If you’re worried about a government-mandated digital ID in a cashless society, and had to imagine the bogeyman you’d least like to deliver it, Peter Thiel’s Palantir might just be the perfect candidate. If that’s you, breathe a sigh of relief: Palantir aren’t interested.
Louis Mosley, Palantir’s boss in Britain and Europe, was asked by Newsnight tonight if they would bid for the digital ID contract as part of further NHS work. He neither confirmed nor denied. But I hear Palantir are not keen on the idea.
The Palantir name inspires dread in equal measure among those who fear NHS privatisation and those who warn of digital state overreach. Yet their global track record of delivering vast data and AI programmes makes them, on paper at least, the perfect bidder for such a scheme.
Taking just one example: far beyond their defence contracts, Palantir underpins much of Ukraine’s government infrastructure. Back home its working deep in the NHS improving waiting lists. Building a digital ID would be small fry for them. But I understand they want nothing to do with it.
Behind the scenes, the reasoning is twofold. The first is straightforward PR. Palantir has spent years trying to shed its caricatured reputation as a Bond-villain corporation bankrolled by an evil billionaire founder. To take on a project that many would see as the most authoritarian step into cyberspace yet attempted by the British state would hardly help that cause.
The second argument is more interesting: the state doesn’t actually need help to do this. Not Tony Blair, not Oracale, if the government insists on pursuing digital ID, it already has the internal capacity. But Palantir doubts the case for it in the first place. Britain already runs right-to-work checks for employment; they are simply too weakly enforced. The state assigns citizens around 18 different reference numbers, and a ‘One Login’ system is already being developed to unify them. In Palantir’s view, investment would be better spent fixing services that actually matter. A digital ID scheme risks being nothing more than a distraction.
And it’s not as if the machinery isn’t already in place. When I worked in a ‘data linkage’ team in the Scottish Government – one of many across the civil service – our entire job was to join the dots between disparate databases. Putting those existing teams to work on simplifying the system, without private contractors, would not be difficult.
There’s plenty of digitisation worth pursuing. I, for one, would welcome an optional mobile passport, sparing travellers the worry of locking a physical one in a hotel safe on arrival in Spain. But a mandatory ID scheme, framed as a tool of state control – and now disavowed by the very company many considered most likely to deliver it – already looks dead on arrival.
