Rival Bids

Under cover of the announcement about the West Bank, though not unconnected to it, yesterday was used to sneak out that we were going to be issued with digital ID after all. Something about child protection. Of course. And who will be providing it? The IDF and ICE. Of course. Or, as they are otherwise known, Palantir, whose relationship with what purports to be His Majesty’s Government is as cosy as this:

Britain’s state-owned electricity system operator has awarded Palantir a £21mn contract without inviting rival bids, arguing critical grid processes are too reliant on its technology to run a competitive procurement process. The National Energy System Operator (Neso) agreed the new contract with the US tech giant last month, extending a previous agreement with the company that started in March 2023 but had not been previously formally disclosed. One of the areas covered by the contract is getting users connected to the electricity grid, where Neso’s performance was described as “materially below expectations” in a report from a panel of independent experts published last week.

Neso said it could not invite rival bids for “technical reasons”, citing a legal exemption that removes the requirement to consider other suppliers if existing dependencies leave no reasonable alternative to using a particular company. The agency said it would open up the areas covered by the contract to competition at a later point. The new contract between Neso and Palantir will last for between 10 and 22 months, depending on how long it takes to run a competitive procurement process and transition to another supplier if one is selected.

The announcement is likely to fuel concerns about the British state’s reliance on Palantir after the Ministry of Defence also awarded the company a follow-on three-year contract worth £240.6mn without a competitive tender process. The FT revealed on Sunday that more than a quarter of police forces in England and Wales are involved in pilot programmes with Palantir of the same type that resulted in the London mayor blocking the Metropolitan Police from proceeding with a long-term contract. Palantir, whose software is widely used by US defence and intelligence agencies, is facing growing scrutiny as the UK government re-evaluates its dependence on US technology.

As well as sovereignty concerns and unease over Palantir’s political ties, MPs have warned about the structural risk of dependence on a single supplier. “Having critical national infrastructure like our electricity grid dependent on just one US-based supplier raises major concerns about our national security and our resilience,” said Labour MP Chi Onwurah. “The government should be able to diversify its suppliers and safeguard against debilitating dependencies on a small number of companies like Palantir,” she added. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, which is chaired by Onwurah, has called Palantir’s presence in the UK public sector an “unacceptable point of weakness” and urged ministers to exercise the 2027 break clause in its contentious £330mn NHS contract.

Neso used to be part of FTSE 100 group National Grid but was nationalised and given a wider role in October 2024, shortly after Labour won the general election, under a process put in train while the Conservatives were in power. Neso is currently under investigation over its management of the electricity grid during a heatwave in late June. The announcement by Neso of the new contract reveals its reliance on Palantir’s technology for two critical processes — connections to the electricity grid and “skip rates”, which refer to how often it picks a more expensive power station to run when a less expensive option is available.

Neso has faced criticism in recent years from battery developers who said it was underusing their technology because of its ageing computer systems and outdated electricity network. The situation has improved since the FT reported these concerns in 2024, but in its report last week Neso’s performance panel recommended it “dedicate additional resources” to make further improvements. Neso said it was “engaging constructively” with the regulator and performance panel on areas for improvement, noting that the performance panel said Neso had met expectations overall. Connections reform was one of the “largest and most complex” changes facing the energy sector and Neso had reduced the size of the queue, it added. Skip rates were a “complex operational issue” where it had made progress but was going further, it continued. Neso said the original Palantir contract was not formally disclosed because it was not a public body at the time the deal was agreed. Palantir said: “We’re proud to be supporting Neso’s efforts to improve energy efficiency, drive down costs and transition to net zero.”

Britain’s alleged security relationship with Israel, usefully forbidden to be discussed, would seem to be as lucrative as ever, more’s the pity. Or are 12 states at imminent risk of all manner of attack due to having sanctioned the West Bank settlements? If such appeared to happen, then forgive us if we were a tad sceptical. Thanks to Peter Mandelson’s Global Counsel, Wes Streeting has left Palantir all over England’s NHS, so watch out for a convenient cyberattack there. But it could be almost anywhere, in this or any of 11 other countries. By the way, one of those countries is Iceland, which has rejected even discussion of joining the EU. Needily banging on the door of that is instead Serbia, with its lavish mourning of a genocidaire, albeit one who fought only against other genocidaires. But then, a lot of people have extremely parochial outlooks. There are those who imagine that the governments of Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden were all interested in the British Labour Party Conference or in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. North and West London are the world to those purportedly metropolitan and cosmopolitan sophisticates, looking out in petrified horror at all of the rest of their own country and most of the rest of the world.

If these sanctions will have practically no impact, then how and why will they be bad for those Palestinians who were employed by settlers? If it is anti-Semitic to conflate British Jews with Israel, then how and why does action against Israel endanger British Jews? Sir Ephraim Mirvis is the Chief Rabbi of about 30 per cent of those British Jews who retained any synagogue affiliation, or perhaps about 20 per cent of British Jews as a whole, themselves half of one per cent of the population, the same percentage as professed a gender identity different from its biological sex. Other Jews may agree with Mirvis, but he does not speak for them. I agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury about assisted suicide, but she does not speak for me. The difference is that she does not pretend to, nor does anyone treat her as if she did.

The MPs who have been awarded the badge of honour that is a ban from Israel will no doubt survive, not least in view of Jeremy Corbyn’s tidy little profit on the sale of his house. But whatever happened to the “million pound mansion” in which we were all told that he was living while he was Leader of the Labour Party? In those days, Laura Kuenssberg manufactured her own news by bringing in Stephen Doughty to resign from the frontbench live on air; he would have dropped his trousers if ordered to do so. Yet last night, he pretty much told Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight that Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in the United Kingdom. Even now, though, Doughty swats away calls to end the arming of Israel, the aiding and abetting of the crimes for which Netanyahu would be apprehended, by wittering on about anti-Semitism under Corbyn.

While Luciana Berger is now an important opponent of assisted suicide, time was when she used Joshua Bonehill-Paine as an example of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, of which he had never been a member, although it all seems to have been forgiven now. Those were the days. The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases of anti-Semitism in its entire report into the Labour Party, neither of them involved Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of that party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.” Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed until Keir Starmer expelled more Jews than under all previous Leaders put together, for the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism.

Scarcely a Conservative MP turned up to listen to Tom Tugendhat, whose cover back in the day was that he was a schoolie. We need to hear from anyone who had had the pleasure of being taught by him. There has rightly been praise for the contribution of Sir Edward Leigh, but at least as important and impressive were the words of Kit Malthouse, “As part of the accountability that [Ed Miliband] has talked about, can we please have a UK-led investigation into the murder of our own citizens who worked for the World Central Kitchen? The Israeli Government have declined to conduct a criminal investigation, and officers of the IDF who were involved in that operation have been out in the media boasting that they would do it again.”

And at least one Israeli spokeswoman on the BBC yesterday was broadcasting directly from Buenos Aires. A rewriting is underway, according to which Israel has come to support the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands in retaliation for the British sanctions. In reality, Israel infamously armed Argentina as anti-British revenge in 1982, and figures close to Netanyahu have been openly supporting that claim for weeks, while Donald Trump has also been dropping very broad hints. Israel has never made any bones about regarding Britain as having been no better than the other side during the Second World War, when its founding heroes committed stomach-turning atrocities against our forces and officials, and in fact it was with the other side that those terrorists attempted to do a deal. Their successors have returned to the perennial Zionist theme of Britain as one of the two bad guys, and if anything the worse. That is their view of our finest hour.

Around the axis of Trump and Netanyahu spin the likes of Javier Milei, who was until recently the chainsaw-wielding darling of a British Right that always needed a Fatherland somewhere away from the National Health Service. The supporters of Milei, of the unequivocally pro-Argentine Netanyahu, and of the ambivalent Trump, form a fifth column in this country, to be identified and treated as such. The commonest telltale sign is the suggestion that Trump might have a point that Britain had been insufficiently supportive of his war with Iran. There are many more, including opposition to the new sanctions.