On Thursday, 1 October, health workers, patients, and activists protested Palantir’s role in the National Health Service (NHS) at more than 40 locations across England. Their demonstrations were part of a global week of action demanding that governments cut ties with the spy-tech firm over human rights and privacy concerns.
Rallies took place in front of Palantir’s London headquarters, as well as in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and many more cities.
“Palantir’s tools are used by the Israeli military in Gaza and by ICE to track and surveil migrants in the US,” campaign groups—including Just Treatment, Health Workers for a Free Palestine, Medact, and Global Justice Now—stated. “A company profiting from human rights violations has no place in the NHS or in any of our public services.”
Palantir’s track record opposes core health values.
Palantir currently holds a £330 million (approximately USD 436 million) NHS contract and has rolled out the service’s Federated Data Platform (FDP), managing sensitive patient data. The project has drawn criticism from virtually every group involved in the NHS: data workers say it lags behind local systems; patients share privacy and data ownership fears; and health workers insist Palantir’s record opposes the very values their profession embodies.
“I cannot stay true to that [Hippocratic] oath and tolerate Palantir continuing to profit from, and grow its malign business model through, an NHS contract,” said physician Rhiannon Osborne from Medact at Thursday’s rally. “Every pound we give them helps to legitimise and sustain human rights abuses and erosion of democratic rule of law across the world.”
A central concern is the company’s support for Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza. “When we strive to save every possible life, they champion their ability to kill and celebrate their role in the repeated war crimes committed by Israel—including unprecedented deliberate attacks on the doctors, nurses, and paramedics I worked with,” paediatric neurologist Omar Abdel-Mannan stated. “No moral government should tolerate their involvement in our NHS or indeed any of our public services.”
Campaigners repeated calls for Prime Minister Andy Burnham to end the contract as soon as possible. Under an exit clause in the original agreement, that moment could arrive as early as February 2027. Campaigners and several commissions are pressing the government to notify Palantir of its intention to withdraw ahead of this date.
“The government only has two months to say no to Palantir, and the momentum is all with us,” Good Law Project activists said at the rally in London. “All the energy is to say no to Palantir, say no to their global human rights abuses, say no to their crap technology that doesn’t work and get Palantir out of the NHS.”
Unions back appeal to bar Palantir from public sector contracts.
Calls to break Palantir’s grip on public services resonate beyond Britain. On 28 September, more than 120 groups and unions called upon European governments and the European Commission to “scrap all existing public sector contracts with the US tech company Palantir.” As reported by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), the appeal seeks to end current agreements and bar the firm from future public contracts. It also urges governments to develop “alternative data solutions compatible with public service,” echoing NHS data workers’ recommendations.
“Palantir’s ramping up of ‘war-related’ support for Israel during the genocide in Gaza and the apparent disdain of its leadership for democracy are just two clear signs that this company serves the interests of the rich and powerful, not the general public,” said Tim Bierley of Global Justice Now. “Yet it has been allowed to embed dubious technologies across our public services, giving it access to sensitive data and creating worrying new technical dependencies.”
“The UK must work with other countries to end dependence on companies involved in human rights abuses and end the outsourcing of the public sphere to a dangerous class of big tech oligarchs.”
I think that so much of the undermining of public programs to address collective needs is down to the American Constitution and the “pursuit of happiness.”
By parading the primacy of the individual, and bending every tenet of common sense to mean individual freedom to raid any and every store of collected money, no western initiative to serve the common good is safe from those with deep enough pockets to bankrupt national institutions and turn the noble idea into the just another ripoff.
I think that westerners and especially Americans need to appreciate why China and the CCP are not liberal institutions. They deploy market tactics and strategies to produce wealth, and they don’t allow those who thrive in the markets to interfere with government policies. The freedom of the individual in liberalism, is the power to promise nirvana and deliver drudgery. It is the core of the imperial state. An imposed hierarchy that the masses embrace because they are fed lies when they are pushed out of the womb into the world.
In this context, voting is a farce, lying is to be expected and selling is the behavior of every huckster. “We the people” are words that do nothing to protect the trust of the duped.