Labour members take aim at Palantir

Welcome to the eleventh edition of The Eye—our weekly guide to the shifting relationship between Big Tech and the state.

This week: Rising opposition to Palantir’s £330m NHS contract, a wave of anti-Palantir protests and our event on the sidelines of the Labour Party Conference.

As Labour gathers in Liverpool, members are challenging one of the government’s most consequential relationships with Big Tech: Palantir’s £330 million contract to provide data infrastructure across the NHS.

Labour members, it seems, will not get the chance to debate the future of Palantir’s £330 million NHS contract at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool, after an emergency motion calling on the government to end the deal was not accepted for debate.

The motion had asked the Department of Health and Social Care to use a break clause in Palantir’s contract to operate the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), which brings together data from across the health service to help hospitals manage waiting lists, discharges and other services. The contract was signed in 2023 and includes a termination point in February 2027.

The motion was submitted by the Labour-affiliated Socialist Health Association and backed by at least three constituency Labour parties. Its authors raise concerns about Palantir’s work with the Israeli military and US immigration authorities, as well as wider questions about the role of a US technology company in critical British public infrastructure. Palantir says its technology has only been used by the Israeli military in Gaza to help locate hostages and not to target Palestinians.

But this is no longer simply a campaign being waged from outside government.

Both the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee have called for the government to use the February 2027 termination clause. The British Medical Association and Unison have also called for the contract to end. Ministers said this week that it would be reviewed through normal contract-management processes.

And the row has acquired another distinctly Labour dimension.

Just over a week before conference, former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson joined Palantir as its UK senior vice-president. Watson, who had advised the company since 2024, said he wanted to help it improve public services including the NHS, policing and defence. He has taken a leave of absence from the House of Lords and relinquished his parliamentary pass while working for the company.

The conference motion explicitly cites Watson’s appointment, arguing that links between senior politicians and private companies can undermine public confidence where government contracts are involved.

Palantir strongly defends its NHS record. The company says its software has helped deliver 110,000 additional operations, a 15% reduction in discharge delays and a 6.8% increase in patients finding out whether they need cancer treatment within 28 days. NHS England says the platform is delivering benefits for patients and stresses that NHS organisations remain responsible for their data and how it is used.

But the argument unfolding in Liverpool is bigger than whether one piece of software works.

It is about how much control Britain should retain over the digital infrastructure on which essential public services increasingly depend - and what happens when those systems are supplied by powerful foreign technology companies.

That question has become harder to ignore because of what is happening elsewhere.

Palantir also holds a £240 million Ministry of Defence contract, while the company is challenging the decision to block it from a proposed £50 million Metropolitan Police contract. Britain is Palantir’s largest operation outside the United States.

In other words, the NHS debate is part of a much larger question about technological sovereignty and who builds the systems through which the British state operates, who controls them, and whether public institutions retain credible alternatives if political, commercial or geopolitical circumstances change.

The dismissed challenge comes during arguably the biggest week for campaign-based anti-Palantir protests ever, as it marks a world-first ‘People Vs Palantir’ global week of action, with coordinated mobilisations happening throughout across both North and South America, Europe, and Australia, all of them opposing Palantir’s role in public services.

Britain’s iteration will see actions coordinated by a coalition of groups like Amnesty International, Medact, Just Treatment, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Pull the Plug take place in different areas all throughout the week, including health-worker led demonstrations at Labour’s conference on Tuesday, a planned demonstration outside of Palantir HQ, and over 30 demonstrations across hospitals and ICBs across England on Thursday.

Burnham says Britain must defend itself in the age of AI

Just days before arriving at Labour conference, Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first address to the United Nations General Assembly to warn that Britain was facing an “industrial-scale assault” on its information environment from hostile states.

Burnham announced plans for a new National Centre for Information Defence, intended to detect, attribute and disrupt foreign information attacks, bringing together intelligence agencies, law enforcement, government departments and social media companies.

Russia was central to his warning. Burnham said the Kremlin spends around £1.3 billion a year manipulating information and accused Russian agencies of using bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles and forged branding, as well as amplifying far-right narratives. He warned that AI would multiply the threat.

The creation of a dedicated centre could answer longstanding criticism that Britain’s response to disinformation has been fragmented across government. But significant questions remain about its powers, accountability and relationship with existing bodies - including what exactly “disrupting” an information operation will mean in practice.

There is also a bigger question about where threats to Britain’s information environment come from.

Foreign states such as Russia are one part of that picture. But the infrastructure through which information, data and increasingly AI systems operate is overwhelmingly privately owned, much of it by US technology companies.

That creates a challenge which cannot be solved through counter-disinformation policy. Britain needs to think not only about hostile content, but about the underlying technological systems on which government and democratic life increasingly depend.

Britain is still dealing with the last interference scandal

There is another unfinished piece of this story. The 2020 Intelligence and Security Committee Russia Report concluded that the government had not sought or assessed evidence of successful Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, despite evidence of Russian attempts to influence democratic processes elsewhere.

In 2025, the European Court of Human Rights rejected an attempt by MPs and the Citizens to force a new inquiry, although the court recognised shortcomings in the UK’s earlier response.

The Citizens and Democratys recently brought together politicians, intelligence specialists, lawyers and campaigners in Parliament for the launch of UK’s Russian Lesson: Building Deterrence Against Foreign Political Interference.

We are now advocating two amendments to the Representation of the People Bill, currently before the House of Lords - stronger sanctions against foreign donors and proxies who abuse Britain’s political finance system, and a meaningful inquiry into Russian political interference around the EU referendum and subsequent elections.

Tom Brake, CEO of Unlock Democracy and former Liberal Democrat MP, told The Eye that “Loud public denunciation by the UK government of Russian disinformation and the setting up of a new National Centre for Information Defence are long overdue. UK democracy is critical national infrastructure, like the rail network or the national grid, and must be protected accordingly.”

That principle goes beyond Russia

If data, AI and digital infrastructure are becoming fundamental to the operation of the state, Britain needs to ask not only how it protects those systems from hostile actors, but who controls them in the first place.

That question will be hanging over Labour conference this week - and nowhere more visibly than in the fight over Palantir and the NHS.

For those attending Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, The Citizens and Doc Society are screening Pink Hair Data Whistleblower tonight, Monday 28 September, followed by a panel with Clive Lewis MP, investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and filmmaker Marc Silver. The film revisits the Cambridge Analytica scandal and asks what has changed in the decade since. Join us in Liverpool or if you aren’t there we will now be livestreaming the panel online, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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About The Eye: In an era where Silicon Valley is rewriting the rules of governance and unaccountable tech companies are capturing our public services from the inside out, The Eye exists to follow the power, connect the dots and reveal how technology is reshaping our state.