Scenes from the End of Neoliberalism

Here:

Former Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick has been working for Palantir as a paid adviser for the last year, the Bureau can reveal, as the controversial US tech firm continues to expand its reach within British policing. The revelation comes as Palantir wins a major new contract worth £10m with a group of forces in the east of England. The five-year deal will enable Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire police forces to use the company’s Foundry data platform. It follows a pilot project known as “Nectar”, for which Palantir developed a “real-time data-sharing network” to assist with decision-making and investigation of crimes in the region. The company also holds a £9m deal to run a firearms licensing system used by all UK police forces.

The latest contract marks a breakthrough in Palantir’s efforts to build its UK law enforcement business despite setbacks earlier this year. A group of East Midlands forces opted not to renew a two-year contract with the firm and London mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a £50m deal with the Met Police. Palantir’s efforts have likely been boosted by the appointment of Dame Cressida, who was Britain’s highest-ranking police officer between 2017 and 2022 after three years leading the UK’s counterterrorism policing unit and two years as a director general in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

A Palantir spokesperson said: “Dame Cressida is advising us on how our software could help improve the delivery of services in the public sector, drawing on more than 40 years of public service in a variety of roles.” Dame Cressida said: “My role is limited to providing advice on the ways in which products such as theirs may assist public sector services. I do not and have not ever lobbied or advocated for Palantir with any organisation or individual in any sector, nor have I ever introduced Palantir to any contact of mine.”

The new recruit is only the latest in a series of former high-ranking public officials to join the payroll of the tech giant, prompting accusations of a “revolving door” for senior execs at public bodies in the UK and US where the firm is seeking work. Labour Party peer and former deputy leader Tom Watson, who was an MP for over 18 years, joined as UK senior vice president of Palantir in September. Other hires from the halls of power include former Conservative defence minister Leo Docherty and Laurence Lee, another former director general in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a second permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence.

Responding to the news, Labour MP Clive Lewis told the Bureau: “Dick’s appointment raises the same concerns I’ve expressed about Tom Watson joining Palantir. What does a company gain when it recruits a former Labour deputy leader or a former Metropolitan Police commissioner? Their experience, yes. But also their contacts, influence and the authority associated with the offices they held. That ‘revolving door’ corrodes confidence in politics, public service generally and in institutions such as the police. People need to know that decisions about policing, public money and their personal data are taken solely in the public interest. Appointments like this make that trust harder to sustain. Ultimately the police depend on public consent. Credibility built through public service shouldn’t become a commercial asset for companies seeking public contracts. We need enforceable restrictions on these appointments, full transparency about their terms and independent scrutiny of potential conflicts of interest.”

Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP who has called for government bodies to cancel contracts with Palantir, said: “It never ceases to amaze me how willing people are to pay money to Palantir for the shoddy goods that they deliver. They think themselves the best in the world but they are just not that good — and keep on hiring people to bend ears to get them in via the back door.” 

Dame Cressida first rose to public prominence in 2005, when she led the operation that ended in the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian electrician who was mistaken by Met Police marksmen for a suspect in the 7/7 London bombings. Her tenure as Met commissioner was also fraught with a series of crises for the force, including the high-profile murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met Police officer. She eventually stepped down from the role after an Independent Office for Police Conduct reported “disgraceful” misogyny, discrimination, bullying and sexual harassment within the Met’s ranks. Dame Cressida said she had been left with “no choice” but to resign after London mayor Sadiq Khan said he had lost confidence in her leadership.

And here:

Thames Water’s lenders are poised to submit a “last and final” offer for the ailing utility, piling pressure on Prime Minister Andy Burnham to decide whether to renationalise the business. The creditors, whose previous offer was rejected by ministers in June, are drawing up a fresh approach that includes a larger debt writedown, a slightly higher equity offer and a demand for regulator Ofwat to waive some penalties in return for a cash payment. Burnham previously suggested he would seek to renationalise Thames, the country’s biggest water provider. However, since becoming prime minister he has resisted taking the company into state ownership despite public support for the move. People close to Ofwat and the creditors hope Burnham will continue to hold off doing so as long as creditors keep lending to the business.

A cross-party group of MPs last month demanded the government and Ofwat block the creditor group, which trades as the London & Valley Water consortium, from taking full control of Thames and abandon negotiations. Some Labour MPs are impatient at Burnham’s lack of intervention after a private briefing last week from Angela Eagle, environment secretary. “If anything, she gave the impression it was a matter for the creditors, the courts and Ofwat rather than ministers,” said one MP in attendance. Sophie Conquest, of campaign group We Own It, said: “Time is up for Burnham to make a decision on our water. The public is absolutely desperate for change.”

The prime minister’s allies say he is close to a decision, as Ofwat moves ahead with talks with London & Valley, made up of about 100 creditors including hedge funds Elliott Management and Silver Point Capital. While the regulator has not officially received the consortium’s revised terms, its board is “well informed” and minded to launch a public consultation on the proposal, according to people close to the regulator. Ofwat could still reject the deal post-consultation, and any agreement requires High Court sanction. Some of the creditors are increasingly reluctant to inject fresh capital without clarity over policy, people close to the discussions said. “It’s dragged on for so long,” one of them said. Some are even considering walking away, according to another person close to the negotiations.

The revised creditors’ plan would include a larger debt writedown of about 35 per cent versus the 30 per cent previously proposed. It would also include £3.5bn in equity, up from the £3.35bn proposed in March, and £6.55bn in debt, although the numbers have yet to be finalised. The group is also asking Ofwat to waive certain regulatory penalties until 2030 in exchange for a one-off £1bn payment into the business, up from £800mn. Meanwhile, the utility is rapidly burning through cash despite rising consumer bills while also missing core targets on leakage and sewage pollution.

To keep the company afloat, creditors have agreed to expand an existing £3bn “super-senior” emergency loan facility by an additional £2.4bn, which can be drawn down until autumn next year, subject to a High Court hearing this month. The expanded liquidity buys the consortium time to secure court sanction for its broader restructuring but carries a bruising 9.75 per cent interest rate. Thames is also seeking to agree to extend the maturities on super-senior, class A and class B debt by a year so it is due by 2028. Those creditors, some of whom have provided emergency loans to Thames, hope to exit through a public stock listing in the early 2030s.

Burnham has pledged greater public control of utilities and had been expected to temporarily nationalise Thames via a special administration regime, or SAR. That would require a High Court order proving insolvency or systemic breaches of the company’s environmental and licence obligations. Experts including Ewan McGaughey, a law professor at King’s College London, argue that Thames has already breached these obligations systematically. Eagle is also set to add amendments to a water bill expected to be presented to parliament within weeks to lift a cap on the government holding stakes in water companies, introduced during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, and to lower the thresholds for taking water utilities into an SAR.

The creditors said the cost of Thames’ rescue financing was “borne entirely by the class A creditors, not customer bills. Creditors have stepped in to provide the billions of pounds of private capital . . . avoiding the need for any government financial support or taxpayer funding”. Ofwat said it was Thames’ responsibility “to address its financial resilience and turn its performance around. It is critical that any new proposal put forward by London & Valley Water addresses the issues we and the government have raised”. Thames said it had over the past year “invested more than £2.7bn upgrading infrastructure and improving our performance for the benefit of customers and the environment”.

Indicts The Whole Administration

The next time that he spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives, Thomas Massie should announce his candidacy for President. In the meantime, Sohrab Ahmari writes:

When Donald Trump first nominated Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, the choice was met with a mix of bafflement and amusement. Could a Fox News anchor with a penchant for women and drink really lead one of the largest, most complex bureaucracies in the world? But Trump got his way. Now, after a year of increasingly ambitious foreign interventions culminating in the Iran quagmire, Hegseth faces a credible impeachment attempt in Congress.

The impeachment push was launched on Monday by outgoing GOP Congressman Thomas Massie, who introduced eight articles accusing Hegseth of abuses of power. Four concern the Iran war, including allegations that he continued military operations without congressional authorisation and presided over the dismantling of safeguards intended to protect civilians. The remaining charges relate to US operations in Yemen and Venezuela, strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats, and alleged retaliation against Democratic Senator Mark Kelly.

Earlier today, Hegseth used his first Pentagon press conference in six months to dismiss the impeachment effort as a “farce”. “We destroyed terror regimes’ capabilities. We sank the boats carrying poison into our communities. We put a narco dictator in handcuffs. These are not high crimes,” he said. “I was proud to execute them, and I would do it again tomorrow.”

Yet for all the bluster and bravado, the Secretary of War — as he styled himself following the revival of the department’s pre-1947 name — offered a feeble defence of his record at the press conference. In truth, he was always more a symptom of MAGA’s foreign-policy failure than its cause. To wit, Hegseth was supposed to be a champion of the movement’s more restrained vision of foreign policy. Indeed, this is just how he presented himself early on, and why many critics of American neoconservatism and foreign interventionism backed his difficult nomination.

I was one of those champions. Indeed, when an avalanche of sexual-assault and drunkenness allegations dogged his nomination, I wrote one of the first pieces defending Hegseth on the merits. I would still defend him, because some of those allegations were indeed spurious. But it was notable that many of the defence types and ex-soldiers who came out of the woodwork to feed me supportive quotes saw Hegseth as an opponent of regime-change “forever wars”.

As one administration insider told me at the time: “Pete believes that the wars we were involved in [after 9/11] were a disaster for us, for our armed forces, and for the people of those countries. Like a lot of veterans, he believes that he was lied to, and he believes he has to shake up the [national-security] complex.” Once he assumed office, Hegseth himself went out of his way to cultivate this image. When I spent a day travelling with him as he oversaw migrant-deportation operations at Guantánamo Bay, he described the post-9/11 wars as a “fucking mess,” adding that “they cost our country dearly: in blood, in treasure, in reputation.

And the more you look at them, the more you realise the depth of the folly around what we thought we were gonna create in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran effectively controls Iraq, the Taliban effectively controls Afghanistan.” The Pete Hegseth of those days — the interview took place in January 2025 — might now add ruefully: “Iran effectively controls the Strait of Hormuz.” Between those early days and February 2026, that vision was forgotten — by Trump himself, and the Iran hawks in his administration. Foremost among them is Hegseth, who has repeatedly pushed for escalation, according to my sources and public reporting.

The whole administration was responsible for the betrayal, and voters punished the GOP accordingly in the midterms. But Hegseth rendered it especially galling: he abandoned his wariness of foreign-policy quagmires and retained only the Trumpian bluster about “lethality” and “warfighters”. Add widespread complaints of mismanagement — head-spinning levels of staff turnover early on, paranoia in the front office, strained civilian-military relations, the bloodbath at a school in Iran — and Hegseth makes for an easy scapegoat for Democrats and antiwar Republicans alike. But the arc of his tenure — from war-wary ex-soldier to an enthusiastic cheerleader for an ill-conceived war — indicts the whole administration.

Good Form?

Josh Babarinde wants to change the law so that nonwhite people would be able to identify as English on the census form. But anyone can already identify as any ethnicity that they pleased on the census form. Has anyone ever checked up on yours? Well, there you are, then.

Nigerians in Sunderland might tick the English box in order to avoid being melted down and used to fill in the potholes, although that Glenn Gibbins became a councillor only because he fancied a bit of extra income had nothing to do with his being a member of Reform UK.

And Kashim Chowdhury might have done better if he had been a member of Reform, a party funded by Short Money, which until recently had a full-time Head of Policy who was also a full-time Associate Professor at Cambridge, a directly publicly funded position.

But if the State could not tell that a job applicant was already a civil servant several times over, then it would certainly not be able to ascertain that everyone who said that they were English really was.

A Valued Public Space

So this is the end of neoliberalism, is it? The Guardian editorialises:

It holds two copies of Magna Carta, the charter that set limits on royal power in 1215. It has the sole surviving manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and notebooks by some of the most beloved authors in the English language: Jane Austen, William Blake, Virginia Woolf. Also in the British Library’s red-brick London building is the original, illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – given as an early Christmas gift to Alice Liddell in 1864. On handwritten drafts of Wilfred Owen’s tragic poem Dulce et Decorum est, visitors can see suggestions made by his friend Siegfried Sassoon.

But neither display cases filled with treasures such as these nor vast digital archives, basement storage rooms, six cafes and a shop have been sufficient to arm the library against a sea of troubles that first threatened it three years ago, when hackers raided its computers for personal data and demanded a £600,000 ransom. Its long-serving chief executive, Roly Keating, took the decision to step down once the worst of the cyber-attack – one of the most serious in the UK’s history – had been dealt with. His replacement, Rebecca Lawrence, lasted less than a year before resigning in the middle of a strike over pay. Now, a new row has broken out over plans to rent out three of the library’s reading rooms and outsource security.

The British Library is, of course, not alone in seeking novel ways to generate revenue from its open-access public building. Private and corporate private views are routine at blockbuster exhibitions; the early weeks of the British Museum’s Bayeux tapestry show were marred by a row about an ill-judged invitation to Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire. But reading rooms are unlike temporary exhibitions in that they are permanent. These are spaces designed for people to read and study in. Handing three of them over to a private contractor to operate commercially, as the British Library proposes, would change the character of a cherished institution.

Its new boss, Dr Paul Bate, has been in post for less than a week. He urgently needs to grip the situation and give a fuller account to staff, users and the public of what is going on. As an arm’s-length body, the library is overseen by a board. But since 84% of its £170m annual budget comes from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ministers too should be constructively engaged. 

It is widely accepted that the damage to finances and morale caused by the hackers, following the Covid pandemic, lies behind the current woes. A report this summer from the public accounts committee of MPs blamed the government for the lack of a strategic approach to cybersecurity. Politicians must take responsibility for past mistakes and help England’s national library to avoid a protracted crisis.

As trade unions have pointed out, outsourcing the library’s security staff would be contrary to the government’s commitment to insourcing. Privatising sections would undermine a valued public space that is both open to all, and an essential component of a neglected higher‑education ecosystem. The British Library – formerly part of the British Museum – was established more than 50 years ago; the St Pancras building is approaching its 30th anniversary. As a national institution, it is a place in which everyone has a stake. The government must get behind it, and look for an alternative solution.

Thomas Massie’s Revenge

One last time, off splutters Donald Trump about electoral fraud. More significantly, of the man who ought to announce his own Presidential candidacy the next time that he spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives, my old PostRight colleague Jack Hunter writes:

“The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President J.D. Vance admitted Wednesday on X, explaining the Republicans’ disastrous midterm election loss the day before. He listed the top four things the GOP could do, according to a pollster with whom he spoke, to win back voters who had defected to the Democrats. These were:

1) End the war 

2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 

3) Put America First 

4) Change our relationship to Israel

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) replied to Vance’s post, “Thanks for acknowledging these things. Better late than never.” Massie included an image of a red, MAGA-style hat. Instead of “Make America Great Again,” it said “Massie Was Right About Everything.” “I’ll send you the hat,” he added. Massie had a point. “Donald Trump will put Americans first by securing our liberties at home and preventing needless wars abroad,” declared Massie in his endorsement of President Donald Trump in October 2024.

At the time, Massie’s praise for Trump expressed the most basic hope of many in the original MAGA movement, and certainly of its ideological core. After his inauguration, Trump’s early promises of radical DOGE spending cuts and a break from interventionist foreign policy withered more quickly and completely than even his political adversaries had expected, and by March 2026, the administration had launched a war with Iran that seemed to serve Israel’s interests, first. That war cost Americans at home, at the gas pump and beyond. So did massive federal spending. So did the other wars.

Massie resisted all of this. He has remained a fiscal hawk throughout the entire Trump era, which has enraged Trump in both terms. And he has been a stalwart “America First” Republican, one who is not afraid to challenge Israeli influence and question policy (which also irked the president). Massie understood that financial and foreign policy restraint were related, something many Americans are now experiencing firsthand. The Kentucky congressman never abandoned the old MAGA message from his original Trump endorsement. He refused. For that reason, Trump teamed with pro-Israel billionaires to defeat Massie in his primary this May—the most expensive House primary in U.S. history.

This week Republicans suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in modern American political history. And it was a loss that differed in important respects from prior reversals. “Past midterm blue waves largely involved angry Democrats and independents beating up on jittery swing-seat Republicans who weren't totally comfortable with what their president was doing, with a few genuine upsets sprinkled in,” observed Jim Antle of the Washington Examiner. “This one hit the GOP’s center of gravity.” Indeed.

Massie tried to warn his party. After the off-year 2025 elections in which Democrats did exceptionally well, he told Republicans what they might need to do to survive the 2026 midterms. “To avoid a repeat of last night’s shellacking in the 2026 midterms,” Massie urged, “Republicans should: quit covering for pedophiles; put America before Israel; put farmers before corporations; quit funding wars abroad; reduce spending to control inflation; quit attacking independent voices.”

Take out Massie’s efforts for more transparency on the Epstein Files, also a part of original MAGA, and this sounds like Vance’s midterm postmortem list. In fact, in this election a number of Democrats ran with the “America First” message sounding more like Trump from two years ago than the president today—and sounding more like Massie on any day than the current Lindsey Graham–ified MAGA. Resharing his November 2025 warning post, Massie wrote on Wednesday, “Instead of correcting course, the GOP chose to shoot the messenger and double down on stupid.”

Trump’s Republican party did shoot Massie the messenger, and it definitely doubled (tripled? quadrupled?) down on stupid. But now, who looks stupid? In the broadest sense, the America First message still remains viable and has been largely untried. That isn’t due to Thomas Massie’s lack of trying. But judging by the midterm results, the voters believe it’s due to Trump’s.

The Great British Sell Off

John Gapper, Clara Murray and Jason Ma writes:

The City of London has always taken pride in being open to international business. But in recent years, it has become a raiding ground. FT analysis of four decades of deals shows the current wave of takeovers of UK public companies by foreign acquirers is unusually fierce. Over the past 10 years alone, more than 300 companies with a combined price tag of over half a trillion pounds at today’s prices have been snapped up by overseas buyers. The traffic in the opposite direction has been far more modest by comparison. This year’s multibillion-pound takeovers of companies — which include testing business Intertek, real estate group Segro and the low-cost airline easyJet — show the continuing vulnerability of UK plc. So far in 2026, announced foreign acquisitions of whole UK-listed companies, including debt, have reached £73bn, the highest level since 2018.

“London has become a clearing house for companies. The UK grows them and then another country acquires them,” says Patrick Sarch, leader of the UK public mergers and acquisitions practice at the US law firm White & Case. A weak domestic institutional shareholder base, the low valuations of British companies compared with their US peers, the barriers to scaling up and the financial incentives to sell up are sustaining the trend — and creating a growing economic problem for the UK. “There is a feeding frenzy and the more that it happens, the more it will. We are in effect exporting economic growth, tax revenue and wealth creation,” says Charles Hall, head of research at the UK investment bank Peel Hunt.

Often, it is foreign private equity groups doing the feasting. The Swedish private equity firm EQT led the £10.7bn Intertek buyout in June, while easyJet accepted a £5.7bn takeover by Apollo after resisting a rival private equity bid. “The UK market is very efficient. Capital moves quickly when there is an opportunity,” says one adviser. Bankers and lawyers in the City are being rewarded. According to London Stock Exchange Group data, the takeover of Segro by Prologis of the US is expected to generate fees totalling $116mn for banks including Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Cazenove. “We make a good living from the car boot sale of UK companies, but it is sad,” says one City adviser.

The FT analysis of LSEG data shows how the sale of UK companies is a long-term phenomenon, often the outcome when boards cannot find a way to grow faster, or a foreign acquirer is looking for an entry to the market. Governments have avoided blocking deals, except on grounds of national security, and big companies are less shielded by family shareholdings than in Europe, where countries such as France and Germany have experienced lower rates of foreign acquisition. The City of London itself was one of the first targets. In the aftermath of the so-called Big Bang liberalisation in 1986, venerable London names such as Morgan Grenfell Asset Management, SG Warburg, Smith New Court and others were acquired by US or European rivals. The City was increasingly compared to Wimbledon: a place that hosted championships dominated by foreign players.

The millennium brought the next wave of deals, with takeovers of companies such as supermarket chain Asda, acquired by Walmart for £6.7bn in 1999. But this was also a period when UK companies, from the energy group BP to the mobile operator Vodafone, were acquiring foreign businesses. They had high valuations and investors, enthused by the dotcom boom, backed rights issues to raise capital. The contrast with this year, where acquisitions of UK companies have far outweighed outward-bound deals such as Shell’s $16.4bn purchase of Arc Resources, is stark. WPP, the marketing group, was one of the most voracious acquirers under Sir Martin Sorrell, acquiring a series of big US rivals during the 1990s and 2000s. “I would probably move to the US today if I wanted to build a global business, but there’s an even greater need for the UK to repeat what we did then,” says Sorrell.

Another wave of activity came around 20 years ago. Cadbury was acquired by US food group Kraft for £11.6bn after an acrimonious stand-off that raised political concerns about foreign ownership. The mobile telecoms group O2 was acquired by Telefónica of Spain, and banking group Abbey National by Santander. But the high point for worries about UK companies being undervalued and vulnerable came in 2016. Arm Holdings, the Cambridge-based group that had become a global leader in chip design, was taken private by Japan’s SoftBank for £24bn following the Brexit vote. Along with the £400mn private acquisition of DeepMind, the AI start-up, by Google in 2014, the Arm deal offered clear evidence that businesses emerging from the UK’s technology start-up ecosystem, linked to world-class universities, were being picked off before they had fully developed. Saul Klein, co-founder of the venture capital group Phoenix Court, calls the opportunity cost to the UK of Arm being acquired “harrowing”.

AstraZeneca, for a time Britain’s most valuable listed company, was one of a very few to successfully defend itself, fighting off a £69bn takeover bid from Pfizer of the US in 2014. Its market value has since tripled. The appetite for UK companies offers a riposte to those who question the country’s entrepreneurial culture. “We beat ourselves up that we are not good at producing great companies, but the rest of the world obviously disagrees,” says Andy Haldane, president of the British Chambers of Commerce and an FT contributing editor. But these companies are not valued as highly, relative to profits, revenues, assets or cash flow, as they would be in the US, and the differential has widened in recent years. That reflects the US economy’s higher growth rate and the willingness of investors there to pour huge sums into risky ventures, particularly in the technology sector. The UK market has traditionally been more cautious and focused on dividends, making it harder for businesses to invest in growth.

“[Companies] cannot buy their way out of it. They are waiting to be bought,” says one banker of the valuation gap. The gulf in valuations has been exacerbated by the retreat of investment institutions from the stock market. UK pension schemes have switched heavily into government bonds after accounting rules changed in the early 2000s, and now hold only about 3 per cent of their assets in UK-listed equities. The lack of such a core long-term shareholder base makes it less likely that investors will reject takeover bids and back executives to expand the business instead, as they did with AstraZeneca. In other markets, including the US and Australia, domestic institutions have retained more of a presence, and Goldman Sachs has established a correlation between the level of domestic investment and valuations.

That is set to change. From 2028, UK ministers will have the legal power to force certain pension funds to invest up to 10 per cent of their funds in UK companies and private assets. Hall of Peel Hunt argues that there should be a default allocation of pension savings to UK equities, with members able to pick a different strategy if they choose. Listed company executives cannot wholly blame a lack of support from UK investors for unsolicited takeover bids. Private equity firms have often tracked them for years, looking for companies that could grow faster with more capital investment, a stronger focus and fewer of the distractions that a public listing brings. “Some of the companies have made themselves vulnerable,” says an adviser.

But the UK has moved from having an open capital market that encouraged inward and outward corporate investment into experiencing a one-way flow. Klein, at Phoenix Court, remarks that the country is “one of the best places in the world to buy a team and one of the hardest to build an owner”. Foreign investors are increasingly capturing the investment returns from UK businesses, and there is little sign of it easing — or reason to believe it will. Whether through the City’s openness to bids, the country’s lack of trade barriers, a paucity of domestic investment or lack of corporate ambition, the banquet of British listed companies continues. “This is not happening in France because it does not put its companies up for sale,” Hall says. “We let it happen, and we’ll look back with regret.”

The biggest deals

Morgan Grenfell | Deutsche Bank

The merchant bank that helped fund Britain through the first world war was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1986, but its share price fell during the crash of 1987 and because of its involvement in the Guinness share-trading fraud. That allowed an expansionist Deutsche Bank to acquire it for £950mn in 1989. It was later renamed Deutsche Asset Management, killing off a hallowed name in the history of world finance.

Asda | Walmart 

In 1999, the Leeds-based supermarket chain was all set to crown an impressive turnaround by merging with B&Q owner Kingfisher when Walmart swooped in to snap up the group for £6.7bn. But the US retail giant’s plan to use Asda as a bridgehead to Europe never really succeeded, while an attempt to merge it with J Sainsbury in 2018 was blocked by regulators. In 2021 it sold most of its holding to TDR Capital and the petrol station billionaires Zuber and Mohsin Issa, returning Asda to UK ownership.

Cadbury | Kraft 

Founded by John Cadbury in 1824, Cadbury was as famed for its Quaker principles and the factory town it built for its workers in south-west Birmingham as it was for its chocolate and cocoa. It was bought by US processed foods group Kraft for £11.5bn in 2010 after an unusually rancorous takeover battle. Kraft was later censured by the Takeover Panel for making misleading statements and criticised by politicians for closing a factory it had pledged to keep open.

O2 | Telefónica 

Spun out of former state monopolist BT in 2001, mobile operator O2’s chances of survival were initially seen as shaky. But clever marketing and rapid rates of customer acquisition allowed it to pay a maiden dividend in 2005. Later the same year, Telefónica snapped it up for £17.7bn. By the 2010s, the heavily indebted Spanish group was hawking O2 around potential buyers, and it returned to semi-British control in 2021 when it merged with Liberty Global’s Virgin Media.

Arm Holdings | SoftBank 

Founded in 1990 by a dozen British computer scientists, Arm became a world leader among so-called fabless chip companies, which design chips for others but do not actually manufacture them. Aided by a weak pound in the aftermath of the Brexit vote in 2016, Japan’s SoftBank bought the UK’s leading tech company for £24.3bn in a deal that then prime minister Theresa May called a “vote of confidence” in the UK. But when the time came to relist Arm, SoftBank chose Nasdaq, where its valuation is now almost six times its purchase price.

Shire | Takeda 

Founded in 1986 by married couple Harry and Caroline Stratford above a shop in Basingstoke, Shire started as a maker of calcium supplements for osteoporosis. But it gradually shed its Britishness as it looked for markets and products abroad, starting with its 1997 acquisition of US-based Richwood Pharmaceuticals, which made ADHD medication Adderall. A series of acquisitions followed before Shire itself was bought by Japan’s Takeda for £46bn in 2019.

EasyJet | Apollo 

British-Cypriot entrepreneur and shipping scion Stelios Haji-Ioannou built easyJet from two leased aircraft in 1995 into one of Europe’s largest budget airlines, though he clashed with its management along the way. Apollo beat out rival asset manager Castlelake to buy the carrier after offering more and pledging to continue paying royalties to use the easy brand. The deal could result in Haji-Ioannou and his family increasing their stake to 49 per cent.

Segro | Prologis

While many commercial real estate groups focus on shops and offices, Segro’s speciality was ready-to-use warehouses that appealed to large corporations. For many years it was known as Slough Estates due to its base west of Heathrow airport, a location that also gave it proximity to fibre optic cables connecting North America to London and helped make it the world’s second-largest cluster of data centres. American logistics and real estate investor Prologis agreed to pay £14bn for Segro in August.

Schroders | Nuveen

Although its origins were German — it was founded in 1804 by Johann Heinrich Schröder, a banker from Hamburg — Schroders became a famous British name in global finance by arranging bond issues for the Confederates in the American civil war and becoming the first foreign lender to Japan. But it struggled to compete with the giant US institutions that muscled their way into the City after the Big Bang. Having sold its investment bank to Citigroup in 2000, it agreed a takeover by Chicago-based asset manager Nuveen in February, robbing the FTSE 100 of its last British asset manager.

UK companies that bought abroad

Vodafone | Mannesmann

Vodafone was launched in 1985, after its parent company Racal won one of the two UK cellular radio licences being sold by the Thatcher government. Under chief executive Chris Gent, it became Britain’s biggest company and pulled off what was for many years the biggest buyout in corporate history: the $183bn takeover of Germany’s Mannesmann. The group later acknowledged it had overpaid. Its empire-building phase is also over; current boss Margherita Della Valle has sold off Spanish and Italian businesses to refocus on the UK.

WPP | Young and Rubicam

Wire and Plastics Products, better known by its initials WPP, was bought up by British businessman Martin Sorrell in 1985 as a listed vehicle he could use to build an advertising empire. A three-decade run of acquisitions included Madison Avenue giants J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather, and Grey, reaching its peak in 2000 with the £3bn purchase of Young & Rubicam. By 2018, when Sorrell resigned amid allegations of bullying and the improper use of company funds, which he denied, the company controlled over 450 entities.

Move On From Palantir

Ben Coleman writes:

Next March, Palantir’s £330m contract to run NHS England’s federated data platform (FDP) ends. Ministers must decide by Christmas whether to extend it. They should move on from Palantir, and transition to new suppliers that put the NHS in full control of its technology and patient data.

I sit on the health and social care committee. In June, we recommended no extension – people don’t trust Palantir, its benefits are contested and other tools could deliver the same or similar advantages. The debate so far has been whether to drop Palantir. The harder question is what replaces it. The tempting solution is to hire a single British firm. But that would not give the NHS the control it lacks: the freedom to switch supplier without losing what it has built.

Currently, NHS teams build applications on Palantir’s software platform. The NHS owns the applications and rents the platform. The aim is to join up hospital data to manage waiting lists, plan operations and get patients home. We need clarity about what will happen if the Palantir contract ends. How easy would it be to move the applications to another supplier? Will there be disruption that affects patient care?

Ministers assure me the NHS is not locked into Palantir’s service. Local NHS data teams, British tech firms and thinktanks tell me they are not convinced. A ministerial response to the committee in August left questions open. It said the NHS owned, or had a right to use, the applications built on the platform, but that some arrangements would end with the contract. It did not say which. Owning your applications is useless if they won’t work elsewhere. It also said the government would explore how to move the applications on to a different platform only if the contract ended, and it declined to audit which Palantir tools hospital trusts depend on. Surely ministers need to know this now?

The NHS’s dependence on Palantir worries the national data guardian, too. She told ministers this month that “concerns about interoperability, vendor lock-in and data sovereignty must be addressed”, including by considering open standards. Open standards are shared, published rules for how health information is recorded and labelled, so that software from different suppliers can work together, much as any UK plug fits any UK socket.

In an FDP based on national open standards, regions could choose their own suppliers to build the software they need, from in-house NHS developers to small British firms. Data would stay with each region and be shared only under strict permissions. Suppliers could be swapped without starting again. Britain has the skills to do this. Nigel Shadbolt, co-founder of the Open Data Institute, told our committee there is “nothing to suggest that the UK lacks the talent or capability to produce an equivalent to what Palantir offers”. For example, Greater Manchester’s integrated care board already runs its own analytics platform, while NHS OneLondon joins up patient records across the capital.

It is not too late to reverse the dependence on Palantir. The Guardian reported recently that 16 trusts and health boards say they do not use the platform. Some tried it and reverted to old systems. The British Medical Journal says a third of signed-up trusts have never logged in and many barely use it. The case for change is about more than avoiding lock-in. A data platform works only if patients trust it, yet mistrust of Palantir means opt-outs are growing.

The FDP’s benefits are also uncertain. Palantir claims a 14% fall in discharge delays, but the Health Foundation has found no noticeable change. Just one trust, Chelsea and Westminster in my constituency, accounts for 84% of the claimed national cut in outpatient waiting lists. Even NHS England now says cause and effect are unproven. I’ve asked its chief executive, Jim Mackey, why it lets Palantir claim otherwise. A full evaluation is not due until 2029. Mackey told our committee that an independent review now would be “helpful and necessary” but could not be done before the decision.

Then there is sovereignty. Britain needs to be able to build and control its own health tech, including AI, and not leave the NHS dependent on a US company. Could an open system be ready by March? Probably not. So ministers should agree only a short transition, on new terms, while it is built. That transition should do four things. Freeze new applications on Palantir’s platform. Run it for at most two years, with leaving made easier over time. Publish what the FDP does and costs, which tools trusts depend on and how an exit would work so others can bid. And make Palantir prove there is no lock-in by moving one application off the platform within a year.

Beyond the FDP, the planned single patient record, which will bring each person’s health records together, must be open, too, or it will tie the NHS to a single supplier on a far larger scale. Data sovereignty means more than keeping health data on British soil. If Britain wants sovereign AI in health, it needs a system it controls. A British Palantir would not give it that. Open standards would.