way in.’

Labour came to power promising a different relationship with public institutions. It has accelerated the same trajectory. This week’s report notes a May 2026 claim that Palantir had been given unrestricted access to identifiable patient data while working on its NHS platform. Palantir’s UK head disputed the characterisation. His company has not been consistent on the underlying question. Earlier evidence stated Palantir did not hold access to NHS data. The parliamentary committee’s published report notes this contradiction explicitly.

And now comes the firearms database.

THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM AND OUR DATA

The parliamentary committee’s report calls for technology sovereignty and an end to vendor lock-in. Translated plainly: once a corporation controls enough of the infrastructure through which public institutions function, the public institution becomes dependent on the corporation. At that point, the democratic mandate of elected government becomes largely decorative.

The committee recommends activating the 2027 break clause in the NHS contract and building an in-house replacement or seeking a UK-owned alternative. These are reasonable recommendations that will be resisted at every turn by those with financial interests in the status quo, and ignored by a government that has demonstrated its commitment to deepening, not reducing, the Palantir relationship.

Palantir has no place in our NHS.

Patient safety is paramount. We must end all ties with Palantir and remove it from our NHS well before the 2027 break clause. pic.twitter.com/GvoU8T10LE

— Kim Johnson (@KimJohnsonMP) June 2, 2026

For working-class communities, the consequences are not theoretical. Your NHS data, held by a company whose founder believed the NHS should be dismantled, risks becoming a commercial asset rather than a public one. Your firearms licensing data, your health records, the data underpinning military procurement, the analytics platforms used by the police: these are all, increasingly, owned and operated by the same network of American corporations, fronted by ministers and signed off by officials, without the public being asked a single question.

George Carlin put it plainly: it is a big club, and you are not in it. He meant America. He could have been describing Westminster.

The choice facing this country is not whether to modernise its public sector. It must. The choice is whether that modernisation is done in the service of the public, with genuine democratic accountability, or whether it is done as a transfer of public power into private hands, one contract at a time, under cover of efficiency, while a Prime Minister visits the beneficiary’s offices off the record and a lobbyist who arranged the visit is later found in the same documents as a convicted sex offender.

The old system was failing. That is true. But the answer to a failing system is not to hand its replacement to the company that has most aggressively positioned itself inside British government by methods that a cross-party parliamentary committee now describes as an unacceptable weakness. A company whose CEO has declared that his product is used, on occasion, to kill people. A company that signed a strategic partnership with an army conducting operations that killed tens of thousands of civilians while its board held a solidarity meeting in Tel Aviv.

The answer is to build something that actually belongs to us.

The question the British public has not been allowed to ask is this: what happens when that club decides ‘we’ – the working class, the organisers, the dissenters – are the problem?

---

Enjoyed this read? I’m committed to keeping this space 100% ad-free so you can enjoy a clean, focused reading experience. Crafting these articles takes a significant amount of research and heart. If you found this helpful, please consider a “small donation” to help keep the lights on and the content flowing. Every bit of support makes a huge difference.

LEGAL NOTE: This article reports on publicly confirmed contracts, parliamentary committee findings, and reporting by Byline Times, The Register, Foxglove, Public Technology, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, and official procurement documents. Palantir has denied direct involvement with IDF targeting systems Lavender and Gospel while publicly confirming its strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defence for war-related missions. All contract figures are drawn from official procurement notices. The Mandelson-Epstein matter is subject to an active Cabinet Secretary inquiry; no findings have been published. Nothing in this article should be read as making assertions beyond the confirmed public record.