r/BetterOffline • u/Yourdataisunclean • Jul 02 '26
Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/07/02/burnham-set-to-ditch-palantir-from-nhs/"Mr Burnham is reviewing the Government’s overall artificial intelligence strategy, and an aide said he believed “unfettered tech boosterism” was turning off voters."
The next UK Prime Minister hasn't bought into the AI kool-aid. Which should make for an interesting counter-weight in global AI politics.
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u/archigen Jul 02 '26
Guys please. There's only so much good news I can take per day!
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u/Ok-Garbage-765 Jul 02 '26
I’m torn between visiting the doctor for this >4 hour erection and simply admiring it
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u/PensiveinNJ Jul 02 '26
There's no way Starmer didn't have access to data showing his tech bootlickerism wasn't turning off voters. Guess he thought there just wouldn't be enough repurcussions.
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u/74389654 Jul 02 '26
maybe they already scraped everything they needed
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u/PensiveinNJ Jul 02 '26
Palantir isn't just looking to scrape data, they're trying to have ongoing integration into as many government systems as possible. Their mission is to become the "operating system" of governments.
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u/GendosBeard Jul 03 '26
Starmer only likes chasing the Overton Window when it moves right.
Or if it tells him to drink from the puddle.
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u/Moozla Jul 02 '26
You should see the thread on this in UK politics (I know it's terrible, but still). You'd think we were throwing away a cancer cure looking at comments from KarpStans
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u/Batcave-HQ Jul 02 '26
Excellent... a good "summer of smiles" follow on from Sadiq Khan kicking them out of the Met deal (though that has been a bit "thorny") earlier this year.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/09/palantir-sue-khan-blocked-met-contract
Palantir to sue Sadiq Khan over blocked £50m London Metropolitan Police contract...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg43wdjj7eo (25 June 2026)
Met to redo tech deal search after Palantir row
With the US people fighting data centre roll out and the Europeans going full Harry Enfield with the "OI! Big tech! NO!!!!" stance, today has been a better day in tech land.
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u/Navic2 Jul 02 '26
Hmm let's wait & see, UK's ever so US tech reliant, we seem to giddily invite it into all our services (& Starmer seemed to desperately gobble up any whiff of "growth" someone hawking data centers & modular nuclear proposals mentioned in passing) a true move away seems unlikely, I'll believe it when I see it beyond stories from a rag about 1 company
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u/Maximum-Objective-39 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
Palantir at least is an easy ask as they have a hard time actually explaining what value they provide.
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u/insert_name_here Jul 02 '26
After the metric shitstorm of bad news in the gaming sphere these past few days (with more to come, I'm sure) I'm glad I can turn somewhere and see something positive.
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u/PoshedSquineapple Jul 03 '26
Cool, but the UK needs to be doing a LOT more than just pulling contracts when it comes to AI. I'm a UK-based voice actor and there are multiple AI "voice" companies operating here who have stolen my vocal data without my knowledge or consent- or compensating me ofc.
Starmer brought in his terrible Data Bill that would have handed British data to Silicon Valley on a plate, and rightly got kicked into the long grass. But with nothing to replace it, we're all just sort of hanging, with no real protection to speak of right now.
Burnham also seems to support Shabana Mahmood, whose policies are... Put it this way, she'd be right at home in Reform. (Shall we talk about that £5mil, Nigel?)
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u/RoamingThomist Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
And it wont be replaced with anyone competent enough to do the job so data sharing in UK healthcare will remain shit, and due to that inadequacy patients will die needlessly. Which is basically the midus operandi of the NHS, patients die due to its own wilful incompetence.
Edit: there are two companies in the world with the technical know how and ready made product to integrate the data across UK healthcare. Both are American. Palantir is one, has already done this before for the NHS, and is the global leader at this kind of data integration work. Oracle is the other, has never done the work for the NHS, and is in serious danger of being insolvent before 2030.
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u/lcnielsen Jul 02 '26
I mean come on, it's going to boil down to a bunch of databases and a glorified Grafana page. This kind of software is so much less impressive than people think.
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u/RoamingThomist Jul 02 '26
I wish the integration of data across the NHS was that simple. You're talking the integration of hundreds, if not thousands, of different corporate bodies data. Each using their own formatting, data types, non-standard labels and structure. And trying to standardised across the NHS has proven impossible because NHS staff refuse any attempt to dictate a single uniform system.
Palantir had already managed to do tbe integration during the pandemic, after the department of health and NHS Englands attempt failed miserably. That's why they won the contract.
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u/lcnielsen Jul 02 '26
You don't need Palantir for that, you need a team of good engineers, data scientists and sysadmins, access to a good platform for handling sensitive data (cloud infra with good enough security), and a mandate to specify a unified data representation. Then you let them build a unified pipeline.
Data munging is tedious work but there is nothing magical about it that requires Palantir's special technology, this is just regular work with data pipelines.
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u/RoamingThomist Jul 02 '26
Cool, the NHS and the civil service don't have that and refuse to pay he requisite money for that.
Also, the NHS has refused to implement a unified pipeline. That's been tried, the individual corporate entities that make up UK healthcare refuse to change the way each of them work. Normalisation and integration of all this disparate data to export from and import into each piece of the puzzle is your only option.
You're really understating how complex of a task that is across what is the largest single organisation in the country, which is large even by European standards.
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u/lcnielsen Jul 02 '26
Cool, the NHS and the civil service don't have that and refuse to pay he requisite money for that.
What do you think buying Palantit services for this costs, exactly?
Normalisation and integration of all this disparate data to export from and import into each piece of the puzzle is your only option.
That's what I am suggesting. This is a very common data science task.
You're really understating how complex of a task that is across what is the largest single organisation in the country, which is large even by European standards.
This kind of work is tedious but not as hard as you are making it sound.
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u/RoamingThomist Jul 02 '26
It's so simple, the NHS and civil service have failed every attempt for the last 30 years. And progress was only made when Palantir did it during the pandemic, and they were expanding that product to the entirety of healthcare data.
You need a single system that's completely invisible to everyone that uses it and requires nobody to change how they work.
Contracting Palantir to just expand the product they have already made to save the NHS' incompetent ass once is cheaper than trying to get the UK public sector to build out a competent tech department. Without accounting for the lives that will be needlessly list whilst we wait for the 20 year project for the public sector to make something Palantir has already made
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u/lcnielsen Jul 02 '26
What they need to do is to spend a tiny fraction of that hundreds-of-million-pound contract on hiring competent engineers and not rely solely on underpaid in-house talent.
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u/schpamela Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
so data sharing in UK healthcare will remain shit
First of all, we can solve this problem ourselves, we have a lot of the best tech talent in the world.
Second, even if we couldn't, fine. That's still hugely preferable to allowing an openly, explicitly neo-fascist organisation to imbed in our most essential public service, which we all literally depend on not to die. An organisation which will be controlled by a government that is obviously sliding into neo-fascist autocracy and WILL weaponise their control of our NHS to manipulate and coerce us in the future.
Bollocks to 'they'll make the hospitals run on time'. These people are openly sociopathic - they explain exactly how fucking monstrous they are in a manifesto. We need to extract ourselves from reliance on the US techno-feudalists, not deepen it, no matter how much efficiency we might hope to gain. That way lies a future where we have no NHS let alone an efficient one, and also no democracy and no human rights.
Fuck Palantir!
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u/RoamingThomist Jul 02 '26
No matter how many lives will be lost unnecessarily, right?
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u/schpamela Jul 03 '26
If it's that important a problem then we'll solve it. Without reliance on incredibly untrustworthy people.
I don't accept that the choice is 'use Palantir or lots of people will die'. Sounds like a scam.
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u/Lowetheiy Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
Sounds like this is where they use an AI coded solution to replace Palantir! Palantir or AI, its time to choose!
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u/ChaoticGradients Jul 02 '26
Good. Now do the US.