Workers must control technology, not Trumpite profiteering warmongers

Adam Harmsworth, Coventry Socialist Party

US tech giant Palantir Technologies recently won a renewed contract with Coventry City Council to process data for its children’s services. This is only the latest of many public contracts Palantir has secured in Britain, including a £330 million NHS contract and more in the Ministry of Defence and police forces.

Two of its most notorious clients are the Israeli military, and ICE in the US. Our public funds are being used to bankroll a company with a direct role in the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians and in Trump’s brutal assault on migrants in the US.

That has earned it a clear endorsement from Donald Trump, who wrote on his social media site, Truth Social: “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war-fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!”

Health and other campaign groups have called for Palantir to be booted out of the NHS, where it now has access to the medical and other personal data of millions of patients. Doctors’ union the British Medical Association is among those calling for all existing NHS contracts with Palantir to be terminated.

So how can Palantir be stopped?

Trade unions in the NHS and across the public sector have a crucial role to play in opposing Palantir data privatisation, and all times public services are passed to profit-making companies. NHS workers showed their power to change things in the 2022 strike wave. If the unions organise together they can force the NHS, councils, and other public bodies to scrap their contracts with Palantir.

That still leaves the question of what to replace Palantir with. In an attempt to rescue its public image, Palantir representatives have emphasised the potential good its services could provide. Palantir’s NHS work promises to cut waiting lists and improve cancer diagnoses, while its work in Coventry could increase the time social workers spend supporting children.

Pro-capitalist commentator Andrew Marr, in the New Statesman, outlines the problem, saying: “If Britain is waiting for a liberal, Guardian-reading cutting-edge tech company to help modernise the state, we may be waiting for a while”. Marr concludes that we need the tech giants, so instead should just seek assurances and safeguards. Those are about as likely to work as waiting for a Guardian-reading tech company!

Kick out privatisers

But we don’t need the tech giants at all. The NHS, councils, and other public bodies could develop the technology themselves, hire teams of skilled workers in software and AI to deliver those same benefits – without the links to war crimes and human rights abuses, or resources sucked away as private profit.

That technology could also be publicly owned and run, and how it uses the data it has access to could be subject to constant democratic scrutiny by the workers who know best.

At a recent ‘Drop Palantir’ meeting in Coventry, Socialist Party member and former MP Dave Nellist explained that Palantir is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of wretched corporate giants profiting from the NHS. Pharmaceutical firms for example have made huge profits ripping off the NHS. It shouldn’t just be Palantir’s services that are publicly owned; we need our health services and all public services nationalised under democratic workers’ control and management.