Zarah Sultana

When I saw that the UK government had seconded an official to work with Rothschild & Co on defence policy, all paid for by you and me, I knew this was something I had to look into. The revolving door between government, private finance and lobbying firms needs to be exposed if we are to understand how money and power work in our politics. Nowhere is this more urgent than on questions of defence and national security, at a time when the government is investing more and more of taxpayers’ money on rearming Britain.

 

Since then, this government has only tightened its embrace. Building on ties established under the Conservatives, Labour is embedding a company accused by campaigners of facilitating human-rights violations deeper and deeper into our public life. Palantir already operates inside the NHS and across Whitehall – particularly within the Ministry of Defence – pulling Britain further into the slipstream of US military priorities and the worst excesses of the American security state.

No company so entangled in foreign military operations and border policing should be anywhere near our public services. Full stop.

Experts and civil liberties campaigners have repeatedly warned about Palantir’s expanding access to sensitive British data, including NHS medical records – data that the US private healthcare industry is eager to exploit. The risks to privacy, accountability and democracy are profound.

Yet, as with the Tories before them, nothing is off the table for this Labour government when it comes to carving up public services for multinational corporations and their lobbyists. Their deference to Washington is now so complete that they barely bother to conceal their enthusiasm for cosying up to Donald Trump’s network of tech-bro oligarchs. We saw this clearly last summer, when Starmer rolled out the red carpet for Palantir and signed off a £1.5bn “strategic partnership” – at the very moment public services across Britain were collapsing under austerity. It begs the question: who, exactly, is Starmer unwilling to roll out the blood-stained red carpet for?

Is MAGA a religion? Why has protest been criminalised in England and Wales? Who is profiting from anti-immigration sentiment? And how can we engage with young men who’ve fallen down the alt-right pipeline? 

 

These are just a few of the questions that we’ve put to leading thinkers, frontline activists, and global experts on our new podcast, In Solidarity, over the past six months.

 

In Solidarity is a podcast for people who understand that politics doesn’t just happen in the halls of power. Every show, we tackle a new theme to uncover how authoritarianism spreads, who is benefiting from fear, and how solidarity is evolving into resistance movements around the world.

 

To ensure you never miss an episode of In Solidarity, subscribe to get an email notification whenever a new one is released.