Palantir boasts its AI will harm Labour voters. Why doesn’t Starmer kick it out?

Being in government often means having to handle crises which absolutely nobody could have seen coming, and getting blamed for things which very much are not your fault. The US/Israel war on Iran very much falls into that category – no one can reasonably blame Labour for not seeing that coming when they were first elected in 2024.

The problems for ministers come when they fail to see problems that are obvious to everyone else months or even years before they happen. Labour seems to have backed itself into exactly that kind of position with Palantir – a company they have more than £1 billion in new contracts to, even as the company’s top executives boast of trying to destroy political parties like Labour and disenfranchise their voters.

Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, said the quiet part out loud in an interview with CNBC on Thursday as he discussed the company’s AI. “This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less,” speaking of the US political context. “And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters.”

This pitch translates easily into a UK political context as a dismissal of the young professional voters that made up the core of Labour’s 2024 election-winning coalition, and a play for the romanticised version of Reform’s voters.

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Perhaps Palantir might have deniability as to the meaning of these comments outside the US – except the company’s UK boss has said very similar, arguably in even starker terms. In an article for the Spectator last month with the headline “AI is coming for the lanyard class”, head of Palantir Technologies UK Louis Mosley (grandson of Oswald Mosley) said he agreed with Karl Marx that “bureaucracies are never on the side of the people”.

Building on this theme, he promised that “AI will challenge our politicians,” he wrote. “Why do we need sprawling back offices, HR wallahs and byzantine regulations if frontline workers can deliver results safely without them? Why import millions of unskilled workers if technology can multiply the productivity of workers at home? I suspect the public will welcome these questions, even if our political class does not.”

Palantir executives are no friends of the Labour Party or the worldview of Labour ministers, and they are not bothering to pretend otherwise – even as they are taking responsibility for some of the UK’s most essential public services. Palantir is embedded into core data functions of the NHS, a public sector health service, and now has multi-year contracts to play the same role in the UK’s defence.

It was not Labour that brought Palantir into British public services – they offered their services for £1 during the Covid-19 pandemic, which critics immediately warned they would try to leverage into much more expensive work later, once they were in the door. Exactly that happened. Palantir was already the fox in the henhouse.

After Donald Trump’s re-election, Palantir made sure they were among his most enthusiastic cheerleaders within big tech. Their software is essential to Trump’s mass-deportation efforts, aiding ICE and CBP in deciding who to snatch from the street. Their political connections and their public statements have been obvious. Instead of acting, Labour appeared to not just treat Palantir like any other company, but like a favoured and reliable ally.

The contracts are signed now Ministers have likely already left it too late to shake Palantir loose from government entirely. They have invited the viper into their nest, and they’re even paying it to be there.

The choice facing the Cabinet now is whether to ignore the problem entirely, and just play nice, or whether to face reality and see the extent to which the damage can be limited. Their track record so far is not one that inspires confidence.