Palantir is taking over Britain. This is how | Martin Wrigley interview

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Am I tough enough to strong and stable leadership?

Total rhubarb. Hell yes, I'm tough enough.

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Martin, welcome to politics, Joe.

Thank you for aren't you having me?

We're here to talk about Palantir and some questions that you've raised around

in Parliament, but before we get into that, I'll let you introduce yourself.

And also, I'd like to know a bit about your background because you have experience in this space.

I do, so politics is my second career.

About 10 or, I suppose it's now 13 years ago, I left my job.

I've been spending 20 years with Orange from a Buffon company,

started where there were 200 employees left when there were 200,000 employees.

And it was part of France Telecom.

I got to a point where I was too senior and insufficiently French

to go any further in France Telecom, controlled Orange.

And so I thought I'd do something different.

So I sat down in my garden and thought, what do I want to do?

I decided I wanted to do something that paid back,

that gave something back to the local community.

So I set my targets to become an MP in 10 years

and started joining local politics, got myself co-opted to the parish council,

elected to the town council, elected to the district council.

We took control of the district council, I got elected to the county council,

got elected to be leader of the district council, got myself elected to be the MP.

So you can work your way through and do it.

But before all this, I was a software architect, a software manager,

I was doing a whole lot of things,

including when Orange was on its massive expansion phase from the early days,

I was architecting the way to expand the systems up from being a few hundred

thousands into the tens of millions where we are today,

which involved a whole load of looking at big data, looking at how we do things,

and implementing things like data warehouses,

which is what the Palantir system is.

Only it's now 20 years further on from when we were doing that,

and it's now powered by AI as well.

And so this background you have in software and tech,

is not something that actually a lot of MPs have,

and it was something that was noted when you were questioning the UK CEO

of Palantir Alex Mosley, he was kind of saying, well, we actually know what we do.

And do you think the fact that a lot of MPs don't even have much of a basic understanding

of things like AI or any sort of background in tech is inhibiting their ability to

properly scrutinize and companies like Palantir?

I think it does play a lot in there, you're right.

I mean, AI is very interesting. What we have as AI today,

it's pretty much the same as I was taught at university 40 years ago.

The difference is that now we have more processing power,

we have better technology in the natural language processing,

so we can understand English questions,

and we have the ability to deal with these large language models with big data.

So that means we can feed the AI system, and we've got the power to run the AI system,

which is a, it's actually a simulation of a neural network,

but that's not important. Reason is it learns and it recognizes patterns,

so you have to understand what it can do and what it can't do.

And you know, the old thing of when you're clicking on the recapture boxes,

show all the pictures of a bus, show all the pictures of a cat,

that is going off often to actually teach AI systems.

Because it's doing pattern recognition, you show out a thousand pictures of a cat,

then show another picture and say, is this a cat,

and it will use what it's learned from what cats look like to determine whether that is a cat.

But it doesn't give you a deterministic answer, it gives you a probabilistic answer.

So the real answer it's giving is that is likely to be a cat, not that is a cat,

and it's certainly not repeatable.

But knowing all of that means that I don't trust it,

because you can't test it. I've spent a long time doing systems that get tested,

so that when you say, in this situation, this is the process the computer is supposed to follow,

this is the outcome that's supposed to deliver. That's testable and repeatable.

Like a car is today, you know that when you press a brake, it will stop.

AI may or may not work at any given moment, may or may not give the right answer,

so you've got to be really careful how you use it.

So that makes me look out for these things to actually see where people are falling into this

trap of trusting something that appears to be artificially intelligent.

But in reality, it's just like a souped up version of the Motorola text predictor,

where it would actually fill out your text messages for you as you're typing along,

it's doing exactly the same thing.

And slightly tangentially on that capture point, it always bothers me that there's

not an option to opt out of training the AI to use the website.

You have to accept that your labor is going to be used to train AI.

You have to do that. Now it's fine when it was a Gutenberg project and we're test reading the

test reading the words, you know, to identify that they'd been optically recognized properly.

That I liked that one, but the training AI is slightly worrying because you never quite know

where it's going to go. So back to Palantir. Yes.

Some people still might not be familiar with what they're actually being contracted to do,

by the UK state and how entrenched they are in some parts of the UK state.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Well, that's interesting because it's very unclear exactly what they're being asked to do,

but it's very clear where they are going.

So they have installations. They started off by offering their system for free to help out

during the pandemic. Now there was a meeting between Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings,

and Peter Teal, the guy who's the founder and chair of Palantir in number 10 for an hour

for which there are no notes. And I've been unable to find out anything about what they discussed,

but that was an hour long meeting in number 10 in 2019.

Not long after that, they offered for free the use of their system to track all of the

injections for the COVID vaccine to try to make sure that everybody got their COVID vaccines,

which was useful, but it's always worrying when people offer something for free.

In the end, we paid a pound for it because we couldn't do free contracts.

But then they came on board and we've got them in the MOD doing something or other.

We don't quite know. We've got them in the NHS where they have been putting in their analytics

platform into hospital trusts that I think is about 70 something. It was recently mandated in about

November last year by the NHS England that that system would be extended to go into every acute

community and mental health provider within the NHS. And they were told to get rid of their

existing analytics systems and use Palantir instead. So that means every GP surgery, it means every

mental health outfit, everybody. So they will all be using Palantir, which means that we will have

a single place where the entirety of the nation's health records are stored and accessed by one

company. That's pretty much I think a unique facility. Nowhere in the world has the entire nation

in one database, all of their health. That's kind of interesting. Now we've asked the National

Audit Office what they're doing with it and are they getting the benefits? This is now extended

to a £330 million contract. The only thing they mentioned when we had them in front of the

select committee was they've optimised the rotors for some operating theatres and nurses and

bits and pieces. I think that's great. Don't get me wrong. That's great, you know, increasing the

efficiency. I'm not sure if it's worth £330 million. Where else we've got? So we've got NHS, we've

got MOD, they're in the cabinet office, they've been doing a bunch of things with the cabinet

office. We're not clear exactly what. And they're on trial in at least two groups of four police

forces, Leicestershire is one, not coming, which the other one is. So they're having a spreading

impact across government departments. You said a lot there that I want to un-pick. But let's go

back to where you kind of started, which was with this meeting between Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings

and Peter Teal, which you've requested and the documents from through I think through the

Freedom Information Act. Yes, we've done FOIs, we've done follow-ups, we've done all sorts and

we've been denied even the background papers that would explain why we couldn't see

why the FOI had been denied. And I guess it kind of relates to why

Palantir is kind of in the news a lot, just I, which is to do with the Epstein files and Peter

Mandelson's connections to Epstein. And Epstein was also in very frequent contact with Peter Teal.

But we also know that it was Peter Mandelson that arranged the meeting between

Cure Starmer and Peter Teal. Of which there is no record and doesn't that sound familiar?

So I was wondering, is it simply the lack of transparency alone around the procurement of

Palantir contracts that's concerning to you? Or is it more than that? Well, the lack of transparency

is always a red flag. So if things aren't transparent, you have to look into them. But then you look

into what they're actually doing and where they're going. And what I can see is that Palantir is

becoming a single supplier across so many areas looking at all of the big data across government.

And that to me starts to look like a single point of failure. Very mindful of the fact that

a little while ago Donald Trump sanctioned the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court

and Microsoft subsequently withdrew their services from him. So he's lost his email.

He lost his email. Most people say, hey, no email. But it does mean that the American

companies are subject to American edicts from the president. So what would happen if Palantir is

running all these different things and for whatever reason Donald Trump decided that he didn't

like something Cure Starmer had done and wanted to sanction him? How many of these systems

would be switched off? We don't know. Now if everything switched off in one go, that does give you

a single point of failure. And this is a point I put to the Foreign Secretary who said they would be

looking into it. So we need to follow up on that. But beyond that, there's also smacks of projects

that I've seen in the past where the slick salesman comes in and says, yes, it will do everything

you want to do. It'll tell you all the things that you need to know. We are Palantir. We are the

the magic-seeing eye from the Lord of the Rings, which is where it's named from.

You can see all of your data and you understand exactly what's going on and everything will be perfect.

And then you ask it some questions. It's, well, we don't quite know enough data yet. We need a

bit more investment. We need more work. We need more people. We need more a bigger range and more

money plowed into this. And you never actually get the answers because you can never get to that

magical point where you can see all the data because we know in the state of the NHS, for example,

that their data is not consistent across hospitals. There was an article on Radio 4

that talked about how they record data differently. And I think they used the example of

left before treatment for a patient who'd gone up, rocked up to accident and emergency.

And they recorded about 10 or 12 different meanings for that within one hospital, let alone

across different trusts, whether it's the patient rocked up and then went before anybody had

seen them, whether they stayed for triage and then just didn't go on, whether all sorts of differences.

So you can't make any sensible analysis if you don't understand the data underneath.

And there is no way they will understand all of that data. So I think they're actually selling

a smoke dream, a pipe dream. I don't think they can actually do what they're promising.

It reminded me of a system in Orange when we were moving into a whole new load of multimedia

stuff when phones were much simpler. And we had IBM come in and we paid them a huge amount of

money to put in this wonderful system that would sort everything out for us. And absolutely,

this would answer all of the questions that we had. And then a few years later we were signing

off projects. So it saved 25 million by getting rid of the IBM component because they never

quite deliver this dream that you want. And I think what they've done is they've sold people

who aren't technically sufficiently knowledgeable, the dream, that big data and AI can answer all

of your questions and make everything work efficiently. And they can't. You only need to listen to

Keir Starmer talk about AI and the way that he's kind of betting Britain's future growth

on AI. And there's lots of questions that you've raised about how to what extent can AI actually

deliver that growth. But I want to go back to what something you said about the single point

of critical failure. And we know about the closeness between and Palantir CEOs and the Trump

administration and what you mentioned there about sanctions as well as really interesting.

So are we essentially outsourcing our national security because we know that Palantir has contracts

with the MOD and to a private company, Palantir or to the US government, Donald Trump?

Yes, completely. And we also know that these systems now don't run in isolation.

There was an interesting a few years ago when the Nissan Leaf first launched. It was delayed by

a few weeks and the reason for the delay is every time you turn the Nissan Leaf on, it needs to go

back to check with its servers back in Tokyo to determine whether it's got the right software.

Does it need an urgent update? So the communications with HQ wasn't working from the individual

cars, so they couldn't launch the cars. The reason that's important is that just takes Tokyo to

say, stop. Now they wouldn't. We know that. Palantir will be running the same scheme,

the same sort of update system, same sort of control, same sort of kill switches that they have.

So should they decide to sanction or whatever they might choose to do or decide they don't

like something that we are doing, they would simply pull the switch or threaten to do so,

which then gives us that single point of failure where they could actually switch it off.

Now they claim it's run through Palantir, UK and fine, yes, but we all know how the

subsidiary companies in country work. They don't have the financial say so, they are the sales arm.

So no, it won't be there. They say it's all hosted on UK systems, that's as maybe.

They say we're not taking copies of your data. Well, they actually are, because that's how it works,

because you can't go into the hospital mainframe, the lack of a better term and pull out the data

whilst it's running, because that locks everything out. You have to take copies of the data,

snapshot to actually then process. So they are taking copies of the data.

And we don't know where that's stored, probably stored on the servers in the UK,

controlled by Amazon, controlled by America. So yeah, we are completely at their behest.

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There was a lavish party this week and thrown by Palantir to celebrate a new strategic

partnership in the next chapter of the Ministry of Defence's partnership with Palantir.

We know that MPs were in attendance and I wonder what would you say to those MPs who are

being worded right now. I was an invited. I wonder why. I think it's a very dangerous thing

when you see lavish parties relating to contracts. The first thing that that suggests is the

contract is overpriced because if you've got money to put on parties, certainly none of the contracts

we got involved with when I was on the supply side, however had that budget. That budget comes with

very well paid. I know Palantir when you look at their accounts and look at the way they spend

their money, they put an awful lot of money into lobbying and sales efforts. I was reading an

interesting sub-stack recently about AI and whether that AI bubble would actually burst and who had

a real business model delivering AI solutions and they talked about Palantir. They were suggesting,

and I've not looked into this, they were suggesting that the Palantir business model barely

breaks even because the amount of money they're spending on sales and marketing. When you've got

very slick sales and marketing operation, it means that you're probably not buying the thing

that you think you are. You're probably buying the glossy brochure. To those MPs who go along,

I would say look very closely at what it is you're associating with and what you're buying because

probably won't live up to the dream. We know, of course, that Palantir were a client of

Peter Mendelssohn's lobbying firm, Global Council. I wonder if you think that there is an

naive as he in the British government right now considering, or I think there is an assumption

a lot of time that businesses operate sort of independently of the political beliefs of their CEOs.

And I wonder, do you think there's an naive as he in the British government towards that given

what we know about Peter Tiel and Alex Carp's, the CEO of Palantir's political beliefs?

This comes back to the private members bill I put in where I tried to change the duties

of a company and director. Right now under UK law, a company director has one duty,

which is to optimize the interests of the shareholders.

Everything else is a subsidiary to that. They might have to take regard to other things,

but they must maximize the interests of the shareholders. If the shareholders politically driven,

those interests will include the political aim they're trying to get to. It's not about

maximizing the interests of the company. It's the shareholders. So yes, we are naive if

within companies are not doing the bidding so the people that own them.

I mean, Peter Tiel said that he doesn't believe that freedom and democracy are compatible

and that he's warned against attempts to regulate technology and said that any attempts

to regulate technology could be the work of the anti-Christ, which he suggested might be Greta Thunberg.

Yes, there was one of his more strange quotes. I would really not sure where to take that other

than if that came from the mouth of somebody who was deranged, it wouldn't surprise me.

It's a very strange thing to say. There's long been a movement from the states to avoid regulation

when I was looking at the early days of apps and having app stores and bits and pieces. We were

trying to put into place the testing of apps to a certain agreed standards so that when they

download an app that it would work, that it would do the right things, it wouldn't be dangerous,

it wouldn't contain malware and all that sort of stuff. That became very difficult when neither

Google nor Apple would play ball with common international standards to do that.

Google were always saying that regulation was the regulation and stifled innovation.

So that's a common belief in Silicon Valley. Personally, I don't believe it at all and I did

some work with another company doing some lobbying out in Brussels and I think regulation is often

built by the incumbents to keep other people out once they're successful. So I think regulation is

important and really vital in getting it done right is vital. I worked through UK regulator for

some while in the Silicon world and I've seen how that worked and it worked very well.

But to say it's stifling innovation is not true. It is if it's done badly but it's not true. The

Americans have a very poor history on regulation and their structure is not really well established as

we heard from the head of the British standards institute at the Select Committee last week

who's talking about the threat to the standards environment that we have here in the UK

and across Europe by some of the potential moves in the deal with the US. So I think the only answer

I can give really is that Peter Teele thing as well. He would say that wouldn't he?

What do you think the UK government needs to do in its relationship with Palantir? What is

the answer here to make sure that we are sovereign over our own security that we're sovereign

over our own data? What would you recommend? Well there's a number of things. I think the first thing

they need to start thinking about buying components of the system from British suppliers.

The Palantir Health System was supposed to have seven different components. I think five of which

were easily supplied by third parties so there should be other companies supplying into that

system to actually get more variety. I think opening up what the system is, how it works,

how it's connected, what it's actually doing and being transparent about it would help. We saw

the M.O.D. say that nobody else could compete against Palantir because they would have to

re-write all their systems and processes and this and the other, the very definition of technical

lock-in. D.C. yesterday he was saying every new system bought by the government had to have

an exit plan how you would get rid of it and if you know how you can get rid of it then you are

not locked into that supplier. M.O.D. don't appear to have that and that was a question I put

with the minister I think it was just yesterday and day before Tuesday I think it was and he didn't

have an answer. So we are getting ourselves locked in so the answer is we've got to get UK suppliers

in there, more suppliers in there, more transparency so we see what the system is doing and the results

of what the money has achieved and we need to have a variety of suppliers in one place because that

also helps. On a sort of wider point around transparency Gordon Brown was suggesting that there

should be an anti-corruption czar in government and a ban on second jobs to prevent what we saw

happening with Mendelssohn happen again is that something you would agree with? Absolutely,

ban on second jobs absolutely 100%. The fact that some Nigel Farage is making more than a million

pounds a year, more than a million pounds a year is rarely in Parliament he's never there apart

from PMQ's. I think the best place to go to avoid bumping into Nigel Farage I'm told is Clackton.

Do you think that that would go far enough because from sort of my reading of what I've seen from

the Epstein files it was almost ensuring or teeing up that there was a job for himself once he left

Parliament rather than when he was in Parliament. So do you think just a ban of second jobs while

in Parliament goes far enough to prevent this conflict of interest? Well now I don't think it does.

I think we've seen there was a report of four senior civil servants going to work for Palantir

before the MOD contract and they were from the MOD side. There are very close relationships between

some of the senior civil servants who work on the health system and Palantir as you would expect

from the main supplier however you know it does have questions and they used to be a body which I'm

not sure still exists that vetted whether it was suitable for somebody who had left the

civil service or left Parliament to go and work for some of these jobs and I think we have a rotating

door going on about it. The revolving door from one to the other does not work and it's not

helpful. I think we need to be very very careful it always used to be that with some of these roles

you would have you know I've always had my commercial roles a six month ban in my contract

for going and working with a competitor. I don't think we have such things in the contracts here

but I mean being an MP is a full-time job I mean I'm still a counsellor I'll put that on record

you know I have what could be technically a second job. I'm a counsellor in the council that I

used to lead is responding to to residents questions in exactly the same way as I do as an MP

and it's for a council that will be abolished in 18 months time so it seems unreasonable to

throw somebody else into that to pick up that and it helps me understand local government reorganisation

from both sides of the coin so whilst I still have a second job I won't retain it for a long time

it's certainly not one I do for the money. Mike and Weekly thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. Youth Mental Health is a complex challenge that requires comprehensive

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not another one

hundreds of thousands of you have joined new coagulations of left-wing parties

it may not seem a huge number in a country of 57 million people but it is a part of a bigger

picture of renewed grassroots activity on the left people are angry they're angry at potential

welfare cuts the rich scurting taxes and a foreign policy that some say supports the relentless

killing of civilians overseas a number of viable structures and networks are growing

and astonishing 150,000 of you have joined the green party independent candidates on the left

have done well at national and local elections and almost five years after Jeremy Corbyn was

suspended from the labor party there are growing signs of renewed confidence in the your party

machine not forgetting the growing discomfort in the labor party and the various pressure groups

growing in size and support from the revived soft left Tribune group to Andy Burnham at the

helm of mainstream which just assisted in electing a new labor deputy leader so this will be a

podcast that takes an in-depth look at the policy and the people that are shaping the new frontier

of left-wing politics in this podcast I will delve into who wants your attention and what they

plan to do with it when they've got it it's the leaders the policymakers and the decision-takers

subscribe to how to rebuild Britain to get the first episode in your inbox next Friday

where I'll be meeting one of the more obvious figures with insight from the people behind the

project I can't stand this there's too much politics going on at the moment why does she need to do it