Imagine: gangs dragging civil servants off commuter trains and beating them up because they handed government data jobs to the wrong contractor – and the government is changing its procurement decisions as a result. Well, OK, it might not have happened yet, but it’s only a matter of time. As the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson asks: “Do you want to let the rule of law lead procurement practice, or do you want mob rule to lead procurement practices?” No, I absolutely don’t want the latter, and it’s always good to get ahead of trouble.
But then I remember there are two common meanings of mob rule. One is intimidation by crowds of thugs. The other is a pejorative term for democracy.
And while I’ve yet to see government procurement practices in the UK determined by pitchforks and flaming torches, democratic transparency could be a genuine threat to certain contractors. One might have hoped that Watson, who once took on the Murdoch empire, would have recognised the distinction. But then again, one might have hoped that Watson would not have taken a job as a senior vice-president at Palantir.
Over the past few years, this US company has been worming its way into the British state. It has landed contracts worth hundreds of millions with the Ministry of Defence, several police forces, the Financial Conduct Authority, the atomic weapons establishment and the NHS. Its superpower, according to a deep investigation by Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin in the London Review of Books, is that it is “willing to spend more on securing political access than almost all of its British and continental competitors”.
It made abundant use of Peter Mandelson’s company Global Counsel, which seems, in turn, to have made abundant use of the UK’s remarkably flimsy lobbying laws. Watson is one of more than 30 former UK ministers and officials Palantir now employs. Palantir’s contracts might have been awarded lawfully, but some of us might question the ways in which doors were opened for it.
These include an unrecorded meeting between Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, in Downing Street in 2019. It was invited back to Downing Street when the Covid-19 pandemic began a few months later, and was working in the NHS within days, on a contract for which it charged only £1. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has criticised such loss-leaders, which can quickly lead to reliance on a company, at which point it can name its price.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
