‘Criticise Palantir, lose your job’, NHS staff told

NHS data analytics staff have been told they will lose their jobs if they keep on criticising the government’s £330m software from murderous US spy software firm Palantir. The threat comes despite calls from doctors, privacy and safety experts, lawyers and human rights groups for the NHS to bin the software, which gathers sensitive patient data.

One NHS data manager told the Financial Times (FT) that he was told directly by an NHS boss linked to the contract:

If you criticise the FDP one more time, you are going to lose your job. I know I am not the only one inside the NHS who has been warned off criticising the tool publicly.

When letters go out saying, ‘Sign this or we’ll call your chief executive’, that doesn’t build goodwill. It creates compliance, not commitment.

Signing up to use Palantir’s ‘Federated Data Platform’ (FDP) is notionally voluntary, but the government is pressuring NHS trust bosses to adopt it. However, many NHS staff are refusing to engage with the platform because of Palantir’s admitted – even boasted-about – role in helping Israel and the US murder people they don’t like and the openly fascist views of the company’s bosses.

Despite its boasting about the people it helps kill, the Starmer government has been giving Epstein-linked Palantir hundreds of millions in public funds to spread its ‘tentacles‘ throughout government and public functions, including the ministry of defence as well as the NHS.

Another NHS official told the FT that:

I was told ‘the FDP will do that’ [decide the direction of software development] and that they would talk to my boss to make sure I stopped work on the tool I was developing. It was a very real threat and I had colleagues tell me to ‘watch yourself’.

Trust bosses have been told to set binding schedules for FDP adoption and to fund ‘senior responsible officers’ to oversee implementation. More than half of NHS hospital trusts have already begun using it. Of the remaining 80 or so, 45 have signed up to begin. NHS England data boss Ming Tang said that the NHS will “maintain our focus” on embedding the platform despite Palantir’s well-known record.

Featured image via the Canary