Burnham wants digital sovereignty in London, but is courting Palantir

Milan. Andy Burnham entered Downing Street promising a ‘circuit breaker’ for British politics – a break with a decade of the City and Westminster being subservient to Silicon Valley. During his nine years as mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, he never signed a contract with Palantir. This detail was already circulating as a warning sign in the days following his appointment as Labour leader. Doing so as mayor, however, is quite different from doing so as prime minister: in the former case, it is a matter of not opening a door; in the latter, of closing one that has long been wide open, with the occupant comfortably settled inside.

The Palantir case in the UK is particularly interesting precisely because of this discrepancy between sovereignist rhetoric and the existing structure of incentives. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp’s company has, in three years, built up a widespread presence in the UK: a seven-year, £330 million contract with the National Health Service for the Federated Data Platform; a £240 million framework agreement with the Ministry of Defence signed a few weeks before Christmas; a contract linked to the nuclear deterrent; and dozens of smaller agreements spread across the police, child welfare services and refugee programmes. At least 34 public contracts have been identified so far by journalists and MPs, often without an open competitive tender. In September 2025, during Trump’s state visit, the partnership expanded further with a £1.5 billion defence deal, making the UK Palantir’s leading European hub for that sector.

Burnham comes to power having built his political capital precisely by opposing this model. Sadiq Khan, another Labour mayor, had blocked a 50 million deal between Palantir and the Metropolitan Police. A cross-party parliamentary committee has described the growing reliance of British public services on Palantir as an unacceptable vulnerability, capable of leaving entire state functions at the mercy of a foreign entity. Yet Burnham’s first move as Prime Minister was to appoint Wes Streeting as Defence Secretary – the very minister who, whilst in charge of Health, defended the NHS’s contract with Palantir instead of triggering the exit clause scheduled for 2027. Four former Ministry of Defence officials now work for the company, and the network of connections built up by Palantir in Westminster runs right through the very corridors that Burnham must now navigate in order to dismantle it.

This is what makes the case interesting beyond the British news story. Digital sovereignty, as a political concept, costs next to nothing as long as it remains a campaign slogan. It becomes costly the moment you have to replace a supplier already integrated into the operational workflows of a hospital, a ministry or a police headquarters, where any margin for error is paid for in human lives or security breaches. It is the same dilemma facing Brussels, where the European Commission has adopted measures to strengthen digital autonomy precisely because the EU relies on non-European suppliers for around 80 per cent of its critical digital services. Here too, some national governments have begun to remove suppliers linked to the Trump administration from their public systems, whilst others – including the Italian government in its policy papers on data centres and AI infrastructure – continue to treat the issue as a procurement problem rather than a matter of strategic autonomy.

There is also a dimension that goes beyond the industrial economics of procurement. Part of the opposition to Palantir stems from concerns about the health data processed by a company linked to the US intelligence apparatus and its ties to Israel: demonstrations outside its London offices have been taking place for months, organised in part by medical staff from the National Health Service. For Burnham, digital sovereignty is not just a matter for the industrial sector, but also concerns citizens’ trust in the state that holds their most sensitive data.

Burnham now has the opportunity to demonstrate whether ‘buy British’ is merely an election ploy or a government policy. The difference will be gauged not by forthcoming press releases, but by the next public tender issued by his government, and by how many companies other than Karp and Thiel’s manage to win it.