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| Volume 56 Number 15, May 16, 2026 | ARCHIVE | HOME | JBCENTRE | SUBSCRIBE |
The "No Palantir in the NHS" campaign organised by Medact, Good Law Project, Amnesty International, Just Treatment, Keep Our NHS Public (KONP), and many others now reflects the current phase of the long-standing opposition in the country by the working class and people to the outsourcing of patient data to private companies that has been going on over the last 20 years. Further, this week a leaked NHS England briefing reported by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) [1] revealed that Palantir and its employees have been allowed "unlimited access" to patient data alongside reports that the government now plans legislation in the new Parliament to force hospitals and GPs to hand over their data on patients. The people's response is No Palantir in the NHS and opposing Palantir and the government's joint abuse of people's data, as well as demanding the right to privacy of patient and other data where only they can decide.
Medact [2], an organisation of health workers that fights for health justice in society, points out: "The No Palantir in the NHS campaign is a grass roots worker, patient and community campaign to remove Palantir Technologies from NHS data infrastructure. It is organised by Health Workers for a Free Palestine in collaboration with Medact and in coalition with groups such as the Good Law Project, Amnesty International and Just Treatment."
Medact continues: "Palantir is a software and AI company specialising in warfare, policing, surveillance and immigration enforcement. They are complicit in multiple human rights violations such as the genocide in Gaza, mass deportation and detentions by ICE in the US, military interventions in Iraq and discriminatory policing practices. You can read more about Palantir as a company and the concerns regarding the NHS contract in our briefing document [3]."
Also, on April 26, The Guardian pointed out, "The US spy tech company Palantir published a 'manifesto' (The Technological Republic [4]) extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others." The "manifesto" exhorted the US to reinstate a military draft, saying that "free and democratic societies" need "hard power" in order to prevail.
In fact, this 22-point "manifesto" of Palantir reads, as commentator's have said, like something out of Hitler's Mein Kampf calling for an end to the "postwar neutering" of Germany and Japan and supporting their re-arming. Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, who has increasingly framed Palantir's AI tools as central to Western military and industrial power, said, "We believe it is not hyperbolic to say that nearly all AI workflows that actually create value - especially on the battlefield - are built on Palantir," In 2025, he also declared on their AI that "Palantir is here to disrupt...and, when it's necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them". Under Alex Karp, Palantir has expanded into military and government contracts, including the US Department of Defence, CIA, FBI, and international clients like NATO and Israel.
The opposition to Palantir in society has continued. In the NHS, by the summer of 2025, fewer than half of health authorities in England had started using the technology amid opposition from the public and doctors. The British Medical Association (BMA) has said that its members could refuse to use parts of the system itself, citing Palantir's work with US immigration enforcement in targeting ICE raids in the US. The most recent reporting of the BMA and others still describes "patchy, limited uptake", with MPs and NHS staff saying that "only a minority of Trusts are using it meaningfully". Still there is no data on uptake. However, a 2026 Westminster debate reported on in the BMJ described the Federated Data Platform (FDP), powered by Palantir, as "awful to use" benefiting only a minority of Trusts and facing calls from MPs to be scrapped. This strongly implies that uptake remains low, even into 2026.
The opposition continues with calls for the termination of the NHS contract with Palantir Technologies.
Medact states: "We are demanding that NHS England cancel the contract with Palantir, which they could do at the upcoming contract renewal date in February 2027. We are also organising to hold our local hospitals and NHS institutions accountable and demanding that they don't implement Palantir's FDP at the local level.
"We ground our actions in the political framing of health justice, and our campaign against Palantir originated in response to the call from Palestinian health unions to cut our institutions' ties to genocide. Organising against the Palantir contract is not only a Palestine and migrant solidarity issue. The contract also represents an increase in the state's ability to surveil health data, which we know will impact marginalised patients the most. It also furthers privatisation and outsourcing of NHS services, and enables corporations to extract and profit from our health data."
Opposition and concern about the handing over of vital patient data that could go to insurance companies and government agencies, together with the massive profits originating from these failed IT projects, has continued to grow over the last 20 years. Yet successive governments of whatever shade have continued to deepen the NHS reliance on private platforms instead of consolidating NHS IT services. Why is this?
Medact points out that with the FDP, the NHS does not own the intellectual property for its key components. Palantir's global business model, it says, "relies on deep integration with client data systems". These systems are completely dependent on Palantir. However, Palantir publicly insists that the NHS - and therefore the government - "controls the data".
This whole situation points to the restructuring of the state in order to strengthen the hold of narrow vested interests with no accountability. In the case of Palantir and the government, the question is being posed as to why the government wants to outsource NHS data with Palantir, and it is being argued that the answer is as a measure to enable control of the data itself. The government cannot control the data of the NHS directly, it is argued, as it cannot force the NHS to hand over the data of patients as the system currently stands. This is in contrast to the government's abuse of pensioners' banking privacy when the government Department of Works and Pensions (DWP) was easily able to force the banks to hand over data of the bank accounts of pensioners for "tax purposes", a measure which it imposed last year.
The conclusion is being drawn that the government's continuation of handing NHS data over to Palantir goes hand in hand with handing civil, police, military and spy data services to Palantir that the government also controls centrally. This is not just a case of no-competition procurement - it can be said to be structural dependency of the state on Palantir, a consolidation of power in the hands of narrow vested interests [5]. This is happening in conjunction with the government's support of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, and its attacks on the right to speak out and protest against these crimes in Britain. Palantir is being embedded in the British state and with it will control all of the NHS data of patients.
This is a profound lesson for all those in the NHS, patients and people alike, as to what the government and the whole cartel party system in Westminster has in store for the NHS and society on their data. The government's plan to hand control of the NHS data - "one of the largest data bases in the world" - to Palantir must be opposed. It is unconscionable that people's data be put under the control of narrow vested interests and utilised to strengthen the police powers of the state. The rights of all to security and privacy of their patient and other personal data must be upheld by a modern society. No to Palantir in the NHS and the abuse of people's personal data! End the contracts with Palantir and other private data consortiums!
Notes
1.GPs and hospitals to be forced to share patient data as Palantir is granted
"unlimited access" to identifiable information
https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj.s929
2.Medact brings together health workers to fight for health justice. Medact
explains: "We recognise that health injustice is driven by political,
social and economic conditions - we mobilise the health community to take
action to change the system. History - Medact grew out of the medical peace
movement. It was formed in 1992 as a merger of two organisations: the Medical
Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, and the Medical Association for the
Prevention of War. After the merger, the newly-formed Medact recognised the
need to adopt a broader global health agenda - one that would incorporate the
health threats posed by climate change as well as the structural violence of
unjust economic policies and systems. Since then, Medact has been working to
mobilise, support and organise health professionals to be more effective social
agents for social change. A relaunch conference in 2013 marked a further
milestone in revitalising Medact and confirming its future course."
3. Briefing: Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS Data Systems
https://www.medact.org/2026/resources/reports/briefing-palantir-fdp/
4. The Technological Republic, in brief. Official PDF Summary: A direct
22-point summary of the book's key arguments was released by Palantir.
https://youmark-images.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Palantir-Manifesto.pdf
5. The government now has a chain of contracts with Palantir stretching from
the pandemic to the present: £60m for the COVID Data Store, £25m to
make Palantir the incumbent supplier, and a £330m-£480m deal to run
the new NHS data spine. Add in defence, intelligence and border-security
contracts, and the picture is clear: Palantir is being embedded across the
British state. This is not procurement - it is the concentration of
unaccountable power in private hands.