November blog

Special Economic Zones-BEWARE!!!

follow twitter @EuropeanPowell

Social Care
Stop overseas tax havens
Employ Care Workers under NHS payscales, promotion and banding.

Prostate checker

The whole concept of the NHS is under fire

-from Labour-Starmer, Streeting

-The IEA Kate Andrews and co

-Trump, Theil, Palentir, Farage, Tice

-all want to make gazillions frrom private health insurance.

No leader is lower/middle class to uphold the protection of the NHS for the poorer-with no savings, no insurance, preexisting conditions, dental problems...

Corruption, bribes, lobbying...Wes Streeting: who bribes him?
Keir Starmer £157,000
Stella Creasey£5,000
Yvette Cooper £231,817
Rachel Reeves £14,840
Angela Rayner £50.000
David Lammy £1,640
Wes Streeting £193,225

Streeting seems fixed on several gimmicks:

1-Give every overweight unemployed worker Wegovy: means great income for Danish manufacturer of Wegovy, Ozempic-Nordisk. Schroder Equity fund has £10 million of Novo Nordisk shares.
Armtage, founder, funded Streeting from 2022 by £95,000 and £25,000 to Labour
Nordisk shares doubled, gaining millions for Armtages fund
(PE 25 October)

2-Streeting also wants NHS smart watches for NHS patients-monitoring bp, heart rate, sugar etc-at what cost? Who makes them: Infosys, Fujitsu,
Easily hacked-gps position etc

3-NHS app-easily hacked, surveying your medical data, sold to insurance companies to refuse insurance, cherry pick profitable patients...

4-Palentir, Peter Thiel Federated data platform: data sold to anyone, hacked by Russia, Iran, given to insurance companies

Tax oil heavily, like Iceland, Norway!!!

Tax Google, Amazon, ban tax havens, collect £37 billion from Di do, collect uncollected taxes, tax the rich same rate,

The levels of corruption, bribes, lobbying has risen above all records

Corrupt governments favour "business and industry" way above ethical, vocational frontline NHS and Care staff, working their butts off despite the government

The electorate are never informed, never asked, have no influence

Government members profit from contracts, IT "provision" (sic)

Di do Harding received £37 billion-never tracked, traced or accounted for...

The NHS and Social Care should have a simple Bevan model: "Hospitals" (not Trust Hospitals), Doctors, Nurses, Radiographers, Midwives PAID FAIRLY AND SIMPLY (look at the complexity of calculating monthly salaries, unfathonable pension rules.,..!)

Private health insurance, private hospital chains should BE ENTIRELY SEPERATE FROM NHS (and not be given public funds to invest or survive...)

Throughout the decades, the NHS has been the object of concealed plots, weasel words...

Thatcher and Regan wanted to "sod the poor", low taxes for the rich, privatise everything, stop opticians, dentists, private health insurance...

Blair wanted to be sweet to industry-and big businesses like private health companies.

Brown was more inclined towards the poor and the NHS

Milburn, Lansley, Hunt-all opened up our NHS to big private companies...

I would bet that Massey (ex DSHSS, now head of puppet GMC-will get a Lordship and a gong-for confusing AAs, PAs with real Doctors.

Should "Trust" Hospitals be renamed "Hospitals"-as there is no Trust!
Allowed to purchase land for expansion, rather than forced to sell...?

In the 2000's, private corporations bough many NHS dental practices, with thousands of NHS patients, which they could convert to private patients.Centene, United Health lobby hard to be able to buy bits of our NHS-and sellout when they cannot make "enough"(humongous) profit. Gullible PMs give Stevens et al positions as "head Health Advisor" to Centene, United Health execs... Heaven help us!!!

Surprisingly, Enoch Powell was quite a sensible MoHealth, Frank Dobson-outed by Blairite successors Milburn to wreck further... David Owen David Anthony Llewellyn Owen, Baron Owen, CH, PC, FRCP was an actual Doctor.

He, and Ted Heath were the only two replies to letters about Dentistry and the NHS, from hundreds of letters...

Likewise, private for profit corporations bought up many medical partnerships premises, and leased back to GPs: they had control of the policies, selecting good profit patients, culling expensive patients, and coercing well off patients into private medical insurance policies -making profits from the NHS.

Similarly, the US style (Un)Accountable Health Organisations, (Dis)Integrated Care Boards,aim to increase profits by rationing care, culling expensive patients

as do Private Health Insurance companies by refusing treatments, co payments, top up fees, and culling difficult expensive patients, and selecting cherry picking, cream skimming easy patients.

The Kaiser Permanente model employs Doctors, owns the buildings, and sells Private Heralth Insurance.

Private health corporations should be completely separate from the NHS: Streeting-Let them stand alone-not subsidised from NHS funds..
They do not have "spare capacity". They take NHS frontline teams FROM our NHS.

Every qualified doctor can work in private health: surgeons can choose to do so, or emigrate:

FULL PAY RESTORATION, agreed in Scotland, is essential.

Private hospitals cost more-they have to make a profit for their CEOs, Directors, shareholders: it is their prime duty to do so...

NHS tax funds should NOT be given to private corporations, private hospital chains.

PAs should stop being promoted ahead of training for Real Doctors, GPs, with funding to EMPLOY them.

The core contract, properly funded, should allow practices to hire more GPs (not prevented by ARRS funding rules, and partners aided to recive full awarded pay

If an NHS GP is burnt out, overloaded, underfunded-it is no surprise they hand back their contract, and work privately-£60 for The London et al...

Government are determined to impose PAs, AAs.

Doctors not to be-Terrifying Guardian article on Physician Associates (Politicians Apologies)

What if your ‘physician’ wasn’t actually a doctor at all? Beware this new reckless experiment!
Rachel Clarke
The NHS says it’s not trying to replace qualified doctors with physician associates. But we can see the terrifying truth

Thu 20 Jun 2024
Something radical, precipitous and sweeping is under way in the NHS. It’s untried, untested and
sorely lacking in evidence, with the potential to cause significant patient harm.
I’m talking about the Department of Health and Social Care’s project to rapidly expand
so-called medical associate professions (MAPs), the largest group of which are termed
physician associates (PAs). None of these groups have a medical degree,
nor postgraduate medical training. But their deployment in our health service is billed
as “essential” workforce planning – the only way to address rising patient demand
and a desperate shortage of trained medics.

The public, generally, are unasware...

Government are determined to pay the private sector:

The Independent Healthcare Providers Network (the Profiteers) offers 2.5 million Treatments...
but want
-solid long term contracts,
-guaranteed fixed tarrifs, and
-supply of patients REJECT!!! SAME AS PFI...

There should be
-no poaching NHS staff, the Private sector should have intensive care beds
- no cherrypicking
- value for money CHPI

outsourcing cataracts meant many NHS eye departments unviable, but left treating expensive complex cases
reverse outsourcing by insourcing.

The Great NHS Heist right click-open or select-open

Phil Hammond I'm Still a Doctor Brilliant read!!!

Many woeful strategies from the past are being endlessly repeated...

Doctors Not To Be 8 March 2007
Are the careers of eight thousand junior doctors being stuffed up on purpose? The rushed implementation of the Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) programme looks like just another Labour cock-up, but its consequences are suspiciously advantageous to a Government intent on busting the medical cabal. The failure of the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS), a centrally-controlled computerised bun fight, was predictable to anyone with a passing knowledge of NHS IT programmes. It was flawed in its content, an unvalidated bullshitters' paradise that has allowed erudite disaster zones to get jobs at the expense of much better doctors, and flawed in its delivery. Making so many doctors apply at the same time was bound to lead to persistent crashing of the site, lost applications, interviews offered for specialities not even applied for and interviews at both ends of the country on the same day. The Government has been able to ignore earlier concerns that the new system was unfair and unworkable, safe in the knowledge that doctors are finding it hard to get public sympathy. Greedy GPs and consultants, rather than privatisation and target-chasing, have been cleverly fingered as the prime cause of NHS debt, and junior doctors bleating to the media that they may have to become lawyers, work in the City or move to Australia will have Patsy Hewitt chuckling in her cornflakes. The shit has finally reached the fan, thanks to West Midlands surgeons suspending their junior appointments, but health minister Lord Hunt was unfazed: ‘MMC was devised with the help and support of the Royal Colleges, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the BMA.’ So it's all their fault. But what's in it for Labour? Having acknowledged they were stuffed by the BMA over consultant and GP contracts, the Government – having increased doctors' numbers – now wants to get by with as few as possible. Doctors have priced themselves out of the market, so medicine is being broken down into simplistic tasks that can be hived off to private companies employing lowest common denominator health workers. Having 30,000 junior doctors compete for 22,000 jobs creates sufficient anxiety and insecurity for those with a job to work illegal hours covering holes in the NHS without whistle-blowing. Junior doctors aren't going down without a fight (support them at www.remedyuk.org) but is seems unlikely that enough would resign en masse to panic the Government. A more likely scenario is that they'll cancel their memberships of the BMA and Royal Colleges, a situation that would delight Labour. The GMC has already been stuffed by Liam Donaldson's ludicrously bureaucratic re-licensing plans, and taking out the rest of the medical establishment would make doctors even easier to control. The Department of Health has announced a review of MTAS, but not suspended it. Thousands of juniors have joined up at Remedy UK, and are planning a protest on March 17 from the Royal College of Physicians to the Royal College of Surgeons. But to get public and media support, doctors need to explain how their personal misfortune will affect patients. For the NHS to thrive, it has to ensure the best and brightest doctors are given the right jobs. MTAS doesn't appear capable of ensuring this. When I'm finally dragged kicking and screaming into an NHS ward, I want to be treated by a doctor with sufficient wisdom, skill and motivation to do the job properly, not a dumbed-down generic health worker reading from a guideline. Cutting down the supply of good doctors may well balance the NHS books in time to save Hewitt, but the long-term consequences will be dire for patient safety.

What Should Gordon Do? 15 June 2007

What should Gordon Brown do with the NHS? He may want to put his ‘unique stamp’ on it, but Blairites are working around the clock to progress the market reforms beyond the point of no return. The great con of Blair's NHS was to preach the rhetoric of patient power whilst handing over control, and a vast sum of public money, to the private sector. To argue that this is not privatisation of the NHS is nonsense, but then Blair excelled at that. The tipping point for the NHS will come if Labour pushes through its plans to outsource up to £64 billion worth of commissioning to multinational corporations such as United Health. This would suit Blair's friends at McKinsey, who can charge a fortune to the NHS for brokering the deals and also represent many of the US companies who stand to gain. At least one senior executive at McKinsey has a staff pass at the Department of Health. In return, Blair will have ample boot-filling opportunities in America. In Blair's absence, Patsy Hewitt is rushing through his agenda before her exit, aided by David ‘Nibbler’ Nicholson, the surprise choice as NHS chief executive, who leapt up the shortlist after a meeting with Blairite health guru Professor Paul Corrigan. Nicholson in turn has appointed an NHS management team that is putting intense pressure on strategic health authorities and PCTs to outsource their commissioning. The idea that PCTs will retain ultimate control (and hence keep the NHS public) is a myth. So what is Brown to do? Clearly a return to the Old Labour Stalinism of diktat by bureaucracy is impossible. And yet Blair's model is equally didactic, suggesting market competition is the only way forward and peppering it with promises of choice, when patients only get to choose what the Government (or United Health) wants them to. The junior doctor selection crisis is the most extreme example of this – thousands of doctors who have worked for seven years or more in the NHS are allowed only one choice of job, in many cases only specifying a region (e.g. Scotland) rather than a hospital unit. Stalin invented the internal market, the Tories introduced it to the NHS and Blair is polishing it to imperfection. The NHS works because it is a one-stop shop – once you're in it, you get all the care you need. Contrast this to America, where patients who have brain tumours removed are sent home the next day if the insurance package does not include continuing care. If American managed-care corporations unleash their ‘expertise’ on the NHS, only an American system can result. Profitable patients are cherry-picked while unprofitable patients are dumped. Brown must reverse this without seeming to be Old Labour. The solution is to deliver what Blair and Hewitt have pretended to promise: ‘a devolved NHS where 80% of the decisions are made locally’. Working in the NHS is like pulling people out of a river without bothering to look at who's pushing them in. If Labour really wants patients to get involved in shaping services, it has to move the money upstream and stop the dysfunctional schism between top-down marketing and local decision-making. Most NHS resources now go on managing chronic illness, and many patients manage themselves perfectly well for all but three hours a year, when they're hanging round the surgery or outpatient clinic. Tapping into this expertise and getting patients to help other patients in their communities is the best hope of stopping the log-jam downstream. The message is simple. Local partnerships between patients and NHS staff work, market reforms don't. But will Brown swallow it? 10 www.plosmedicine.org May 2005; Volume

so much money has already been wasted on NHS change that he'll have a job convincing the staff of the need for more. He's proposing polyclinics to do much of the work done in district general hospitals, but we've already invested £1.4 billion in Independent Sector Treatment Centres that were supposed to do the same. ISTCs were encouraged into the market with guaranteed contracts paid above tariff. Last year, they were paid for 50,000 more operations than they carried out. The vast majority of waiting-list reductions were carried out in existing NHS hospitals and a huge sum has been wasted on unnecessary competition. The NHS already has a competitive market under Payment By Results. Or rather activity. Hospitals can only survive by sucking as many patients as possible through their doors. ISTCs couldn't attract the custom, not least because they failed to submit sufficient outcome information to the Healthcare Commission to enable them to be audited for quality and safety. Polyclinics may well have the expertise to treat patients closer to home but whether they can stand up to the might of desperate hospitals remains to be seen. To get the support of NHS staff, Darzi doesn't just need to consult them, he needs to publish evidence showing his reforms would work. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has performed the most comprehensive review of the reconfiguration plans and agrees that highly specialised services such as major trauma, heart and brain surgery need to be specialised on fewer sites. But it found no evidence to support the centralisation of the non-complex, high-volume work done in district general hospitals. There is, however, evidence that patients feel access to GPs has improved in the last few years, which makes Brown and Darzi's peculiar focus on extending opening hours puzzling. The review smells strongly of hastily assembled populist opinion. Clinical medicine has been reformed in the last twenty years by focusing on the evidence, not the expert. The same needs to happen with NHS reform. Don't change the system until you can prove you've got something better.
IT expert put it: ‘Scotland and Wales are smaller communities, with more collaboration and co-operation than the market-obsessed English NHS. They assume that NHS staff are generally trustworthy and have developed ‘higher trust’ IT systems that are simpler and easier to access, and have managed to gain the consent of patients. Contrast this to England, where no-one can be trusted and the media is paranoid about leakage of confidential data. So you've built hugely complex programmes with military grade security to block the few bad people but which take ages to log onto, navigate around or swap user. At their worst, they stop you practising medicine, rather than enable you to do the job better.’ Granger's parting shot from the IT programme was to boast at how tough his

More Staffing Problems 8 April 2009

A key question for the investigation into the appalling standards of emergency care at Mid Staffordshire hospital is: ‘Why did no member of staff blow the whistle sooner?’ In a 2006 Healthcare Commission survey, only 27% of the Mid Staffs staff said they would be happy to be treated in their own hospital, a powerful indication that standards were unacceptable. And after Bristol, the General Medical Council deemed that doctors had a duty to speak up when the service becomes so unsafe that patients are being harmed. However, the experience of Dr Rita Pal in nearby North Staffs suggests that whistle-blowing in the NHS remains a thankless task. Dr Pal identified serious shortcomings in the nursing and medical care of patients on Ward 87 of City General Hospital, Stoke on Trent, when she started working there in August 1998. These included a lack of basic equipment such as drip sets, a lack of adequate support and supervision for junior doctors, a gross shortage of staff and repeated ‘do not resuscitate’ notices. As a result, patient care was often poor, with a lack of baseline observations and routine blood tests, and there appeared to be an unacceptably high mortality rate. In November 1998, Dr Pal articulated these concerns to senior nursing and medical staff, and put them in writing. As a result, she was bullied and victimised. She was wrongly accused of causing a needle-stick injury and inserting the wrong date on a drug sheet, and she found out that her previous consultant had been contacted to ascertain whether she was ‘capable of doing the job’ (i.e. flying by the seat of her pants with inadequate support and resources, surrounded by hostile nursing staff and patients dying unnecessarily). She requested leave because she (quite reasonably) felt unable to care for patients in this environment. Subsequent investigation found that Dr Pal's allegations had been spot on. A review in May 1999 by Mrs T Fenech from the Infectious Diseases Unit found ‘serious deficiencies in nursing practice’ and that ‘the level of care demonstrated for some patients on the ward at the time of my audit was nothing short of negligent.’ In 2001, an internal report concluded that the directorate failed to take appropriate action when the allegations were made by Dr Pal and that patients had suffered from poor standards of care. And in March 2002, the Commission for Health Improvement still found ‘serious deficiencies’ particularly with ‘the level of supervision, workload and work patterns of junior doctors working within medicine.’ So not only were Dr Pal's initial allegations accurate, but four years later very little had been done to address them. Dr Pal took her concerns to the General Medical Council and – eleven years after first raising concerns – is still embroiled in a fight to ascertain the true extent of the harm done to patients on Ward 87. A mature and safety-conscious NHS would have thanked her for raising concerns to help improve patient care, and acted on them. Instead, she has been bullied, falsely accused of malpractice and repeatedly denied access to key documents to help support her case. Last week, Sir Ian Kennedy, retiring chair of the Healthcare Commission, spoke of the bullying culture in the NHS that still ‘permeates the delivery of care.’ Those who are brave enough to speak up about deficiencies in care are being pilloried and silenced. In such an environment, patient safety can never flourish. Dr Pal has lobbied (via her MP Andrew Mitchell) for the Commons Health Select Committee to investigate the problems faced by whistle-blowers in the NHS. She has also started a support network for whistle-blowers and can be contacted at: dr.ritapal@googlemail.com Struck Off and

Labour's Pains 24 June 2009

New health secretary Andy Burnham does a fine line in cheesy tributes, describing his predecessor Alan Johnson as ‘the postman who delivered for the NHS.’ But Johnson got out just in time, leaving Burnham (39, Capricorn) to pick up a number of suspicious packages: The swine flu pandemic, a predicted Summer heat-wave, a staffing crisis caused by the 48-hour week for junior doctors and a projected five-year shortfall in NHS funding of £20 billion. Alas, his maiden speech at the NHS Confederation conference did little to inspire confidence: “Can we do more to get through the challenge and to the next level, going from good to world-class?” He also promised to “unlock the 1.4 million people working in the NHS” and “create a truly people-centred NHS – which genuinely empowers patients and carers as experts potentially backed with control over funds, moving on heath promotion and physical activity, helping people to lead full happy lives, working with public sector partners to wrap care around patients and to place quality at heart of everything”. Burnham is clearly au fait with new Labour bullshit, but can he stop the NHS going tits up in the recession? The NHS has undoubtedly got better over the last decade, but there are still huge variations in the quality of care, and plenty of commercial secrecy and petty rivalry disguising poor practice and waste. Lord Darzi has been frantically encouraging doctors to get more involved in management, and it certainly makes sense for a clinical service to be run by clinicians. But the English NHS is stuck with a market which hasn't delivered a good enough service because nobody knows how to spend £100 billion a year without wasting half of it. The solution was supposed to be word class commissioning (WCC), a phrase dreamt up by Mark Britnell, the self-styled NHS director general for commissioning and system management. Britnell also came up with the FESC framework to encourage the private sector to take control of the purse strings. Britnell was the golden boy of the department of health, voted third most influential person in the NHS by the Health Service Journal, a chief executive in waiting. Until he jumped ship this month to join KMPG, one of the companies involved in FESC. The revolving door from NHS policy maker to the private health provider is hardly new (Simon Stevens, Alan Milburn, Patricia Hewitt, Lord Warner, Baroness Jay, etc.) but for Britnell to time his escape as Burnham arrives does not bode well for the NHS or for Burnham.

and here is how Allyson Pollock described it back then:
“The Darzi report is simply a glib advertising campaign on behalf of the healthcare industry and a new generation of greedy healthcare entrepreneurs.”

If you’re not familiar with Allyson Pollock, she is a Professor of Public Health and NHS campaigner who predicted many of the problems we see now in the NHS, and much of the expansion in privatisation which has occurred in recent years. I trust Allyson, and so I’m nervous to see Lord Darzi placed in a position of prominence again. I’m not only nervous however, but confused. I wrote a newsletter several months ago explaining that there was a huge amount of concern about the low productivity in the NHS at the moment, and about the two separate reviews that had been started to investigate the problem.

Why is he focusing on this issue first, when he could be focusing on emergency investment into the crumbling NHS hospital buildings, or providing immediate support to the NHS workforce? And why is he involving Lord Darzi?

Concerningly, I suspect it is because Starmer’s Labour party have already decided they want to reform the NHS through the involvement of private companies, and they need a report to back up their plans. Politicians are incredibly adept at deciding on the answers they would like from reports like these, and then approaching the “right” people to write them, and on this occasion Lord Dazi appears to be the right man.

Further bios of Hunt, Javid, Coffey, Barclay, Atkins cwould show a desire to beat the BMA, and Doctors, into a pulp by forcing PAs, AAs into subtitution of real qualified Doctors...

We will have to watch Starmer, Streeting, and their allies from the Blair / Brown era closely. Many people defend Tony Blair’s record for the NHS because he brought down the NHS waiting lists, but he and his team did so while wreaking havoc on the infrastructure of our health service. Their Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) left many NHS trusts with enormous debt, costing the taxpayer billions; the final debt not set to be paid off fully until 2050.

We finally have a chance for a fresh start after 14 long years of Conservative governments undermining the NHS. This opportunity to turn things around should feel fresh too; it should not be a rehash of old plans – plans that didn’t help patients, and which put a lot of money into the pockets of private company shareholders.

We need things to improve, not change, and we don’t need any more NHS privatisation!
I’ll keep you up-to-date as things develop… Phil Hammond

Real NHS leaders In the thick of it...

Why Doctors leave the NHS

Palantir’s, Thiel, federated data platform
-can easily be sold by a desperate bancrupt government to private health insurers,
-used to eliminate expensive risky patients, sell insurance to low risk patients,
- exclude patients from GP lists, show which patients are high risk of admission to hospital-expensive

Risk of blackmail: if you do not take wegovy, you get no benefits

Streeting is a Jekyll and Hyde character- like all politicians..
"Change"- they can do anything…
Bribed by private health companies
Speeches to alarm- the NHS is broken
Needs reform
Milburn
Outsourcing
Any Qualified Provider
no ten year workforce plan
PAs
Darzi: we already know what’s wrong
Believe Marketisation-or you get no promotion

Kaiser Permanentewas ompared with NHS-used bad statistics-but now Government policy
Dissolve all the good things-Strategy planning, public health policy, don't collect statistics

Let's concentrate on the GPs-the essential gateway to the whole NHS

DDRB has been knobbled by government to keep everybodies wages down.
General practice pays capitation for each patient (£163 a year), plus Item of Service for "extras"
The GP gets what is left over after paying expenses
Good GPs hire more GPs-but lose income
Our health Centre has many GP doctors, no PAs: I'm sure the partners take home less income, and pay less tax, -but their patients get superb care...
If practice overheads (gas, electric, computers, nurses, secretaries) costs rise, GP income falls.
Funding has been reduced for years-and now, some practices are quitting the NHS-going bancrupt...
Increasing funding by 1.2% when staff are awarded 6% leaves an overdraft..., or bankruptcy.
As GPs retire, emigrate, go private-the number of full time equivalant GPs shrinks
but patients are increasing-leading to burnout, depression, alcohol. mistakes, or suicide
and many GPs are leaving
new GPs are deterred...
The government push for more PAS-which incur risk to their registration with GMC
extra workload, worry and risk
poorer treatment

Raising Employer NHI contributions raises the cost of employed NHS workforce.
GP practices and Dental practices have to bear these costs unless exempted or reimbursed.
Many GPs and Dentists accept lower income resulting from repeated underfunding
but a few dozen at their limit will quit, hand back their contracts and close-then go private
Similarly, farmers paying inheritance tax will sell up for housing, quit, and we import more...

Concentrate on

-GPs Capitation is £163 for each patient-who can make dozens of consultations:
do not consult needlessly-but wisely!!!
-Maternity
-Cancer-oncology, diagnostics IN NHS HOSPITALS
-Stop PAs, AAs
-Stop Private Equity-they want PROFIT, not great care...
-Stop Community Hubs-run by PAs, not supervised

PostScript
This is a bit rude to Welsh GPs...

NHS Dentistry:

Vitreolic media writers and their connections

Personal life

Oakeshott married Nigel Rosser and has three children.[46][47] In 2018, she began a relationship with businessman and former Reform UK party leader Richard Tice.[48][49]

During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, neither Oakeshott nor Tice denied their attendance at a garden barbecue (allegedly against the regulations at the time). Instead, they made reference to testing their eyesight – an apparent signal to an earlier Dominic Cummings scandal.[50]

Oakeshott is related to life peer Matthew Oakeshott.[51]

Oakeshott is a supporter of Brexit, and has close links to the Conservative Partydonor Michael Ashcroft.[52]

Institute of Economic Affairs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Formation
1955; 69 years ago
Type
Free market think tank
Headquarters
London, United Kingdom
Executive Director
Tom Clougherty
Funding
Partially disclosed, including Jersey Finance and the John Templeton Foundation, funding from fossil fuel industry, gambling industry, and tobacco industry

Website
iea.org.uk

The Institute of Economic Affairs(IEA) is a right-wing, free market think tank[7] registered as a UK charity.[8] Associated with the New Right,[5][6] the IEA describes itself as an "educational research institute"[9]and says that it seeks to "further the dissemination of free-market thinking" by "analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems".[9][10]

The IEA subscribes to a neoliberalworld view and advocates positions based on this ideology.[11] It published climate change denialmaterial between 1994 and 2007.[12]It has advocated for privatisation of, and abolition of complete government control of, the National Health Service (NHS), in favour of a healthcare system with market mechanisms.[13][4] It has received more than £70,000 from the tobacco industry[14][15] (although it does not reveal its funders),[16][17] and an IEA director was recorded offering a prospective supporter introductions to policy makers, referred to as "cash for access". The IEA is headquartered in Westminster, London.[18][12]

Founded by businessman and battery farming pioneer Antony Fisher in 1955,[19]the IEA was one of the first modern think tanks,[20] and promoted Thatcherite right-wing ideology, and free market and monetarist economic policies.[21] The IEA has been criticised for operating in a manner closer to that of a lobbying operation than as a genuine think tank.[22] The IEA publishes a journal (Economic Affairs), a student magazine (EA), books and discussion papers, and holds regular lectures.[23]

History

In 1945 Antony Fisher read an article in Reader's Digest that was a summary of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek.[24][20] Later that year, Fisher visited Hayek at the London School of Economics. Hayek dissuaded Fisher from embarking on a political and parliamentary career to try to prevent the spread of socialism and central planning.[24] Instead, Hayek suggested the establishment of a body which could engage in research and reach the intellectuals with reasoned argument.[24] The IEA's first location was a cramped, £3-a-week room with one table and chair at Oliver Smedley's General Management Services, which housed various free-trade organisations at 4 Austin Friars, a few dozen yards from the Stock Exchange in the heart of the City of London.[25]

In June 1955 The Free Convertibility of Sterling by George Winder was published, with Fisher signing the foreword as Director of the IEA.[24] In November 1955, the IEA's Original Trust Deed was signed by Fisher, John Harding and Oliver Smedley. Ralph Harris (later Lord Harris) began work as part-time General Director in January 1957.[24] He was joined in 1958 by Arthur Seldon who was initially appointed Editorial Advisor and became the editorial director in 1959.[24] Smedley wrote to Fisher that it was

"imperative that we should give no indication in our literature that we are working to educate the public along certain lines which might be interpreted as having a political bias. ... That is why the first draft [of the IEA's aims] is written in rather cagey terms".[20]

The Social Affairs Unit was established in December 1980 as an offshoot of the Institute of Economic Affairs to carry the IEA's economic ideas onto the battleground of sociology.[26] "Within a few years the Social Affairs Unit became independent from the IEA, acquiring its own premises."[26] In 1986, the IEA created a Health and Welfare Unit to focus on these aspects of social policy.[24][26]Discussing the IEA's increasing influence under the Conservative government in the 1980s in relation to the "advent of Thatcherism" and the privatisation of public services, Dieter Plehwe, a Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, has written that

The arguably most influential think tank in British history... benefited from the close alignment of IEA's neoliberal agenda with corporate interestsand the priorities of the Thatcher government.[27]

During the 1990's the IEA began to focus its research on the effects of regulation[5]and began a student outreach programme.[5] Free market publications, however, continued to be the core activity of the IEA.[5]

Oliver Letwin said of the organisation in 1994: "without the IEA and its clones, no Thatcher and quite possibly no Reagan; without Reagan, no Star Wars; without Star Wars, no economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Quite a chain of consequences for a chicken farmer!"[28][29] In 2007 British journalist Andrew Marrcalled the IEA "undoubtedly the most influential think tank in modern British history".[30] Damien Cahill, a professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, has characterised the IEA as, "Britain's oldest and leading neoliberal think tank".[11]

In October 2009 the IEA appointed Mark Littlewood as its Director General, with effect from 1 December 2009.[31]

In September 2022 an associated think tank, the Free Market Forum was founded.[32]

In December 2023 Mark Littlewood stood down as the IEA's Director General and was replaced by Tom Clougherty under the title of Executive Director.[33]

Purpose and aims

In 2018 the IEA's then-director Mark Littlewood said "We want to totally reframe the debate about the proper role of the state and civil society in our country ... Our true mission is to change the climate of opinion."[34] While there is no corporate view, and while the IEA has a tradition of welcoming discussion, debate, and papers from those on the left, the IEA promotes the market and has two prominent themes in its publications: first, a belief in limited government and, second, "the technical (and moral) superiority of markets and competitive pricing in the allocation of scarce resources."[5]

The IEA is described as a "university without students"[according to whom?] because its primary target is not politicians but "the gatekeepers of ideas", namely the intellectuals, academics, and journalists.[35] The IEA believe that a change in the intellectual climate is a pre-condition for any ideological shift within political parties or government institutions.[36]

The IEA has written policy papers arguing against government funding for pressure groups and charities involved in political campaigning.[37] The IEA does not receive government funding.[38][non-primary source needed] As a registered charity, the IEA must abide by Charity Commission rules, that state that "an organisation will not be charitable if its purposes are political". In July 2018 the Charity Commission announced that it was to investigate whether the IEA had broken its rules.[34]

The investigation concluded that one of the IEA's reports on Brexit was too political. The regulator thus asked the IEA to remove the report from its website in early November 2018 and issued an official warning in February 2019. It required trustees to provide written assurances that the IEA would not engage in campaigning or political activity contravening legal or regulatory requirements.[39]The IEA removed the report on 19 November and said it complied with the commission's other guidance by 23 November. IEA trustees were also required to set up a system whereby research reports and launch plans are signed off by trustees.[40]

Following the IEA's compliance, the Charity Commission withdrew the official warning in June 2019. A compliance case into the IEA remained open, examining concerns about the trustees' management and oversight of the charity's activities.[40]

According to George Monbiot, the IEA supports privatising the National Health Service (NHS); campaigns against controls on junk food; attacks trades unions; and defends zero-hour contracts, unpaid internships and tax havens.[34] IEA staff are frequently invited by the BBC and other news media to appear on broadcasts.[41][42][43]

The IEA published, between 1994 and 2007, "at least four books, as well as multiple articles and papers, ... suggesting manmade climate change may be uncertain or exaggerated [and that] climate change is either not significantly driven by human activity or will be positive", according to an October 2019 Guardianarticle.[12] Specifically, in 2003, the IEA published the book Climate Alarmism Reconsidered which concluded that government intervention in the name of sustainability is the major threat to energy sustainability and the provision of affordable, reliable energy to growing economies worldwide.[44] It further advocated that free-market structures and the wealth generated by markets help communities to best adapt to climate change.[44]

Concerns about political independence; investigation

The Observer reported on 29 July 2018 that the director of the IEA was secretly recorded in May and June. He was recorded telling an undercover reporter that funders could get to know ministers on first-name terms and that his organisation was in "the Brexit influencing game". While seeking funding, Littlewood said that the IEA allowed donors to affect the "salience" of reports and to shape "substantial content". The recording was to be given to the Charity Commission on 30 July.[45]

The Charity Commission, considering that the allegations raised by the recordings were "of a serious nature", on 20 July 2018 opened a regulatory compliance case into the IEA due to concerns about its political independence. Previously, it had become known that the IEA offered potential US donors access to ministers while raising funds for research to promote free-trade deals favoured by proponents of a "hard Brexit". The commission has powers to examine IEA financial records, legally compel it to provide information, and disqualify trustees. The IEA denies it has breached charity law.[46]

It was also revealed that, after the IEA published a report recommending more casinos, the casino industry donated £8,000 to the IEA.[46]

Jon Trickett, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, welcoming the investigation into the IEA, said "on the road to Brexit, a small group of establishment figures, funded to the tune of millions, are covertly pursuing a political campaign in favour of extreme free trade, acting in effect as lobbyists for secretive corporate interests...there are serious questions that high-ranking Conservative ministers must now answer about their dealings with the IEA."[47]

It was also revealed that Jersey Finance, representing financial interests in Jersey, paid for an IEA report saying that tax havens (such as Jersey) benefited the wider economy, and did not diminish tax revenues in other countries. The report recommended that their status be protected. The IEA did not disclose the funding from Jersey Finance. A similar IEA report about neighbouring Guernsey was funded by the financial services industry there. Following this, the IEA said that the funding they received never influenced the conclusions of reports, and that their output was independent and free from conflict of interest.[48]

Separately, the register of lobbyists concluded in 2019 that the IEA had not participated in consultant lobbying for E Foundation.[49]

Freer launch

In March 2018[50] the IEA offshoot Freer was founded to promote a positive message of liberal, supply-side Conservative renewal.[51][52][failed verification] Freer held two meetings at the 2018 Conservative conference (with none in any other political parties' conferences),[53] and remains entirely within the IEA's structural and organisational control.[54]

Cabinet ministers and MPs (including Michael Gove and Liz Truss) spoke at the organisation's launch. Truss called for a neoliberal "Tory revolution" spearheaded by "Uber-riding, Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating freedom-fighters",[52] comments which were criticised by the Morning Star for failing to take into consideration the quality of employment within the companies mentioned.[54] Conservative blogger Paul Staines said that the launch "piqued the interest of senior ministers including Michael Gove, Dom Raab and Brexit brain Shanker Singham".[54] The organisation has[when?] 24 parliamentary supporters – including prominent figures such as Liz Truss, Chris Skidmore, Priti Patel, Ben Bradley and Kemi Badenoch – all of whom are Conservative MPs. Freer also holds events and publishes pamphlets for Conservative MPs, and has been referred to the Charity Commission by Private Eye for political bias.[53]

Funding

The IEA is a registered educational and research charity.[55] The organisation states that it is funded by "voluntary donations from individuals, companies and foundations who want to support its work, plus income from book sales and conferences",[56] and says that it is "independent of any political party or group".[56]The Charity Commission listed total income of £2.34 million and expenditure of £2.33 million for the financial year ending 31 March 2021.[55]

The IEA policy is to allow donors to choose whether or not to disclose their funding.[57] Some publish their grants to the IEA;[58] others do not. It has been criticised by health charities and by George Monbiot in The Guardian[34] for receiving minor funding (less than 5% of revenue) from major tobacco companies whilst campaigning on tobacco industry issues.[59] British American Tobacco (BAT) confirmed it had donated £40,000 to the IEA in 2013,[14] £20,000 in 2012 and £10,000 in 2011, and Philip Morris International and Japan Tobacco Internationalalso confirmed they provide financial support to the IEA.[15] In 2002, a leaked letter revealed that a prominent IEA member, the right-wing writer Roger Scruton, had authored an IEA pamphlet attacking the World Health Organisation's campaign on tobacco, whilst failing to disclose that he was receiving £54,000 a year from Japan Tobacco International.[60][61] In response, the IEA said it would introduce an author declaration policy.[61] The IEA also says that it "accepts no tied funding".[62]

An organisation called 'American Friends of the IEA' had received US$215,000 as of 2010 from the U.S.-based Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, donor-advised funds which support right-wing causes.[63]

The think tank Transparify, which is funded by the Open Society Foundations, in 2015 ranked the IEA as one of the top three least transparent think tanks in the UK in relation to funding.[64][65] The IEA responded by saying "It is a matter for individual donors whether they wish their donation to be public or private – we leave that entirely to their discretion", and that it has not "earmarked money for commissioned research work from any company".[64]

Funding to the IEA from the alcohol industry, food industry, and sugar industry has also been documented.[66] IEA Research Fellow Christopher Snowdon disclosed alcohol industry funding in a response to a British Medical Journal article in 2014.[66]

In October 2018, an investigation by Greenpeace found that the IEA was also receiving funding from the oil giant BP, which was "[using] this access to press ministers on issues ranging from environmental and safety standards to British tax rates."[67] In May 2019, the British Medical Journal revealed that British American Tobacco was continuing to fund the IEA.[68][69]

In November 2022, the funding transparency website Who Funds You? rated the institute as E, the lowest transparency rating (rating goes from A to E). This was updated to a D rating in December 2023.[70]

Reception

In early 2019, on national radio station LBC, James O'Brien called the IEA a politically motivated lobbying organisation funded by "dark money", of "questionable provenance, with dubious ideas and validity", staffed by people who are not proper experts on their topic. The IEA complained to the UK media regulator Ofcom that those remarks were inaccurate and unfair. In August 2021, Ofcom rejected the complaint.[71][72]

Palantir Technologies Inc.
is a public American company that specializes in software platforms[3] for big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded by Peter Thiel,[4] Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale,[5] and Alex Karp in 2003. The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings where the magical palantíri were "seeing-stones," described as indestructible balls of crystal used for communication and to see events in other parts of the world.[6]

The company has three main projects: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry, and Palantir Apollo. Palantir Gotham is an intelligence and defense tool used by militaries and counter-terrorism analysts. Its customers included the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense.[7] Their software as a service (SaaS) is one of five offerings authorized for Mission Critical National Security Systems (IL5) by the U.S. Department of Defense.[8][9]Palantir Foundry is used for data integration and analysis by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, Wejo, Lilium, PG&E and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.[10] Palantir Apollo is a platform to facilitate continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) across all environments.[11][12]
Palantir's original clients were federal agencies of the USIC. It has since expanded its customer base to serve both international as well as state and local governments, and also to private companies.[13]
History
2003–2008: Founding and early years

Founder and chairman Peter Thiel was Palantir's largest shareholder as of late 2014.
Though usually listed as having been founded in 2004, SEC filings state Palantir's official incorporation to be in May 2003 by Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal), who named the start-up after the "seeing stone" in Tolkien's legendarium.[13]Thiel saw Palantir as a "mission-oriented company" which could apply software similar to PayPal's fraud recognition systems to "reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties."[14]

In 2004, Thiel bankrolled the creation of a prototype by PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings and Stanford University students Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen. That same year, Thiel hired Alex Karp, a former colleague of his from Stanford Law School, as chief executive officer.[15]

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company initially struggled to find investors. According to Karp, Sequoia Capitalchairman Michael Moritz doodled through an entire meeting, and a Kleiner Perkinsexecutive lectured the founders about the inevitable failure of their company.[16]The only early investments were $2 million from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and $30 million from Thiel himself and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund.[8][9][17][18][19]

Palantir developed its technology by computer scientists and analysts from intelligence agencies over three years, through pilots facilitated by In-Q-Tel.[20][8]The company stated computers alone using artificial intelligence could not defeat an adaptive adversary. Instead, Palantir proposed using human analysts to explore data from many sources, called intelligence augmentation.[21]

2009: GhostNet and the Shadow Network

In 2009 and 2010 respectively, Information Warfare Monitor used Palantir software to uncover the GhostNet and the Shadow Network. The GhostNet was a China-based cyber espionage network targeting 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including the Dalai Lama’s office, a NATO computer and various national embassies.[22] The Shadow Network was also a China-based espionage operation that hacked into the Indian security and defense apparatus. Cyber spies stole documents related to Indian security and NATO troop activity in Afghanistan.[23][24]

2010–2012: Expansion

In April 2010, Palantir announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters to sell the Palantir Metropolis product as "QA Studio" (a quantitative analysis tool).[25] On June 18, 2010, Vice President Joe Biden and Office of Management and BudgetDirector Peter Orszag held a press conference at the White House announcing the success of fighting fraud in the stimulus by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). Biden credited the success to the software, Palantir, being deployed by the federal government.[26] He announced that the capability will be deployed at other government agencies, starting with Medicare and Medicaid.[27][28][29][30]

Estimates were $250 million in revenues in 2011.[31]

2013–2016: Additional funding

"[As of 2013] the U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir."
— TechCrunch in January 2015[32]

A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least twelve groups within the U.S. government, including the CIA, the DHS, the NSA, the FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Special Operations Command, the United States Military Academy, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. However, at the time, the United States Armycontinued to use its own data analysis tool.[32] Also, according to TechCrunch, the U.S. spy agencies such as the CIA and FBI were linked for the first time with Palantir software, as their databases had previously been "siloed."[32]

In September 2013, Palantir disclosed over $196 million in funding according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.[33][34] It was estimated that the company would likely close almost $1 billion in contracts in 2014.[35] CEO Alex Karp announced in 2013 that the company would not be pursuing an IPO, as going public would make "running a company like ours very difficult."[36] In December 2013, the company began a round of financing, raising around $450 million from private funders. This raised the company's value to $9 billion, according to Forbes, with the magazine further explaining that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley’s most valuable private technology companies."[36]

In December 2014, Forbes reported that Palantir was looking to raise $400 million in an additional round of financing, after the company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission the month before. The report was based on research by VC Experts. If completed, Forbes stated Palantir's funding could reach a total of $1.2 billion.[36] As of December 2014, the company continued to have diverse private funders, Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller, In-Q-Tel of the CIA,[37] Tiger Global Management, and Founders Fund, which is a venture firm operated by Peter Thiel, the chairman of Palantir. As of December 2014, Thiel was Palantir's largest shareholder.[36]

The company was valued at $15 billion in November 2014.[38] In June 2015, BuzzFeed reported the company was raising up to $500 million in new capital at a valuation of $20 billion.[39] By December 2015, it had raised a further $880 million, while the company was still valued at $20 billion.[40] In February 2016, Palantir bought Kimono Labs, a startup which makes it easy to collect information from public facing websites.[41]

In August 2016, Palantir acquired data visualization startup Silk.[42]

2020

Palantir is one of four large technology firms[43] to start working with the NHS on supporting COVID-19 efforts through the provision of software from Palantir Foundry[44] and by April 2020, several countries had used Palantir's technology to track and contain the contagion.[45] Palantir also developed Tiberius, a software for vaccine allocation used in the United States.[46] In August 2020, Palantir Technologies relocated its headquarters to Denver, Colorado.

In December 2020, Palantir was awarded a $44.4 million contract by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, boosting its shares by about 21%.[47]

Valuation

The company was valued at $9 billion in early 2014, with Forbes stating that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology companies".[36] As of December 2014, Thiel was Palantir's largest shareholder.[36]In January 2015, the company was valued at $15 billion after an undisclosed round of funding with $50 million in November 2014.[48] This valuation rose to $20 billion in late 2015 as the company closed an $880 million round of funding.[49] In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued the company at $6 billion.[50]

On October 18, 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Palantir was considering an IPO in the first half of 2019 following a $41 billion valuation.[51] In July 2020, it was revealed the company had filed for an IPO.[52]

It ultimately went public on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct public offering on September 30, 2020 under the ticker symbol "PLTR".[53] On September 6, 2024, S&P Global announced that the company would be added to the S&P 500 index. Palantir’s share price rose 14% the next trading day.[54]

Investments

The company has invested over $400 million into nearly two dozen special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) targets according to investment bank RBC Capital Markets, while bringing alongside those companies as customers.[55]

Products

Palantir Gotham

Released in 2008, Palantir Gotham is Palantir's defense and intelligence offering. It is an evolution of Palantir's longstanding work in the United States Intelligence Community, and is used by intelligence and defense agencies. Among other things, the software supports alerts, geospatial analysis, and prediction. Users can use Gotham to analyze multiple types of intelligence. Palantir’s online demo shows how the software can be used to track an adversary’s troop movements.[56] Foreign customers include the Ukrainian military.[57] Palantir Gotham has also been used as a predictive policing system, which has elicited some controversy over racism in their AI analytics.[58]

Palantir Foundry

Palantir Foundry is a software platform offered for use in commercial and civil government sectors. It was popularized for use in the health sector by its use within the National Covid Cohort Collaborative, a secure enclave of Electronic Health Records from across the United States that produced hundreds of scientific manuscripts and won the NIH/FASEB Dataworks! Grand Prize. Foundry was also utilized by the Center NHS England in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in England to analyze the operation of the vaccination program. A campaign was started against the company in June 2021 by Foxglove, a tech-justice nonprofit, because "Their background has generally been in contracts where people are harmed, not healed." Clive Lewis MP, supporting the campaign said Palantir had an "appalling track record."[59]

As of 2022, Foundry was also used for the administration of the UK Homes for Ukraine program.[60] to give caseworkers employed by local authorities access to data held by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, some of which is supplied by the UK Home Office.

In November 2023, NHS England awarded a 7-year contract to Palantir for a federated data platform to access data from different systems through a single system, worth £330 million, criticized by the British Medical Association, Doctors Association UK and cybersecurity professionals.[61]

Palantir Apollo

Palantir Apollo is a continuous delivery system that manages and deploys Palantir Gotham and Foundry.[62] Apollo was built out of the need for customers to use multiple public and private cloud platforms as part of their infrastructure. Apollo orchestrates updates to configurations and software in the Foundry and Gotham platforms using a micro-service architecture. This product has led Palantir's business model toward providing software as a service and away from developing bespoke solutions for customers as similar to a consulting company.[63]

Other

The company has been involved in a number of business and consumer products, designing in part or in whole. For example, in 2014, they premiered Insightics, which according to the Wall Street Journal "extracts customer spending and demographic information from merchants’ credit-card records." It was created in tandem with credit processing company First Data.[64]

Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)

In April 2023, the company launched Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) which integrates large language models into privately operated networks. The company demonstrated its use in war, where a military operator could deploy operations and receive responses via an AI chatbot.[65][66] Citing potential risks of generative artificial intelligence, CEO Karp said that the product would not let the AI independently carry out targeting operations, requiring human oversight.[67][68]Commercial companies have also used AIP across many domains. Applications include infrastructure planning, network analysis, and resource allocation.[69][70]

AIP lets users create LLMs called “agents” through a GUI interface. Agents can interact with a digital representation of a company’s business known as an ontology. This lets the models access an organization’s documents and other external resources. Users can define output schemas and test cases to validate AI-generated responses. AIP comes with a library of templates that can be extended by clients.[71] Palantir also offers five-day boot camps to onboard prospective customers. The company reports that some attendees leave with prototypes in hand.[72] Palantir hosts an annual AIPCon conference featuring demos from existing customers.[70]

TITAN

Palantir’s TITAN (Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node) is a truck that is advertised as a mobile ground station for AI applications. After being prototyped with IRAD funds, the project is now developed in partnership with Anduril Industries, Northrop Grumman, and other contractors. The company claims that TITAN can improve customers’ ability to conduct long-range precision strikes.[73]Palantir is under contract to deliver 10 units to the U.S. Army.[74]

MetaConstellation

MetaConstellation is a satellite network that supports the deployment of AI models. Users can request information about specific locations, prompting the service to dispatch the necessary resources. MetaConstellation has been used by customers including the United States Northern Command.[75]

Skykit

Skykit is a portable toolbox that supports intelligence operations in adverse environments. Palantir offers “Skypit Backpack” and “Skykit Maritime” to be transported by individuals and boats respectively. Contents include battery packs, a ruggedized laptop with company software, and a quadcopter supporting computer vision applications. Skykit can also connect to the MetaConstellation satellite network.[76] In 2023, various sources reported that the Ukrainian military has begun receiving Skykit units.[77][78]

Palantir Metropolis

Palantir Metropolis (formerly known as Palantir Finance) was[79][80] software for data integration, information management and quantitative analytics. The software connects to commercial, proprietary and public data sets and discovers trends, relationships and anomalies, including predictive analytics.[81][82] Aided by 120 "forward-deployed engineers" of Palantir during 2009, Peter Cavicchia III of JPMorgan used Metropolis to monitor employee communications and alert the insider threat team when an employee showed any signs of potential disgruntlement: the insider alert team would further scrutinize the employee and possibly conduct physical surveillance after hours with bank security personnel.[81][82] The Metropolis team used emails, download activity, browser histories, and GPS locations from JPMorgan owned smartphones and their transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations to search, aggregate, sort, and analyze this information for any specific keywords, phrases, and patterns of behavior.[81][82] In 2013, Cavicchia may have shared this information with Frank Bisignano who had become the CEO of First Data Corporation.[81] Palantir Metropolis was succeeded by Palantir Foundry.[83]

Customers

Corporate use

See also: Information Warfare Monitor

Founded as a defense contractor, Palantir has since expanded to the private sector. These activities now provide a large fraction of the company’s revenue. Palantir has had 55% year-over-year growth in the U.S. commercial market in Q2 2024, although the company serves foreign customers as well. Example applications include telecommunications and infrastructure planning.[84]

Sales by business (2023)[85]
BusinessSales in billion $
share
Government 1.2 54.9%
Commercial 1.0 45.1%

Palantir Metropolis was used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms.[8][9][23][86]

Sales by region (2023)[85]
Region
Sales in billion $

share

United States 1.4 61.9%
Rest of World 0.6 27.5%
United Kingdom 0.2 10.6%
Palantir Foundry clients include Merck KGaA,[87] Airbus[88] and Ferrari.[89]

Palantir partner Information Warfare Monitor used Palantir software to uncover both the Ghostnet and the Shadow Network.[23][90][24]

U.S. civil entities

Palantir's software was used by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to detect and investigate fraud and abuse in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Specifically, the Recovery Operations Center (ROC) used Palantir to integrate transactional data with open-source and private data sets that describe the entities receiving stimulus funds.[clarification needed][29] Other clients as of 2019 included Polaris Project,[91] the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,[32] the National Institutes of Health,[92] Team Rubicon,[93] and the United Nations World Food Programme.[94]

In October 2020, Palantir began helping the federal government set up a system that will track the manufacture, distribution and administration of COVID-19vaccines across the country.[95]

U.S. military, intelligence, and police

Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor (responsible for the GhostNet and the Shadow Network investigation). Gotham was used by fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, a former US federal agency which operated from 2009 to 2015.

Other clients as of 2013 included DHS, NSA, FBI, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED Defeat Organization and Allies. However, at the time the United States Army continued to use its own data analysis tool.[32] Also, according to TechCrunch, "The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir."[32]

U.S. military intelligence used the Palantir product to improve their ability to predict locations of improvised explosive devices in its war in Afghanistan. A small number of practitioners reported it to be more useful than the United States Army's Program of Record, the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A). California Congressman Duncan D. Hunter complained of United States Department of Defense obstacles to its wider use in 2012.[96]

Palantir has also been reported to be working with various U.S. police departments, for example accepting a contract in 2013 to help the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center build a controversial license plates database for California.[97] In 2012 New Orleans Police Department partnered with Palantir to create a predictive policing program.[98]

In 2014, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded Palantir a $41 million contract to build and maintain a new intelligence system called Investigative Case Management (ICM) to track personal and criminal records of legal and illegal immigrants. This application has originally been conceived by ICE's office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), allowing its users access to intelligence platforms maintained by other federal and private law enforcement entities. The system reached its "final operation capacity" under the Trump administration in September 2017.[99]

Palantir took over the Pentagon's Project Maven contract in 2019 after Google decided not to continue developing AI unmanned drones used for bombings and intelligence.[100]

British National Health Service (NHS)

The firm has contracts relating to patient data from the British National Health Service. In 2020, it was awarded an emergency non-competitive contract to mine COVID-19 patient data and consolidate government databases to help ministers and officials respond to the pandemic. The contract was valued at more than £23.5 million and was extended for two more years. The awarding of the contract without competition was heavily criticised, prompting the NHS to pledge an open and transparent procurement process for any future data contract.[101][102][103]

The firm was encouraged by Liam Fox "to expand their software business" in Britain.[104] It was said to be "critical to the success of the vaccination and PPE programmes,” but its involvement in the NHS was controversial among civil liberties groups.[105] Conservative MP David Davis called for a judicial review into the sharing of patient data with Palantir.[106]

The procurement of a £480m Federated Data Platform by NHS England, launched in January 2023 has been described as a 'must win' for Palantir.[107] The procurement has been described as a "farce" by civil liberties campaigners, alleging that Palantir have a competitive advantage as it "already has its feet under the table in NHS England" and benefits from a short procurement window.[108] In April 2023 it was revealed that a consortium of UK companies had been unsuccessful in its bid for the contract.[109]

In April 2023, Conservative MP David Davis publicly expressed his concern over the procurement process, stating that it could become a "battle royale". Davis is one of a dozen MPs pressing the government over privacy concerns with the use of data. Labour peer and former Health Minister Philip Hunt voiced his concern about Palantir's use of data, stating “The current NHS and current government doesn’t have a good track record of getting the details right, and the procurement shows no sign of going better.” [110]

In April 2023, it was also reported that eleven NHS trusts had paused or suspended use of the Palantir Foundry software. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care stated that this was due to "operational issues".[110]

In January 2023 Palantir's founder, Peter Thiel, called Britain's affection for the NHS "Stockholm Syndrome" during a speech to the Oxford Union, going on to say that the NHS "makes people sick". A Palantir spokesman clarified that Thiel was "speaking as a private individual" and his comments "do not in any way reflect the views of Palantir".[111]

In March 2023 it was revealed that NHS hospitals had been 'ordered' to share patient data with Palantir, prompting renewed criticism from civil liberties groups.[112] Campaign groups including the Doctors' Association UK, National Pensioners' Convention, and Just Treatment, subsequently threatened legal action over NHS England's procurement of the FDP contract citing concerns over the use of patient data.[113]

NHS England's former artificial intelligence chief, Indra Joshi, was recruited by Palantir in 2022. The company said they were planning to increase their team in the UK by 250.[114] Palantir's UK head, Louis Moseley, was quoted internally as saying that Palantir's strategy for entry into the British health industry was to "Buy our way in" by hoovering up smaller rival companies with existing relationships with the NHS in order to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance.” [115]

In November 2023, NHS England awarded Palantir a £330 million contract to create and manage the Federated Data Platform.[116]

Europe

The Danish POL-INTEL predictive policing project has been operational since 2017 and is based on the Gotham system. According to the AP the Danish system "uses a mapping system to build a so-called heat map identifying areas with higher crime rates." The Gotham system has also been used by German state police in Hesse and Europol.[58]

The Norwegian Customs is using Palantir Gotham to screen passengers and vehicles for control. Known inputs are prefiled freight documents, passenger lists, the national Currency Exchange database (tracks all cross-border currency exchanges), the Norwegian Welfare Administrations employer- and employee-registry, the Norwegian stock holder registry and 30 public databases from InfoTorg. InfoTorg provides access to more than 30 databases, including the Norwegian National Citizen registry, European Business Register, the Norwegian DMV vehicle registry, various credit databases etc. These databases are supplemented by the Norwegian Customs Departments own intelligence reports, including results of previous controls. The system is also augmented by data from public sources such as social media.[117]

Ukraine

Karp claims to have been the first CEO of a large U.S. company to visit Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion.[118] Palantir's technology has since been used close to the front lines.[119] It is used to shorten the "kill chain" in Russo-Ukrainian War.[120] According to a December 2022 report by The Times, Palantir's AI has allowed Ukraine to increase the accuracy, speed, and deadliness of its artillery strikes.[121] Ukraine's prosecutor general's office also plans to use Palantir's software to help document alleged Russian war crimes.[122]

Israel

The London office of Palantir was the target of demonstrations by anti-Israeli protesters in December 2023 after it was awarded a large contract to manage NHS data. The protesters accused Palantir of being "complicit" in war crimes during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war because it provides the Israel Defence Force (IDF) with intelligence and surveillance services, including a form of predictive policing.[68] In January 2024, Palantir agreed to a strategic partnership with the IDF under which it will provide the IDF with services to assist its "war-related missions".[123] Karp has been emphatic in his public support for Israel. He has frequently criticized what he calls the inaction of other tech leaders. His position has prompted several employees to leave Palantir.[124]

Other

Palantir Gotham was used by cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor, a Canadian public-private venture which operated from 2003 to 2012.

Palantir was used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to verify if Iran was in compliance with the 2015 agreement.[37]

Partnerships and contracts

International Business Machines

On February 8, 2021, Palantir and IBM announced a new partnership that would use IBM's hybrid cloud data platform alongside Palantir's operations platform for building applications. The product, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, is expected to simplify the process of building and deploying AI-integrated applications with IBM Watson. It will help businesses/users interpret and use large datasets without needing a strong technical background. Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data will be available for general use in March 2021.[125]

Amazon (AWS)

On March 5, 2021, Palantir announced its partnership with Amazon AWS. Palantir's ERP Suite was optimized to run on Amazon Web Services. The ERP suite was used by BP.[126]

Microsoft

On Aug 8, 2024, Palantir and Microsoft announced a partnership where Palantir will deploy their suite of products on Microsoft Azure Government clouds. Palantir stock jumped more than 10% for the day. [127]

Babylon Health

Palantir took a stake in Babylon Health in June 2021. Ali Parsa told the Financial Times that "nobody" has brought some of the tech that Palantir owns "into the realm of biology and health care".[59]

Controversies

Algorithm development

i2 Inc sued Palantir in Federal Court alleging fraud, conspiracy, and copyright infringement over Palantir's algorithm. Shyam Sankar, Palantir's director of business development, used a private eye company as the cutout for obtaining i2's code. i2 settled out of court for $10 million in 2011.[81]

WikiLeaks proposals (2010)

In 2010, Hunton & Williams LLP allegedly asked Berico Technologies, Palantir, and HBGary Federal to draft a response plan to "the WikiLeaks Threat." In early 2011 Anonymous publicly released HBGary-internal documents, including the plan. The plan proposed that Palantir software would "serve as the foundation for all the data collection, integration, analysis, and production efforts."[128] The plan also included slides, allegedly authored by HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, which suggested "[spreading] disinformation" and "disrupting" Glenn Greenwald's support for WikiLeaks.[129]

Palantir CEO Karp ended all ties to HBGary and issued a statement apologizing to "progressive organizations ... and Greenwald ... for any involvement that we may have had in these matters." Palantir placed an employee on leave pending a review by a third-party law firm. The employee was later reinstated.[128]

Racial discrimination lawsuit (2016)

On September 26, 2016, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs of the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Palantir alleging that the company discriminated against Asian job applicants on the basis of their race.[130]According to the lawsuit, the company "routinely eliminated" Asian applicants during the hiring process, even when they were "as qualified as white applicants" for the same jobs.[131] Palantir settled the suit in April 2017 for $1.7 million while not admitting wrongdoing.[132]

British Parliament inquiry (2018)

During questioning in front of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Christopher Wylie, the former research director of Cambridge Analytica, said that several meetings had taken place between Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, and that Alexander Nix, the chief executive of SCL, had facilitated their use of Aleksandr Kogan's data which had been obtained from his app "thisisyourdigitallife" by mining personal surveys. Kogan later established Global Science Research to share the data with Cambridge Analytica and others. Wylie confirmed that both employees from Cambridge Analytica and Palantir used Kogan's Global Science Research and harvested Facebook data together in the same offices.[133][134]

ICE partnership (since 2014)

Palantir has come under criticism due to its partnership developing software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Palantir has responded that its software is not used to facilitate deportations. In a statement provided to the New York Times,[135] the firm implied that because its contract was with HSI, a division of ICE focused on investigating criminal activities, it played no role in deportations. However, documents obtained by The Intercept[99] show that this is not the case. According to these documents, Palantir's ICM software is considered 'mission critical' to ICE. Other groups critical of Palantir include the Brennan Center for Justice,[136] National Immigration Project,[137] the Immigrant Defense Project,[138]the Tech Workers Coalition and Mijente.[139] In one internal ICE report[140] Mijente acquired, it was revealed that Palantir's software was critical in an operation to arrest the parents of children residing illegally.

On September 28, 2020, Amnesty International released a report criticizing Palantir failure to conduct human rights due diligence around its contracts with ICE. Concerns around Palantir's rights record were being scrutinized for contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants.[141][142]

"HHS Protect Now" and privacy concerns (since 2020)
This section may be unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article or discuss the issue on the talk page. (December 2020)

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted tech companies to respond to growing demand for citizen information from governments in order to conduct contact tracing and to analyze patient data.[143] Consequently, data collection companies, such as Palantir, have been contracted to partake in pandemic data collection practices. Palantir's participation in "HHS Protect Now", a program launched by the United States Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of the coronavirus, has attracted criticism from American lawmakers.[144]

Palantir's participation in COVID-19 response projects re-ignited debates over its controversial involvement in tracking illegal immigrants, especially its alleged effects on digital inequality and potential restrictions on online freedoms. Critics allege that confidential data acquired by HHS could be exploited by other federal agencies in unregulated and potentially harmful ways.[144] Alternative proposals request greater transparency in the process to determine whether any of the data aggregated would be shared with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to single out illegal immigrants.[144]

Project Maven (since 2018)
Main article: Project Maven

After protests from its employees, Google chose not to renew its contract with the Pentagon to work on Project Maven, a secret artificial intelligence program aimed at the unmanned operation of aerial vehicles. Palantir then took over the project. Critics warned that the technology could lead to autonomous weapons that decide who to strike without human input.[100]

Leadership
Jamie Fly, former Radio Free Europe president and CEO, serves as senior counselor to the CEO.[145]

Matthew Turpin, former director for China at the White House National Security Council and senior advisor for China to the Secretary of Commerce during the Trump administration, serves as senior advisor.[146][147]

Ownership
The largest shareholders of Palantir in early 2024 were:[85]
Shareholder name
Percentage
The Vanguard Group 9.4%
Peter Thiel 7.2%
BlackRock 4.7%
SOMPO Holdings 3.9%
Alex Karp[148] 2.5%
Renaissance Technologies 2.1%
State Street Corporation 1.9%
Geode Capital Management 1.4%
Jane Street Capital 1.1%
Eaton Vance 1.1%
D. E. Shaw & Co. 1.0%
Others 66.2%

Allison Pearson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the American scholar, see Allison W. Pearson. For the accused witch, see Alison Pearson (accused witch).
Allison Pearson
Born Judith Allison Lobbett
22 July 1960 (age 64)
Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire, Wales
Education Market Harborough Upper School
Lincoln Christ's Hospital School
Alma mater Clare College, Cambridge
Employer The Daily Telegraph
Spouse Simon Pearson ?(m. 1988)?
Judith Allison Pearson (née Lobbett;[1] born 22 July 1960) is a British columnist and author.[2][3] She was bankrupted in 2015 by HMRC for non-payment of tax.[4][4]

Pearson has worked for British newspapers such as the Daily Mail, The Independent, the Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph, and the Financial Times. She has also worked as a presenter for Channel 4 and BBC Radio 4. Pearson's chick lit novel was published in 2002; a film adaptation with the same title, I Don't Know How She Does It, was released in 2011.

Pearson campaigned in favour of Brexit and in 2016 described Brussels as the jihadist capital of Europe. She has criticised the Gender Recognition Act 2004, and opposed transgender rights, describing them as a "an evil trans ideology".

Early life
Born in Carmarthen, Pearson moved to Burry Port, Carmarthenshire as a young child.[2] She lived in Leicestershire, and attended Market Harborough Upper School (now Robert Smyth School). Her family moved to Washdyke Lane in Nettleham, where she attended Lincoln Christ's Hospital School,[5] and won a prize for History in the sixth form;[6] she gained A-levels in English, History and French.[7]

She studied English at Clare College, Cambridge,[8][failed verification] graduating with a lower second class degree (2:2).[9]

Career
Journalism
Pearson began her career with the Financial Times, where she was a sub-editor, before moving to The Independent and then The Independent on Sunday in 1992. There she was assistant to Blake Morrison before becoming a television critic, winning the award for Critic of the Year at the British Press Awards in 1993.

Pearson was a columnist with London's Evening Standard and The Daily Telegraph, then took over from Lynda Lee-Potter at the Daily Mail. Pearson ended her column for the Daily Mail in April 2010, when it was said that she was to join The Daily Telegraph.[10][11] In September 2010, Pearson resumed her role as a columnist with The Daily Telegraph.[12] As of 2015, Pearson was a columnist and chief interviewer of The Daily Telegraph.[13] Pearson has presented Channel 4's J'Accuse and BBC Radio 4's The Copysnatchers. She participated as a panellist on Late Review, the predecessor of Newsnight Review.

Pearson is on the Media/PR Advisory Council of Toby Young's Free Speech Union.[14]

Books
Pearson's first novel, I Don't Know How She Does It (2002), was a "chick lit" examination of the pressures of modern motherhood. The book was a bestseller in the UK and the US, selling four million copies, and was made into a film.[2]

Pearson was sued by Miramax for non-delivery of a second novel, I Think I Love You, for which she received a US$700,000 advance in 2003. Delivery was due in 2005:[15] it was published in 2010.[16] The novel was about a teenager's passion for David Cassidy in the 1970s and the man writing the so-called replies from David Cassidy to the teenage fans, who meet up 20 years later after marriage, divorce, and children. The Daily Telegraph praised the novel for its warmth and sincerity;[16] however, The Guardian described it as an "unrealistic and sappy romance".[17]

A sequel to I Don't Know How She Does It was published in September 2017. The novel, How Hard Can It Be,[18] continues the story of the protagonist Kate Reddy, now approaching 50 and struggling with bias against older women in the workplace. The book attracted considerable publicity, but was not a bestseller.[3]

Views
Islamic terrorism
Shortly after the first of the 22 March 2016 Belgian bombings, Pearson suggested that the attacks were a justification for the Brexit cause in the then-upcoming referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, writing on Twitter that "Brussels, de facto capital of the EU, is also the jihadist capital of Europe. And the Remainers dare to say we're safer in the EU!" Her tweet was criticised by Kay Burley and The Guardian columnist Owen Jones.[19][20][21] Following the May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, Pearson called for terror suspects in the United Kingdom to be interned.[22]

Transgender issues
Pearson views transgender identity as "an evil trans ideology" and "a warped ideology".[23][24] In 2017 she described a review of the Gender Recognition Act as "spineless politicians, pathetically eager to be on-trend" and that the review was due to "biological science lies".[24][25]

COVID-19 pandemic
Pearson said during the COVID-19 pandemic that she would not wear a protective face mask because she considered it demeaning.[26] In September 2020, Pearson suggested purposely infecting young people with COVID-19 to create herd immunity within the population.[27] In January 2021, Pearson drew censure from Twitter users after outing a critic's employer on Twitter, following her claim that National Health Service (NHS) bed occupancy during the pandemic was lower than suggested.[28]

According to The Guardian, Pearson has made misleading claims about COVID-19.[26] In December 2020, she wrote in her Telegraph column that "Last week, Sir Patrick Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty presented another of their Graphs of Doom; this one cherry-picked several hospitals on course to run out of beds." However, this was false, and no such data was presented in the period stated.[29] In July 2021, she misleadingly tweeted that hospitalisations were 0.5% of COVID-19 cases; Full Fact found that the calculation was incorrect, but also did not make sense due to the lag between testing positive and hospitalisation.[30]

Personal life
Pearson was married to fellow journalist Simon Pearson,[1] in May 1988 in Lincoln. She subsequently lived with Anthony Lane,[31] a film critic for The New Yorker. She now lives alone with her cat.[32]

Allison Pearson was declared bankrupt following a personal insolvency order made by the High Court of Justice in London on 9 November 2015. The bankruptcy petitioner was the Commissioners for HM Revenue and Customs.[33][34]

Duration: 6 minutes and 45 seconds.6:45
Allison Pearson talks about I Think I Love You on Bookbits radio.
Awards and honors
Literary awards
Year Work Award Category Result Ref
2003 I Don't Know How She Does It Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize — Shortlisted [35]
Virgin Books Newcomer of the Year Award — Won
Waverton Good Read Award — Longlisted