But is it already too late to reverse course?
When news about the scale of British Labour Party grandee Peter Mandelson’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein broke in early February, it was clear the resulting fallout would be significant. Since then Mandelson has been arrested, Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has resigned, and calls are rising for Starmer himself to walk following revelations that he had ignored and overruled his own vetting team in appointing Mandelson as ambassador to the US.
If Starmer were to resign in the coming days or weeks, perhaps some of the dystopian policies his government has aggressively pursued may be halted, or even binned, before they become an irreversible reality. They include the hugely contentious proposal to restrict trial by jury, one of the most important pillars of justice in common law systems like the UK’s, which has already passed its second reading in the House of Commons.
Another possible silver lining is that Mandelson-gate has shone a bright light on Palantir’s expanding operations in the UK, as we noted in our post, “The Political Fallout from the UK’s Mandelson-Gate Scandal Has Only Just Begun“:
As readers may recall, one of Mandelson’s few “accomplishments” during his brief tenure as UK ambassador to the US was to arrange a visit for Starmer to Palantir’s facilities in Washington.
As we noted at the time, the visit immediately sparked accusations of conflicts of interests:
Palantir is a long-standing client of Global Counsel, the lobbying company Mandelson co-founded during his time out of politics. Now that he’s back, Mandelson may have stepped down as chairman of Global Counsel but still retains “significant control,” according to Companies House.
Palantir UK’s chief executive, Louis Mosley, the grandson of Britain’s most famous fascist, Oswald Mosley, who was also in attendance, said Starmer “gets” Palantir — hardly a surprise given Starmer’s authoritarian impulses…
Palantir is not only closely tied to Mandelson but also features prominently in the latest Epstein files drop. It is now clear that Palantir co-founder and Chair Peter Thiel maintained a business relationship with Epstein from 2014 to the paedophile’s final arrest in 2019.
That business relationship seemingly extended to Thiel and Epstein’s joint ownership, together with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, of the Israeli-linked intelligence company Carbyne, which now runs and controls the 911 emergency systems throughout multiple states and counties in the US, reports investigative journalist Whitney Webb, author of One Nation Under Blackmail:
Their initial software descriptions revealed that they harvest tons of data from phones that call into those 911 call systems and store that information, previously touting they would use it for pre-crime-style functionality.
You may be outraged about the Epstein files and the Epstein cover-up, but you should also be investigating how nothing practical is being done to dismantle what Epstein helped build. This foreign company should be nowhere near essential US services, but it continues to rack up local contracts.
Indeed, Webb has argued in recent interviews that Palantir is essentially taking over the job of sex blackmail rings like the one operated by Epstein:
“[A]nother thing I argue is that Epstein, the type of sex blackmail activity he was engaging in was no longer, is no longer needed to blackmail people. You can do all of that stuff digitally now. And I think it’s no coincidence that, I argue— that, you know, Epstein told Ehud Barak to check out Palantir, which I argue in my book is really, you don’t need an Epstein blackmail style operation if you have Palantir operating.
“And there’s a straight line as I’ve noted in other past articles from the Promise Software scandal, which involved Israel, the CIA, this exact network, including Robert Maxwell among other figures that pop up repeatedly in the story, all the way through Palantir’s creation as a rebranding of the… Bush era Total Information Awareness program.”
Straight-Up Corruption
In recent weeks, reports have surfaced that Mandelson had maintained a 24% stake in his lobbying firm, Global Counsel, even as he, as then-British ambassador to the US, personally brokered a deal between the firm’s client, Palantir, and the UK’s Ministry of Defence. The resulting contract, awarded directly to Palantir, was worth around £250 million.
The government has so far declined access to the documents from the secret meeting between Starmer, the UK defence secretary and Palantir’s CEO, claiming it’s too expensive to find them.
More shocking than #Mandelson‘s £75k payoff is that he retained a stake in his lobbying firm Global Counsel till just few weeks ago – after the Govt signed the £250 mn Palantir – but we’re being refused access to the documents because the govt claims it’s too expensive to find… pic.twitter.com/WEwDitNO00
— Canary (@TheCanaryUK) March 11, 2026
In a letter released as part of the “Mandelson Files” published by the government last week, Mandelson said how “proud” he was of the “UK-US tech deal” signed during his time in Washington. The deal, he said, would “help write the next chapter of the special relationship” between the UK and the US.
A lot has happened since that letter was written. Now, pressure is rising on the government to terminate its dealings with Palantir. The reason this is important is that Palantir was still relatively little known until Mandelson-gate, and the Esptein scandal more broadly. The company until recently seemed to be going from strength from strength.
As we wrote in our June 17, 2025 post, Welcome to Peak Palantir, “the darker the world grows, the richer the pickings for Silicon Valley’s darkest unicorn.” Now, however, Palantir appears to have hit a major stumbling block, at least in the UK and certain other European markets.
The leader of the Liberal Democrats, traditionally the third largest party in the UK parliament, Ed Davey, told LBC yesterday that “there should be an investigation into all the meetings Mandelson had where subsequently there were contracts signed by the government”:
Asked if there was anything he could do from a Parliamentary perspective, Sir Ed told LBC, “We’re going to press the government, just as we have been doing with files relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
“I hope the government is not going to come to the House of Commons and force their hand again. They should publish all these notes and minutes.
“This reeks. Palantir has loads of contracts in our health service, in our defence, probably other parts of the government too.
“Many of us have been worried for some time about how this American technology company, with links to Donald Trump, has got such a vested interest across our government.”
Deep Penetration
Palantir now has 24 contracts with UK public institutions including the Ministry of Defence, the Police Force, the Cabinet Office, the National Health Service and the DLUHC. The following infographic gives an idea of just how far and deeply Palantir has penetrated UK government institutions:
These are the contracts that Palantir has with the UK government. It is a company that rejoices in the killing of innocents, is insanely pro-Israel and is helmed by a racist white South African pic.twitter.com/rPNlrBSKj4
— Andrew Feinstein (@andrewfeinstein) January 27, 2026
One of the biggest causes of concern is Palantir’s management of the National Health Service’s Federated Data Platform, which we formerly covered here and here. As the British Medical Journal reported a few days ago, every hospital in England has been urged to disobey an NHS directive to use software operated by controversial US analytics software company Palantir:
A coalition of human rights, health and patient organisations, and unions sent out the plea to NHS trusts by email, out of concern over Palantir’s federated data platform (FDP).
They urged hospitals to not follow NHS England’s instructions to sign a memorandum of understanding to use the FDP, as set out in planning guidance issued in October.1
This guidance said all trusts should be using FDP “core products” from April, although this, NHS sources indicated, was a policy decision rather than an enforceable instruction.
The FDP was created during the covid pandemic with the aim of helping manage a federalised, siloed health service at a time of national crisis. Palantir won the now £1bn contract to supply the service using its Foundry software, a platform that can connect incompatible databases and allows customers to integrate and analyse data from across many different sources.
In the post-covid NHS this involves monitoring things such as waiting lists, hospital supplies, and available beds and operating theatres.
But a new briefing document from the health worker campaign group Medact, called Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies in NHS Data Systems,4 emphasises that hospitals have the ability to refuse NHS England’s directive and urges them to do so.
The document, shared with The BMJ and Guardian, outlines concerns over Palantir’s past behaviour, data security of the FDP platform, potential harm to trust among patients, and the risk of the FDP being used by other government departments to access people’s health data.
“We know the FDP rollout is not going to plan, and we know that NHS England is under intense pressure to cancel the contract when it reaches its break clause in February 2027,” said Medact’s Rhiannon Osborne.
She spoke for a collection of groups concerned about Palantir, including Amnesty International, the Good Law Project, Privacy International, Just Treatment, Corporate Watch, and the United Tech and Allied Workers Union.
She added, “Fifty thousand patients have written formal complaints to their hospitals, and the BMA is telling members to explore ways around using Palantir products.
“It’s a key time for local hospitals to exercise their autonomy when NHS England isn’t listening.”
Medact is also concerned that, with Palantir systems in place, the Home Office border control, police forces across the country, and current or future UK governments could use NHS data for other purposes.
In the US, Palantir is already using the health data of millions of people to help ICE hunt down down undocumented workers, according to a recent investigation by 404 Media.
“National Security Threat”
One of the most common arguments trotted out by successive UK governments to justify their ever-multiplying contracts with Palantir is that the data remains in-house. Palantir, they say, manage it but does not own or control it. As a Ministry of Defence spokesperson told the Nerve, “all data remains sovereign and under the ownership of the MoD”.
Unfortunately, this is simply not true. In a recent exposé, the Nerve spoke to two high-level MoD insiders with detailed knowledge of the underlying technology. They warned that not only are such statements “ignorant” and/or misleading, but also that Palantir poses “a national security threat to the UK”:
The insiders, who are senior systems engineers with knowledge of the Palantir software systems the MoD is using, have come forward to speak after the Nerve published an investigation in January that revealed Palantir had at least £670m worth of contracts across the UK government, including £15m with the UK nuclear weapons agency…
In that investigation, data and security experts claimed that the contracts with the firm, owned by Peter Thiel, are a critical risk to Britain’s national security…
It’s believed to be the first time individuals currently working with the ministry have spoken out about the national security risks Palantir poses. They are doing so because they believe that these are matters of the highest public interest and that parliament needs to act.
The first, a senior systems engineer with the MoD who has decades of experience across the defence industry, told the Nerve: “Ministers clearly have a lack of understanding of Palantir’s technology. The statements with respect to sovereign data appear to be missing the point entirely. [They’re] missing the realities of data scraping, of aggregation, and the fact that Palantir is building its own rich picture of our nation that they can use for their own ends.
Allowing a single entity, foreign or domestic, to have such far-reaching, pervasive access is inherently dangerous. How our national cybersecurity centre has allowed this beggars belief.”
At the heart of the claims is that while the underlying data may remain under the MoD’s control, any insights derived from that data do not. The implications of this, the insiders say, are far-reaching, especially because of the vast quantity of personal and other data the company has access to across UK government departments.
One source said: “Palantir does not need to own the data or even have stewardship. They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.”
A second source, who has a background in intelligence, said Palantir probably has “a complete profile on the whole UK population. They have visibility into wildly different focus areas, yet their data is all condensed into one foreign supplier’s control/visibility. At the very least I’d call that a security risk.”
The UK is apparently not the only country that appears to be suffering pangs of buyer’s remorse after finding out its government has outsourced data management responsibilities to Palantir. In January, Intelligence Online reported that Danish intelligence “is discreetly seeking to free itself from its dependence on US firm Palantir’s services” — a dependence that is “particularly jarring” amid Copenhagen’s diplomatic standoff with Trump over Greenland.
That level of dependence is already extremely high. Danish authorities have placed Palantir at the very centre of its all-encompassing surveillance system, explains the emerging technology consultant Jay Latta. The big mistake they made, he notes, was to frame Palantir as “neutral infrastructure”:
[J]ust another platform to “connect data,” “increase efficiency,” “support decision-making.”
This framing is deliberate and dangerous.
Palantir is not a passive database tool.
It is an active sense-making system that:
fuses data across domains
creates behavioral profiles
generates risk scores
nudges decisions through opaque logic
Once embedded, it reshapes how institutions see people.
Not as citizens.
As datasets…
The democratic inversion
Denmark’s trajectory reveals a broader inversion happening across Europe:
Instead of the state being transparent to the people,
the people are becoming transparent to the state.
Instead of power being constrained by law,
law is being reshaped to fit power.
And instead of technology serving democratic oversight,
democracy is being adjusted to accommodate technology.
That is not modernization.
That is democratic regression wrapped in UX polish.
Many other European countries have sought Palantir’s services, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Greece, Sweden and Finland. Others are in talks with the company over possible future contracts.
Last year, even NATO joined Palantir’s growing client list by acquiring the Palantir Maven Smart System for employment within NATO’s Allied Command Operations — the same system that is now being used across the entire US War Department.
My honest if pessimistic take: This technology will deployed in <5 years to assassinate dissenters in so-called “liberal democratic” countries. https://t.co/tgEddAtVvx
— David Adler (@davidrkadler) March 14, 2026
One European country that rejected Palantir’s advances was Switzerland. In fact, the small Swiss magazine that first revealed the Thiel-chaired group repeated failure to win Swiss federal government contracts, Republik, is now being sued by Palantir for not giving it sufficient right to reply. That has ensured that a story that was of muted national interest and would have inevitably died down quickly ended up causing a stir globally.
As the FT reports, Palantir is grappling “with European fears over US companies managing sensitive state systems… [I]nternational customers accounted for a declining share of overall sales last year, and [Palantir CEO Alex] Karp noted this month that some non-US clients had favoured domestic providers.”
The problem for some governments is that it may already be too late to turn back the clock. After all, Palantir is not just helping governments manage data, it is creating new operating systems for government.
Here’s what most people don’t understand about Palantir. They are busy with “second empire building”, which refers to the digital colonisation of social and economic life, where private corporate entities assume the traditional roles of the state (sovereignty, identity… pic.twitter.com/DoOfa2MkvT
— EuropeanPowell (@EuropeanPowell) January 20, 2026
As the South African technologist Johan Steyn warns, the company is not just selling software, it’s quietly capturing the state. So, what if a new government, say in the UK, came into office and wanted to extricate government departments and ministries from Palantir’s operating system. The problem, as Steyn writes in a recent Substack, is that “once workflows, data pipelines, and institutional habits are built around one system, exit becomes hard”:
Once a platform is embedded, it starts to shape how the institution sees the world. It influences what gets measured, flagged, prioritised, and acted upon. Over time, “decision support” quietly becomes decision-making, simply because people trust what the system surfaces and ignore what it cannot.
The second problem is lock-in. It is not only commercial lock-in, where switching becomes too expensive. It is skills lock-in (the state loses the capability to build and manage alternatives), process lock-in (workflows are redesigned around the vendor), and operational lock-in (critical functions can’t run without the platform). At that point, procurement becomes a fiction. The state is no longer choosing; it is renewing.
Health data adds another layer: trust. The NHS is not just a service; it is a national trust relationship with citizens. When the public believes their data is being routed through a controversial foreign vendor, the long-term cost is not only privacy risk, but legitimacy risk. In 2026, the BMJ reported that doctors would be given guidance on limiting engagement with the NHS Federated Data Platform because of links with Palantir, a signal that professional unease has not evaporated.
The final concern is geopolitical. Even if contracts promise “sovereign” control, dependence on a US-based firm inevitably creates a legal and strategic exposure that the public rarely understands. You do not need a conspiracy theory to see the leverage: states use law, diplomacy, and intelligence relationships to pursue national interests. The more mission-critical the system, the more valuable the leverage becomes.
If there is one thing European governments have learnt by now, or at least should have, it is that the current occupant of the White House is willing to use every possible source of leverage the US has over other countries, whether friend or foe, to his advantage, including, in particular, their outsized dependence on US tech.
