Beware This Rush To War

In March, we learned that the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, had helped the United States to “frame their request” to use British bases to bomb Iran. How was that Knighton’s job? How was it even compatible with his job? His only medals are Jubilee ones, the Coronation one, and the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, while there are no wings among his braids. In 38 years, his only combat tour has been as an engineering support officer in Italy during the Kosovo War. To have risen to his present eminence, appointed in the end by Keir Starmer of all Prime Ministers, he is obviously a spook, and thus steeped in the Five Eyes culture of being fed scraps by the Americans while yelping our gratitude at having been fed at all. And now, Peter Hitchens writes:

Why is the Chief of our Defence Staff beating war drums on the BBC, while making incorrect public statements about Russia, as I shall describe below? His job, surely, is to defend our seas, coasts and skies, not barge into political controversy.

And isn’t it time war went out of fashion? Like the dreadful clothes and hairstyles of the 1970s, it looks increasingly ugly and embarrassing. More and more people look at what has happened and ask: ‘What were we thinking when we did that?’

Donald Trump’s illegal attack on Iran, hand in hand with Israel, has gone hopelessly wrong and threatens to plunge us all into recession while achieving less than nothing. Almost all sensible people are now utterly sick of Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated bloody resort to bombs and shells in Gaza and Lebanon. They hold back only because they do not wish to damage Israel.

Vladimir Putin has brought increasing ruin on his country by foolishly thinking he could outsmart America’s Russia hawks – by using naked violence in a lawless invasion. It was exactly what they wanted him to do and had been trying to goad him into doing for years. It has – as those hawks hoped it would – exposed Russia’s many serious weaknesses as a country. Not least that its conventional armed forces are weak and rusty. The resulting cemeteries can be seen from space.

None of this is any surprise. All my life, idiots have reached for aggressive war rather than diplomacy, and covered themselves in blood and shame. In our own case, attacks on Suez, Iraq and Libya have brought disastrous national decline, growing poverty, a climate of toxic lying and unstoppable mass immigration from the lands we have ruined.

Yet there is still a strong war party in this country, and it burst rather weirdly into action on Friday. Recent years have seen the strange sight of spy supremos emerging from secrecy to freeze our blood with warlike musings. Service chiefs, too, once models of silence and impartiality, have begun to blurt and blether in support of war, which – in our system of government – they really should not do. They are paid to fight, not to bloviate.

The latest is Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, currently Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS). He was interviewed on Friday by the normally level-headed Justin Webb on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. As it was the eve of the anniversary of D-Day, Sir Rich (as he prefers to be known) rightly recalled the courage of those who fought in Normandy in 1944, but also ‘the strength of the alliance that allowed us to fight for freedom and push Nazi Germany back’.

So far, so ordinary. But then the exchange turned weird. Mr Webb asked, in the woeful tones of a funeral director: ‘How close are we now to having to fight again against Russia?’

Note that ‘again’. Why did he say it? Britain has not been at war with Russia since the end of the Crimean War in 1856. In 1914, Russia was our ally against Germany. In 1944, Russia – then in the USSR – was utterly vital to the alliance that, as the CDS rightly said, ‘allowed us to fight for freedom and push Nazi Germany back’.

Russians would argue that D-Day, as brave and noble as it was, could not have happened if Russians had not fought Hitler for the previous three years over many bitter, bloody miles.

The current official frenzy for a new conflict with Russia causes people to forget such inconvenient things. It shouldn’t.

But then came the really odd bit. Sir Rich turns out to be against illegal invasions (tell Sir Anthony Blair!), critical of those who carry out assassinations (tell Mr Netanyahu!) and critical of those who are willing to ‘use military force against another nation’ (tell President Trump!). He also believes this is ‘the most dangerous period that I have known’ in 35 years of service. Is it really?

Then he began to speak about the Kremlin threat. He said that ‘closer to home we have seen in 2026 more long-range aviation from Russia. These are strategic aircraft that will go well into our own airspace, as many in 2026 as we saw in 2025’.

Alas for the CDS, this is twaddle. There haven’t been any such incursions since 2005. Russian planes may fly close to our airspace (we also fly close to theirs) but they don’t usually fly into it. You might bear this in mind the next time you see a headline claiming that some ancient Russian Bear Tu-95 (it first flew in 1952, so is almost as old as I am) has violated Britain’s sovereign air. It won’t have done.

When I pointed out the CDS’s rather serious factual mistake to the Defence Ministry, they tried to pretend that Sir Rich had been speaking of the ‘High North’, a vague ill-defined area in the Arctic which includes Russia and has no specific airspace anyway. But he didn’t utter the phrase. What he had done was to use the words ‘closer to home’ and ‘our own airspace’, which plainly mean the UK.

But the real question is: Why do senior military figures believe and spout this stuff? Yes, they want more money. But by turning rusty, bungling Russia into a giant bogeyman with scare stories and alarm, they – and the BBC – may alas get their wish, a real war. You won’t enjoy it, if they do.

Beware this rush to war. All that the warmongers learned from being caught out lying in Iraq was how to make their propaganda slicker.

Having Your Battenberg Cake And Eating It?

What’s in a name? At the age of 97, Lady Pamela Hicks died today, the oldest living descendant of Queen Victoria, and until her marriage Lady Pamela Mountbatten. She named her daughter India, which is just delicious. Alas, though, her demise was not the main Mountbatten story. There are those with a right to criticise Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, but they do not include Margaret Hodge, whose feud with Jeremy Corbyn goes back to her time as Leader of Islington Council, when, much to his disgust, she presided over what amounted to a network of child brothels purporting to be care homes. One may as well take lectures from Ghislaine Maxwell, who may as well be a Peer of the Realm, a Privy Counsellor, and a Dame of the British Empire.

On balance, I would not abolish the monarchy. You would not have hereditary surgeons or hereditary pilots, but nor would you elect them. The arguments for the monarchy are rubbish in their own terms, but so are the arguments for a republic, meaning that the case for change has not been made. Which republic is classless, and free of corruption? France? Germany? Italy? India? Ireland? The United States? Where? A Presidential Election would be a choice between the next Bullingdon Club member in line and someone who had casually given a trifling £50,000 to the most recently successful candidate for the Leadership of the Labour Party. No one else would even make it onto the ballot paper, and I would not want either of those as my Head of State.

Nor would I abolish the Royal Prerogative. Rather, I want it to be exercised by a Prime Minister who aspired to strengthen families and communities through economic equality and international peace. But the monarchy, and with it the exercise of the Royal Prerogative by persons who most certainly did not share those aspirations, does not depend on the support of people like me. It depends on the support of people who, as long as the monarchy were simply there, have been prepared to overlook the fact that hardly anything that they really wanted ever happened, while all sorts of things that they did not want did happen, no matter who was in government.

Yet the threat to the monarchy was always going to come from the Right, although I had always assumed that that would be because it was blindingly incompatible with Thatcherite meritocracy. As it is, though, note what those Raising the Colours, no beneficiaries of Thatcherism unless one reasonably counted lifelong and intergenerational benefit dependency, were saying online about the King, and note what they were not saying, for God to save him or for him to live long, either there or on the streets. Of course Queen Elizabeth II was a Remainer, just as of course the King is a Green at least in a nonpartisan sense; he and his asylum-seeking father practically invented it. Like Green Parties from the Bundestag to the House of Commons, the King is a supporter of the war in Ukraine. So much for the Battenberg line, through which he is a great-great-nephew of Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna.

Already revering Oliver Cromwell, Restore Britain has recruited Laurence Fox, whose Reclaim Party wanted the monarchy to die with the then Queen. Reform UK gave Fox a free run at Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in return for the same at Mid Bedfordshire. Richard Tice has repeatedly called for Nigel Farage to become Britain’s elected Head of State. The political neutrality of the monarchy is like the impartiality of the BBC. When, exactly, has there ever been any such thing? The same may be said of the Police, about whom the clue is in the name. Like having a monarchy or having the BBC, having the Police is inherently political. If they no longer automatically express your prejudices, then your prejudices are no longer hegemonic. If they never have done, then they never were. Of those three examples, it is the monarchy that never has embodied the presuppositions of its strongest supporters. It still keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet. But I am entirely at a loss as to why it has that effect on them.

Either Elizabeth II or her equally revered father signed off on every nationalisation, every aspect of the Welfare State, every retreat from Empire, every loosening of Commonwealth ties, every social liberalisation, every constitutional change, and every European Union treaty. Charles III signed off on decriminalised abortion up to birth, and he would have signed off on assisted suicide and on gender self-identification, as he may yet. They have had assisted suicide in Canada for years. If those monarchs could not have done otherwise, then why bother having a monarchy? What is it for? I support public ownership and the Welfare State in principle, even if the practice has often fallen short. The same may be said of decolonisation, as a matter of historical interest. I find some social liberalisations and some constitutional changes a cause for joy, and others a cause for horror. I abhor the EU, and the weakening of the Commonwealth. But this is not about me.

Is it the job of a monarch, if not to acquire territory and subjects, then at least to hold them? If so, then George VI was by far the worst ever British monarch, and quite possibly the worst monarch that the world has ever seen, with his daughter in second place. And is it the job of a British monarch to maintain a Protestant society and culture in the United Kingdom? If so, then no predecessor ever began to approach the abject failure of Elizabeth II, a failure so complete that no successor will ever be able to equal it. And for all her undoubted personal piety, I am utterly baffled by the cult of that Queen among Evangelical Protestants and among those who cleaved to a more-or-less 1950s vision of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism or Methodism. What did she ever do for them? What has the monarchy ever done for them?

During the last reign, Britain became history’s most secular country, and the White British became history’s most secular ethnic group, a trend that has been even more marked among those with Protestant backgrounds than it has been among us Catholics. The next monarch is not a regular churchgoer, meaning that the one after that is not being brought up as one. “We have no King but King Jesus,” proclaimed the Covenanters of 1638, and another King Charles’s prayer with the Pope has at least implicitly caused the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster to hoist again the Blue Banner, “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant”, from Kyle Paisley’s ministerial charge in old Puritan East Anglia.

This has implications for the Windrush debate, and with eight Commonwealth Realms in or on the Caribbean, a fat lot of good being the Queen’s loyal subject did anyone there; Barbados, proportionately the most Anglican country in the world and known as “Little England” on account of the length and depth of the ties, became a republic in 2021. It also has implications for aspects of the debate around Brexit. If you wanted to preserve and restore a Christian culture in this country, then you would welcome mass immigration from the Caribbean, from Africa, from Latin America, and from Eastern Europe.

And speaking of immigration, the Royal Family would agree with NHS England that cousin marriage, not least where one party was an immigrant, had “benefits” that included “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”. Queen Victoria and the immigrant Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line, and Prince Philip was not only an immigrant, but an asylum-seeker who took refuge in Britain because he had relatives here, one of whom he married. Britain intervened militarily in his native land to restore his family to the Throne. Talk about bringing their troubles to our door.

Cousin marriage was the most uncompromisingly Protestant thing about the public life of the late Queen. It is unconditionally legal in 18 of the United States plus the District of Columbia, and conditionally legal in a further six. Proponents of a ban on it here should ask themselves why there was not one already. There did used to be. Until the Reformation, the Late Roman ban on marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity had obtained, extended to affinity because in marriage, “the two shall become one flesh”. Catholic Canon Law has therefore always banned cousin marriage, at one time to the seventh degree, although with possibilities of dispensation since the ban was not in the Bible. Such dispensations did the Hapsburgs no good.

The legality of marriages between first cousins is a product of the Reformation. Its prevalence until the First World War, and as recently as that, was a badge of Protestant honour, since Henry VIII had legalised it when he had wanted to marry Catherine Howard, who was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin, and since although William and Mary never had children, the intention had been that they would, and they were first cousins whose marriage would not ordinarily have been possible in the Catholic Church. Does the Orange Order now wish to ban a marriage such as William of Orange’s? Would the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist in the House of Commons vote for that ban?

This seems to be a Two Cultures thing. Although Charles and Emma Darwin were first cousins who had 10 children, and although Albert and Elsa Einstein were both maternal first cousins and paternal second cousins such that her maiden name was Einstein, the mere thought of this practice is profoundly shocking to scientists. But to people formed by the study of literature and history, then, while that is where it belongs, that is where you will find it routinely. Mainstream British society was educated out of it, and not very long ago, so that can obviously be done. South Asians are hardly unreceptive to education. Between 1979 and 1981, the makers and viewers of To the Manor Born took it as read that Audrey fforbes-Hamilton’s late husband had been her cousin. Although Coronation Street does not, both Emmerdale and EastEnders still feature such arrangements between white characters whose families were supposed to have lived in Emmerdale or Walford since time out of mind, and that seems to raise no eyebrows.

Anglo-Saxons and Scotch-Irish still regularly marry their first cousins in several of the parts of the United States that were most likely to vote for Donald Trump, and they did so as a matter of course into the very recent past. But if the argument is that this was something that certain other ethnic groups did, then it is probably better to treat it as a health education matter rather than a criminal one. After all, that was what worked with everyone else. Nineteenth-century novels are full of marriages between first cousins as the most normal thing in the world, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line. But the King is a last hurrah of that sort of thing. His mother was one of the least inbred monarchs ever, and his son and grandson are not at all inbred. Educate people, and it will mostly or entirely die out. That worked with everyone else. Even the Royal Family.

Yet since the intention would apparently be to prevent genetic defects, which is not the only reason to oppose cousin marriage, then it would be pointless without the criminalisation of sex between first cousins. So be it, but that seems highly unlikely, since we have already raised the age of marriage to two years above the age of consent, a literally preposterous arrangement. It is now legally impossible to do the decent thing, but not to do the indecent thing. Pity poor Imam Ashraf Osmani of Northampton, who in January was handed a suspended sentence of 15 weeks’ imprisonment for having performed a nikah, which has no legal status whatever, so that two 16-year-olds could have a perfectly lawful sexual relationship without sinning. The second time as farce.

Something similar applies to polygamy. As you could marry your cousin my nikah, with no legal standing, and the two of you could then have children perfectly legally as you could have done anyway, so you can take three more wives alongside your legal one by nikah, with no legal standing, and have children with all of them. Or you could take all four wives by nikah alone. In fact, any man can have children with four different women simultaneously if they will let him. Doing so with two, often in arrangements that lasted decades, has never been especially uncommon, and nor has sending the bill to the DWP or its predecessors. Whatever else that may be, it is certainly not un-British.

Palantir UK: Capture of the British State

Last night, Newsnight featured yet another BBC outing for Matthew Syed, this time to declare himself the voice of the white working class, which he claimed was never mentioned. When that was laughed out by everyone else in the room, including a miner’s daughter, then it was clearly a novel and unwelcome experience for the table tennis player who became a table tennis pundit, who became a pundit in general. Footballers who try to do that are howled down.

Syed told last year’s Conservative Party Conference that he had become a Conservative specifically because that was the present vehicle for the New Labour of 2001, for which he told the adoring audience that he was “proud” to have been a parliamentary candidate, and from which all parties except the Conservatives had “moved wildly to the left”.

The 2001 Labour manifesto, Syed asserted, “was miles to the right of almost anything you see in British politics today”, hence his pride. He called Nigel Farage “a Socialist, way to the left economically of the Corbyn-McDonnell manifesto of 2017”, and he stated that that was why he had joined the Conservative Party, which gave him a standing ovation. Now he is “the Conservative commentator, Matthew Syed”.

And the self-proclaimed voice of the white working class. But if anyone deserves that epithet, then it is the peerless Paul Knaggs:

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 

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.

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?

Civil Disorder

Opposite-sex couples may already contract civil partnerships, so what is David Lammy going on about? Is this an attempt to solve the problem of provision for Sarah Ferguson?

Bit pity the poor old Blairites, and it is not often that you will read that here. Back in the day, they were the most ferocious republicans that I had ever heard before or since, and I was at only one degree's remove from the Corbyn Leadership several times over. Yet as Wes Streeting has hinted, monarchism is now the "centrist" position against the two sides of Kemi Badenoch's predicted civil war.

Civil wars do split families, but a civil war between the supporters of the Green Party and their grandparents in or around Reform UK and the avowedly Cromwellian Restore Britain? Alas, the Boomers' bemedalled fathers would not be around to laugh at it. But it would be the most popular comedy ever shown on Palestinian television.

Corpus Christi: The Bulwark of Science

Here.

Two down, one to go, on getting back the proper Holy Days of Obligation, as kept by the rest of the world, including the Pope. Check his Twitter feed today if you do not believe me. He knows what day it is. Astonishingly, the Sacred Heart, the date of which is based on that of Corpus Christi, is still being kept on the right day, i.e., next Friday. Do they just not know, or something?

Tiers Before Bedtime

Nigel Farage's cameo at Prime Minister's Questions was his first utterance on the floor of the House since 25 March, but he did not stay for the Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2026, meaning that he still has not voted since 18 March.

Last night's riot in response to Farage's call for "pure cold rage" was his second time, after mass disorder had resulted from his false claim that the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings had been an asylum seeker and a Muslim. Farage's rare appearance in Parliament may have been to avoid the knock on the door, but an MP may be arrested in the Palace of Westminster as surely as at home. The House of Commons also has a power of expulsion, which might give the people of Clacton the chance of meaningful parliamentary representation.

And far be it from me to defend Kemi Badenoch, but Reform UK's misrepresentation of her is a missed opportunity. When she was Minister for Women and Equalities, she was Minister for Women and Equalities. There would be plenty in her record for Reform to exploit. Had the taking of the knee for Black Lives Matter by the England football team at the 2022 World Cup not been advocated by the then Immigration Minister attending Cabinet. Robert Jenrick.

Without Prejudice To The Generality

A ban on wheelie bins would make life so much simpler. No one ever knows which colour to throw at the Police. But Sikhs, as such, do not have an exemption from the law on knives. They are simply in the same position as tree surgeons, or as gentlemen attending the Royal Caledonian Ball. Section 139 (5) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 reads:

Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (4) above, it shall be a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that he had the article with him— 

(a) for use at work; 

(b) for religious reasons; or 

(c) as part of any national costume.

The Five Ks are equally binding on both sexes, and when John Ashby raped a Sikh woman because he had thought that she was a Muslim, then her kirpan was no use to her. It was not a tiny symbol originally, it has not always been one historically, and it may not always be one internationally, but it has always been one in Britain, where in no known case has it been used as an offensive weapon. To the charge of possession of a bladed article in a public place, Vickrum Digwa's defence was that it was a kirpan. The jury rejected that defence by convicting him of that charge. His father and brother face similar.