Martha Dacombe/Arguably: Denouncing Palantir, however, is simpler than finding an alternative. The NHS, you might recall, failed spectacularly when it sought to create an electronic patient record system, spending more than £10bn of public money on the abandoned National Programme for IT. Patients would suffer if the state simply cut ties with Palantir tomorrow, as Wes Streeting consistently warned during his time as health secretary.
Yet the question the media rarely addresses is why Britain has failed to produce an AI or govtech company of comparable size and institutional depth. While successive governments have rhapsodised about the importance of technology, they have failed time and again to provide British start-ups and scale-ups with the markets they need…