AS THE fallout from the Peter Mandelson scandal continues to shake Westminster it is right a spotlight is being shone on US surveillance firm Palantir.

Palestine solidarity activists who took their protest to a Ministry of Defence (MoD) party celebrating a new £240 million contract with the controversial company are just the latest to press home a message that ministers must heed.

We don’t want this CIA-linked company, which signed a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli Defence Ministry as the genocidal invasion of Gaza was unfolding in January 2024, getting access to our money or our data.

The point was made by Green Party leader Zack Polanski at a protest outside Palantir’s British HQ last month, focusing on the £330m contract it’s been handed to handle NHS patient data.

This data is not for sale, Health Secretary Wes Streeting insists; but access will be granted to private companies in the name of research, a lucrative opportunity for pharmaceutical firms.

US demands on their behalf last year that the NHS pay higher prices for medicines show the conflict of interest in handing control of the data to a US company, especially one with ties to the US state and to the president himself (its founder, billionaire tech bro Peter Thiel, has donated to both President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance).

Jeremy Corbyn added to the pressure in the Commons this week, asking how the company had “wormed its way” into so many public contracts — including with police forces and now the MoD. Palantir provides software to the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (Ice) “to use AI to track and deport immigrants.”

The clearly racist nature of Ice targeting in the United States is an ominous warning of what Palantir-supported practices consist of: and given the horrors of the past month in Minnesota and the real risk of a Reform government in Britain, do we really want it embedded in police work over here?

If MPs are serious about cleaning up a politics discredited by cosy relationships with the rich and powerful, then they have good grounds to demand revocation of Palantir’s contracts and an investigation into how it won them.

We know Palantir is a client of Mandelson’s lobbying firm, Global Counsel.

The Financial Times has revealed that Mandelson’s office set up an “informal visit” to Palantir’s Washington HQ last year which saw Starmer meet its CEO Alex Karp and its British operations chief executive Louis Mosley (grandson of British Union of Fascists founder Oswald — no, he can’t help his ancestry, but his association with the far-right “democracy-sceptic” Thiel is curiously apt). Within months the MoD signed a “strategic partnership” with Palantir worth £750m to the firm.

Open Democracy has described the “pipeline” of personnel from the MoD to Palantir, among them the ministry’s director of industrial strategy Barnaby Kistruck, who left the MoD last August and started a job at Palantir nine days later. The £240m contract being celebrated last night soon followed, being directly awarded without tender: the whole thing stinks.

The name Palantir, like those of many of Thiel’s companies, derives from the Lord of the Rings, where it denotes a network of seeing stones the Dark Lord uses to control people from afar. Sometimes we don’t need to work hard at metaphors for the evils of Big Tech.

Thiel, like Elon Musk, is explicitly committed to the use of technology to advance corporate power at the expense of democratic rights, and he is hand in glove with the Trump administration showing us what that looks like.

As that administration tears up international law, kidnaps presidents, ramps up illegal blockades and threatens war after war, the last thing we need is even deeper operational dependence on the US military-industrial complex, sunk into arm after arm of the British state.

Cancel the contracts.