> The US technology company was awarded a £330 million contract in 2023 to collate operational data, including patient information and waiting lists.
That contract value is ridiculous - how many full time staff do they have on this project and what rates are they charging? How can some say ‘operational data collection’ is worth a third of a billion to NHS over the alternatives of using a third of a billion on patient healthcare and actual medical research? This needs an investigation around how this contract was ever approved.
nhs is famous dumb and has spent years trying to stop using fax machine. £330 million is nothing over a few years.. NHS budget for 2024/25 is circa £242 billion.
the entire annual intake from capital gains tax is £20 million or so
I think you mean £20 billion for that latter figure. This is largely because a significant amount of assets are held in ISA's (£20k a year contribution per person allowed) , or via personal property which is capital gains exempt or in a pension which is again, capital gains exempt.
Thus only the wealthiest are outside these boundaries, and they often will not liquidate holdings until their death to pay inhertiance tax, or in trusts which will liqudiate over decades as they can pay inheritance tax over a very long period.
This is not to mention the large amounts of off-shore holdings.
Many people opt for off-shore bonds (which have a number of advantages) which means paying normal tax instead of capital gains, so the capital gains figure doesn't really capture investment as a whole.
Your entire comment is filled with false claims and figures.
In 2025-26 there are an estimated 39.1 million people paying income tax - 56.0% of the population [1]. Of course, in the last census, 20.7% of the population were children [2]. About 3.1% of the population are UK students in University education [3], and about 18.6% of the population are retired [4]. I've also missed all the 18-year-olds in their final year of school, which is roughly 1.1 million or 1.6% of the population [5]. About 8.8 million, or 12.6%, are pensioners who pay income tax that I have double counted, usually due to private pensions and other sources of income [6].
Totally these numbers gives a rough estimate that suggest only about 12.6% of working age people do not pay income tax. This is in line with the government's own statistics putting those claiming Universal Credit at 10.6% of the population [7], or those economically inactive at 12.9% [8]. This is wildly different to your implication that 61% of people are too lazy to work.
Unemployment, which is roughly defined as those out of work who are actively looking for work, is at 5.2% [9], which it is worth noting is slightly below the EU and Euro area average of 5.9% and 6.2% respectively [10]. Direct comparisons are difficult to make, but it is certainly indicative of the UK falling within what is considered a healthy range.
Furthermore, take-home pay on a £100,000 salary is £68,561 [11], giving an effective income tax of 31.4% - far below your claim of 71%. True, there is the so-called "£100k tax trap" which gradually reduces your tax-free allowance above this salary. But this still gives just a 37.6% tax on £125,000, or 41.1% on £200,000. You may consider these to be high, but they are far, far below your claim of 71% income tax.
I think the reason behind this is that the UK NHS is using a lot of budget on long-term ill people who they believe aren't really long-term ill, or who at least could be working. Essentially, they feel they can't trust their employees and want LLMs to do it instead.
So they want LLMs to look at all the files, and essentially kick a lot such people off the NHS. That's what they're paying for.
In other words they want to "Elon Musk the NHS, DOGE-style".
This is, of course, highly illegal to do. There is no way giving medical data to a US consultancy does not violate UK and EU law something awful. The government knows this, does it anyway. Which is one reason you won't be able to do anything about this: the government has zero intention to respect the law in this case. You will, of course, be expected to pay your taxes correctly.
I checked, and you can of course donate to Led By Donkeys either as a one-off or monthly via their web page https://donate.ledbydonkeys.org/ but they don't have a way to contribute to specific campaigns.
You're really bashing a straw man of "the sensibles rightfully in charge of the plebs" to argue in support of a system that will be overtly in charge of the plebs without even nominal democratic accountability? Talk about mental gymnastics.
Sorry but the Adam smith institute is a ridiculous think thank that cherry picks Adam smith, he would be spinning in his grave at the misuse of his name.
This is why I disagree with the idea that we should keep increasing funding to the NHS. The argument always seems to come to a false dichotomy of "either this or the American system" as though other systems don't exist, and as though the NHS isn't top heavy with bureaucrats and questionable contracts
The truth is that the NHS is very bad not due to funding, but for structural reasons.
The fact I can't even see a GP I'm not registered with (not even an option to pay extra) is ridiculous. You have absolutely no control over your health at all.
With private, you get exactly what you want, whenever you want it.
> With private, you get exactly what you want, whenever you want it.
In the US this isn't how it works. You can't see whoever you want unless you have a really, really good plan. Otherwise, you need referrals. And lots of specialists won't see you without a referral anyway.
And, the wait is often on the order of months. I know that's something people complain about in the UK but I assure you, it happens that way in the US too even though we're paying 10x as much.
I know private in the UK is quite good. What you need to understand is that the only reason it's any good at all is because of the NHS. It has to remain competitive. If you go full private, then it very quickly decays.
A specialist also requires a referral in the UK. There are also much more medicines which are prescription-only than in the US.
That's why in practice we have all these (private) services to get easy GP appointments via phone, video or even online forms. While everyone knows those appointments can't realistically do any real medical work, they serve to give you prescriptions and referrals.
It's just a gatekeeping mechanism, that you can more easily bypass if you have money. The more you pay, the more they care about your user experience and how streamlined it is.
That was my thinking... even for specialists, I can generally get into a new one within a few weeks.
My SO is on state Medicaid (cancer) and does experience the kinds of waits mentioned above... so I guess it does follow similarly for government/state backed healthcare, where I'm mostly out of pocket.
But even when I had relatively typical coverage, I didn't have issues getting into a doctor more often than not. I think getting my sleep study was the longest wait I had for anything, they were months backed up with appointments... but my kidney and retina specialists were somewhat easy to get started with.
You can absolutely see a GP you’re not registered with if you are travelling and need to. I have done it multiple times. I have been offered it same or next day after calling 111.
While away from home, my son (5 yo) cut his finger and was in need of disinfectant and a bandage (steri strips).
Pharmacy was useless, no medical skills or knowledge of their own products. Asked me to figure out myself what I needed and put it on my son myself.
Local GP surgery sent us away: no registration, no visit. Me saying this was an emergency just made them suggest A&E.
A&E is where we ended up, and while that definitely works, going to the emergency services of a large hospital for every little thing is not only a waste of my time but also of resources. It seems however to be the NHS way: whenever the littlest of troubles arise, just go to the hospital, or even call an ambulance.
Sorry for being too American to understand, but why would you need to talk to any medical professional to put a bandaid on your kid? Is this about NHS being paying for the bandaid? About medical expertise to apply a bandaid?
Not all disinfectants are child safe, and the wound was serious enough to require steri-strips (an alternative to sutures) -- it was not a matter of a bandaid.
You would have been best served by a Minor Injury Unit but not every town has one, so A&e is not excessive. The great majority of people going there do not need the full capabilities of it (resuscitation etc).
Getting a minor wound bandaged up is not what A&E is meant for, it's for life-threatening injuries.
Going to A&E and waiting there also means you're losing 4 to 6 hours.
111 you just get some robot asking you a never-ending list of inane questions before someone tells you to either self-care at home or go to A&E.
A pharmacist should be able to administer the supplies they sell, particularly wound dressing and care. It's a requirement in some other European countries like France (where pharmacists are doctors), but in the UK the reality is that most are unable to do so.
111 do a lot more than that, they will get you a GP visit even if the GP claims to not have slots, and they will get medical professionals to come to you.
If it was in hours, I'm surprised they didn't get a nurse appointment for the cut.
If only there were some system where the incentives could freely flow through and permeate every level of the sector. Where those organisations that provide sub-standard care die and those that excel receive outsized funding...
Unfortunately, a system with these qualities doesn't exist in practice. You just end up with the same too-big-to-fail macro organization minimizing their point-of-care labor spend and maximizing their management spend either way.
As someone who largely worked at startups and smaller companies before joining the NHS it genuinely confused me how no one would ever say no to anything when I first started working there.
The projects I worked on were genuinely absurd... My team alone spent millions on things that literally wouldn't have made any difference to the quality of healthcare in the UK.
Apparently we were given a budget and we had to find a way to spend it otherwise it would be cut. At any normal company we should have all immediately have been made redundant.
The rate of increase of healthcare funding for the UK is 2,000% higher than France's rate of healthcare funding increases from between 2010 and 2019, according to World Bank data.
The UK healthcare system is uniquely incompetent, administratively bloated and drives very suboptimal value for money.
UK citizens appear to be in a collective delusion about the NHS that allows them to continue ineptly bumbling through mediocrity while perpetually fleecing more tax money to line the pockets of administrators.
Meanwhile actual frontline workers in the NHS are completely ripped off in salary. Nurses get paid peanuts, while even neurosurgeons earn less than 1/6th of their American counterparts.
To plug the gap by skilled healthcare workers bailing over these horrific conditions, the UK has been importing people to fill these gaps, often with severely lower competence (usually because of completely faked qualifications or outright fraud [1]).
Isn’t this true for any project ever attempted? The only reason this project exists is because millions have already been wasted on trying to do this in house
Yes, but the comment I was replying to sounded like it was saying that the large cost wasn't an issue, because it would have such a big impact. But the odds of it actually accomplishing anything useful need to be taken into account, too. If it has a low chance of success, then a large price tag isn't worth it.
A system whereby millions of people seek services from thousands of potential providers, with a life-or-death need to track which services and products were delivered where and when ... ya. It is a billion-dollar data problem. But that is the cost for the luxury of being able to walk into any hospital in the country and expect them to know everything about your conditions at a moment's notice.
I assume the purpose of Palantir is to enable the Federal government to circumvent the constitution by framing their new spy agency as a public/private partnership. From that lens the funding makes sense.
The purpose of Palantir is to watch over Mordor and the other lands of Sauron. He's only got one eye, one attention span, he needs intelligent agentic processing to administrate the realm. Who are you going to entrust, Gorthak The Orc? The Nazgul? They have their own priorities, their own limitations.
It was incredibly expensive to run East Berlin as a panopticon state, with a large fraction of the population on the payroll as informers to the 100,000 Stasi agents. Obvious conclusions were missed all the time because of the sheer difficulty of keeping track of facts cross-referenced on paper in filing cabinets in a large office building. This volume of classified siloed information is toxic for the occupation, operationally unusable. People were disappeared or even executed on mere suspicion because it would have been too difficult to rustle up proof.
Thiel looked at our prospects for effectively running an authoritarian surveillance state in Afghanistan and Iraq, looked at how many American contractors we would have had to devote to that, how many people we would have had to torture on a routine basis, how fast we might learn the language, and said "I think I can do better. A softer touch, a smarter system for controlling people. This is what AI is for, running society after this liberal democracy fiction falls away"
NB: The Palantir were created by the Elves, not by Morgoth or Sauron. The problem is that it takes a lot of will to use one and not have things of importance hidden (it shows what you think is important, not what is important), and as it turns out holders of one stone can influence what holders of other stones can see, if their will is greater. The Enemy doesn't get ahold of a stone until Minas Ithil falls and becomes Minas Morgul, and that's well into the Third Age. Two thousand years after the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, the second defeat of The Enemy, and the first destruction of Sauron. Which is still a thousand years before the start of Frodo's adventure. Lots of time in Middle Earth.
The rest of your comment is, unfortunately, spot on.
It's amazing how some people can read Tolkien's works and come away with an idea that it would be a good thing to create new powerful artifacts that will inevitably fall under the control of evil. Perhaps because their minds have already been corrupted by the One Ring.
I suppose it's just the Don't make the Torment Nexus effect with a different motif.
Some special amendment procedure is not the only or even defining feature of constitutional law. There is non-constitutional law that has this property and there is constitutional law that does not.
I notice you are using the phrase "constitutional law" now, where as the original question was whether the UK can be said to have "a constitution."
The oddities of this "duck" go far beyond its lack of entrenchment. It also lacks form and definition in the way that a puff of smoke lacks form and definition. It includes such nebulous elements as common law, unwritten convention, and even legal commentary of various law scholars. It's also said to be in constant flux as it evolves over time.
It may be a useful abstraction within the context of UK law to refer to this amorphous blob as the "constitution," but for anyone unfamiliar with the UK's system of government, to say the UK has a constitution is grossly misleading in as much as all of the conclusions the listener will draw from that assertion will be false. It's like characterizing a chicken eating grain out of your hand as being "attacked by a dinosaur." The chicken may belong to the clade "Dinosauria" and may have inadvertently pecked your palm in its feeding frenzy, but in as much as it communicates information contrary to fact, it is a confabulation. At best, it's a lawyer's lie, to coin a phrase.
I find it weird that people would downvote this, I know you should not complain about it, but this comment is correct. The UK does have a (uncodified) constitution. Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.
>> There is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document. <link>
That's got to be the understatement of (many) centuries. AFAIK the UK constitution isn't even even codified into millions of documents, let alone a "single" one. Saying it's not in a "single" document is like saying my trillions of dollars aren't in a "single" bank account. The number of partitions really isn't the problem with that statement here.
Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution", let alone an arbitrary citizen who needs to be able to become aware of them to be able to follow them? (Note I'm not asking for interpretation, but literally just listing the sentences.) Could they even do this with infinite time? Is it even possible to have an oracle that, given an arbitrary sentence, could indisputably tell you if it is in the constitution?
Maybe that's asking too much. Forget enumerating the laws. Per your own link: "...this enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched."
If this doesn't itself sound silly, hopefully you can at least forgive people for getting irritated at the proposition that there totally exists a "constitution"... that nobody can point to... and that doesn't actually do the one thing many people want from a constitution: being more entrenched than statutes.
> Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.
Not sure what countries you're referring to, but at least in the US, this is not the case. There is a single document that is the constitution, and (thankfully, so far) nobody is disputing what words are in fact written on that document. And that document absolutely is supreme to statutes.
Interpretation of the words is obviously left to courts in the US, and courts can interpret it differently changing the effective law, but "constitution" is not a synonym for "effective law", and nobody argues over what the words to be interpreted are. And even those interpretations are still written down!
I believe interpretation is a part of the definition of a constitution, you do not, we have different definitions, oh well. I also believe the uncodified/codified distinction is not binary, it is obvious that the US constitution is far more codified than the UK constitution, the two are at opposite extremes.
> I believe interpretation is a part of the definition of a constitution, you do not, we have different definitions, oh well.
You can't just brush it aside as some quibble about definitions. It's a fundamentally substantive difference in the two structures: one of these has an indisputable source of truth (a foundation everyone can witness) that everything else is built on top of
-- however shakily! -- and the other does not. Regardless of whether you include the upper parts of this metaphorical building in your definitions or not, the foundations are not the same.
> It's a fundamentally substantive difference in the two structures
Yes, it is a substantive difference but it does not follow that this difference provides the 'constitution' property.
> one of these has an indisputable source of truth... the foundations are not the same
They are so similar as to be almost the same and if an 'indisputable source of truth' exists anywhere, it is not in the written documents or their structure but unwritten norms and rituals sit beneath both.
What stops a President from simply choosing to ignore a Supreme Court ruling and what prevents the King from returning to personal rule?
The lack of arbitrary rule is a defining feature of both and relies on something that emerged rather than something imposed from without by written words.
> What stops a President from simply choosing to ignore a Supreme Court ruling and what prevents the King from returning to personal rule?
Legally? The fact that everybody under the president -- including those in the military -- understand they are swearing their oath to the constitution -- not the King, not the Crown, not God, not the Supreme Court, not anything else. And that the Supreme Court says what the constitution means. And that if there is a clear and direct contradiction between the Supreme Court and the president, the former trumps (no pun intended) the latter.
Physically? "Nothing", yeah. Same goes for non-presidents. If you can get enough people to follow you (or maybe at least enough of the people with guns) everything else becomes irrelevant, including whether your title was president or King or God or Constitution or whatever.
> The lack of arbitrary rule is a defining feature of both
It is emphatically not. There are lots of countries with constitutions that nevertheless have arbitrary rule. As there are countries without constitutions or arbitrary rule.
> They are so similar as to be almost the same and if an 'indisputable source of truth' exists anywhere, it is not in the written documents or their structure but unwritten norms and rituals sit beneath both.
No, that's exactly what those are not. Unwritten stories, traditions, and rituals are very much disputable. That's kind of the entire point of writing things down, and the point of the game we call Telephone. The indisputable bits are physical artifacts everyone can see with their own eyes.
> And that if there is a clear and direct contradiction between the Supreme Court and the president, the former trumps (no pun intended) the latter.
The extent to which members of the executive branch adhere to their oaths is not written down. Ofc the oath is written and its power may partly derive from its written nature (clear; predictable; well publicised etc) but there is a lot more than its written nature that might cause a general to refuse to follow a Presidential order to arrest all people suspected of voting for their opponent.
> The lack of arbitrary rule... is emphatically not [a defining feature of both]
I guess it depends on whether you (or most reasonable people) would call countries like Russia a 'constitutional republic'. Of course there are plenty of dysfunctional and dictatorial countries which superficially describe themselves as XYZ but it lacks substance.
While there may be a textbook answer, I strongly suspect it is debatable within the field and comes down (like so many things) to how you define your terms. Do you define 'constitutional' as attaching more to the codified and written nature of any rules or whether it is more to do with predictable and enforceable rules limiting arbitrary government. My view is that it attaches more the latter.
If you go into the etymology of the term, I don't think codification is baked in - that you can find a large number of books discussing the English or UK constitution (using that term) is testament to the fact that it's not just some niche view. I do suspect the influence of US popular culture (e.g. Hollywood) has biased the term towards the US' arrangement vs. the alternatives.
Yes, the foundations of the constitutions are not the same, one of them has a mostly codified constitution, the other has a mostly uncodified (uncodified but mostly written down, that is not a contradiction!) constitution. They both have constitutions however, so the phase "Britain has no constitution" is wrong. To be clear, I am not saying that is good or bad that Britain has an uncodified constitution, just that from my definition (and most political and legal definitions) of what a constitution is the phrase "Britain has no constitution" is wrong. Britain of course has laws, and laws about how new laws are made, etcetera. This forms a constitution.
>> Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution"
> No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not?
Do you never write down or sign contracts? Are verbal promises adequate for you in all transactions?
If you don't see the value of laws being written down - especially the most important ones! - I can't really convince you of it here on HN.
But what I can tell is that most people who care about the legitimacy of government believe it is fundamental to fairness that there be a single source of truth that can tell them the laws under which they would be rewarded or punished, before those happen.
I think you have diverged too much...well from reality, in order to try to prove a point. Do you think most people, or lawyers, or judges in the UK spend their time trying to enumerate all the laws of the land before they proceed in their court cases? Do you think that people think that the UK system of government is illegitimate? What point are you trying to make? Because it is not grounded in reality. You can debate the merits of a codified constitution versus an uncodified one, but the UK does have a constitution, the vast majority of which is codified into many documents. The following two links might help you:
Nobody claimed it's helping or hurting. The debate is over what constitutes a constitution, whether good or bad. There have been great governments without a constitution and terrible governments with one. "You don't have a constitution" does not mean "your government sucks", but it seems somehow people take it as such.
You are technically correct. But the distinction between devolution and a Federation of states gets very blurry when you take a look at what's happening with voting in the US these days.
You are technically incorrect about the UK not having a constitution. It's just not all compiled into a single written document.
Technically correct only if you accept "vague set of traditions" as a valid definition for "constitution". This both contradicts common usage and enables tyranny, so I recommend rejecting it.
Where can I find the official list of which acts are part of the constitution? And what additional obstacles exist to changing those acts beyond the obstacles to changing non-constitutional acts of parliament? In common usage, a constitution is something that restricts changes to ordinary law. If a "constitution" is made entirely from ordinary law it cannot function as a constitution.
Before you demand more explanation on the spot, you know there's a Wikipedia page for that. It explains the components how they are legitimated and the mechanisms of the UK government that rely on it.
It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.
I suppose the issue is that the NHS themselves have historically been terrible at managing their software. Nobody I know who I rate as even mediocre and above would or have worked at the NHS, and those I do know who have have, I wouldn't hire into junior roles.
I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is. GP surgery's have for years had to send paper files across to new practices when a patient moves. The new NHS app is great, but I can see from my history that > 90% is missing.
Another great example of how good the NHS is at this, is the fact that nurses & doctors would have to scroll down a combo list without any typeahead to pick a medication, which would be in an A-Z list of every medication ever.
So, closing the circle, is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence, who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT? Yes. There are many.
There will always be concerns about data, about security, but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it than an unknown company getting billions in contracts, building software worse than someone with a $20 Claude extension, and then leaking it to hackers.
> I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is.
Yep, as someone who's worked at a couple of small startups trying to sell into the NHS, it's terrible. A big part of the problem seems to be that there's no centralised procurement: each trust (of which there are ~200) does their own precurement. And a lot of the companies (the big established players are the worst) at most pay lip service interoperability. So you end with a big mess of system that don't talk to each other.
And they're not setup to pay "market rates" that are competitive with private employers to their in-house developers. So it's hard for them to attract and retain good in-house developers where they have them (although there are still some great people working there).
Internal restrictions are such that even aspiring software Devs find hurdles to doing basic automation. I know someone who wanted to use python, yes just use it, and it took months to be allowed to do that on an NHS machine.
Is there any proof that Palantir has ever leaked client data? From a security perspective they are one of the few companies that hold IL6, which means they can handle highly classified/top secret information.
They work with many international governments and companies, and I would imagine any sort of unapproved leak would be disastrous for their brand.
> It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.
I'm not 100% convinced that the consultancy/implementation being the same as the software vendor is a bad thing.
Depending on the contract it can give you better exit clauses, implementation costs can be subsidised by SaaS revenue, you might have novel clauses for PS overspends, you get rid of the 'implementation vendor blames software vendor' thing, if you need modifications/enhancements to the base product then it sits with the same person, plus we don't know if Palantir's system is easily made for an independent implementation consultant to pick it up and be able to do everything without having to do some backend magic.
A contrarian view although I do dislike contracting with foreign companies for roughly similar reasons: Palantir's technology looks good and I think it probably works. Most things don't work.
The Palantir brand has become incredibly toxic and, from what folks report, the software just isn’t very good either. A lot of smoke and mirrors hype not matched by substance.
From what I've heard their money product is taking all the various government data systems and indexing them for search on one platform. Doesn't seem like much of a moat, but I guess that is what the bribes are for.
It’s not. The moat is just that it’s challenging to get into that world as a vendor, but by all indications and observations folks cite the tech is pretty meh by 2026 standards.
> While Louis Mosley, the executive vice-chair of Palantir in the UK, maintains that such campaigns are ideologically motivated and could harm patient care,
this is EXACTLY why it is of outmost importance to own those critical systems, and not delegate them to foreign companies, especially if from a country explicitly hostile towards Europe
Too late. The NHS is already heavily reliant on AWS. Not the only ones either.
As things are Europe (except Russia and a few others) is utterly reliant on Americas. Read up on how difficult things became for the ICJ judge the US sanctioned. If the US ever blocked almost any European countries access to online services they economy would collapse.
Any government that hands over citizen's data to a private
entity, even more so one that is primarily foreign, should
be investigated for being a traitor to the public. That's
a general statement, not solely confined to the Palantir
guys. They kind of gave it away by chosing that name alone
already - damn thieves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr).
For those wondering, FDP stands for Federated Data Platform
> Our mission for the NHS Federated Data Platform is to provide a secure, flexible system that connects data across NHS organisations to improve patient care, streamline services, and support informed decision-making.[1]
palantir is a US company subject to the cloud act. patient data from 123 hospital trusts is now one mlat request away from us law enforcement regardless of where the servers sit.
Only if Palantir owns the servers and the storage. A lot of what Palantir does is on a clients infrastructure. The entire platform is installed on client infra. At least the one we have where I work is.
Palantir is under immense economic pressure to deliver this integration at high quality on time. This incentive structure, combined the publicly traded nature of the company, risks corrupting its core founding goals of embodying the evil of Sauron on earth and hurting as many people as it can, as badly as possible. However, Thiel is an extremely competent, mission focussed leader and I agree with the doctors: he will get this program back on track mission-wise without pissing off shareholders too much.
The reality is that no program so far has really been successful within the NHS. Money is burnt at an alarming rate and the companies taking on these contracts are incompetent at best.
If staff don't want to work with it then they're not fulfilling their roles.
What if any of us took a job and then refused to work with Microsoft or [Insert company] due to personal reasons? We'd be jobless.
People arent robots, they are allowed their own thoughts and free will. Your comment implies any behavior against the interests of a corporation is somehow a sin. This is such a gross take.
> completely ignorant about what palantir is and who it's owned by
Perhaps you could give your take? When I look at the facts, I see a fairly humdrum data integration company that was a slightly early adopter of applied machine learning.
Or, the non politicized take is that they think the software could improve the data landscape of the NHS, which, if we are bring honest, has a lot of room for improvement.
I am an American so the plight of the NHS has no direct impact on me, but I'd argue that Palantir is a fundamentally political company and thus there is no room for non-politicized takes.
Have you used Palantir or know the infra on how it provides services? Or just giving sound bites you’ve read on media?
You can mandate an installation on self managed infra. We install / use it on a completely self managed cloud install with pretty solid exfiltration protections. It’s a data platform, provides interesting connections in the data. But that’s where its utility ends.
Do they work with US defense and govt? Sure they do. But you don’t have to share your data outside of your cloud infra.
What I am talking about has nothing to do with their technology. To know Palantir is an inherently political company you just need to hear Alex Karp speak.
There have been recent articles in the FT about a man (who surname, funnily enough, sounds like swindle) who was an advisor to Palantir while also being chair of 4 NHS Trusts and pushing the trusts to put more of their data into Palantir.
As an interesting linguistic coincidence (or not), FDP is a commonly used acronym in Portuguese, standing for "filho da puta", literally, "son of a whore", but semantically it's approximately "asshole/jerk/dickhead".
We've banned this account for posting several egregious comments in the past few days. (This one isn't the worst; I'm just commenting here because it's the most recent.) This account holder has a history over several years of registering new accounts and continuing to post in blatant breach of the guidelines. Please stop wasting everyone's time with this practice. Very few people see the comments.
Why do Epsteinist Companies feel they have the right to not only billions of dollars of citizens in other countries, but also their health record data?
Companies related to the network of Epstein associates. They seem to have zero respect for people's rights and privacy. True enemies of freedom and children. We should not appease these people with incredulity when they are directly and specifically and correctly called out for destroying society.
Yes they were and it wasn't made up. The objection was that the number is gross but some of that money the EU chose to spend in the UK.
But that's irrelevant to this point because the EU didn't spend any of that money on healthcare. It went on the commissions priorities and projects, not the NHS. So the claim that it could be spent on the NHS instead, but only on leaving, was correct.
I think you would need a lot more context to say if 0.019% is too high. If this platform is driving real operational improvements and is the core software backbone, then it doesn't seem particularly unreasonable.
> The US technology company was awarded a £330 million contract in 2023 to collate operational data, including patient information and waiting lists.
That contract value is ridiculous - how many full time staff do they have on this project and what rates are they charging? How can some say ‘operational data collection’ is worth a third of a billion to NHS over the alternatives of using a third of a billion on patient healthcare and actual medical research? This needs an investigation around how this contract was ever approved.
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/apparently-the-nhs-is-the-wor...
https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/removi...
nhs is famous dumb and has spent years trying to stop using fax machine. £330 million is nothing over a few years.. NHS budget for 2024/25 is circa £242 billion.
the entire annual intake from capital gains tax is £20 million or so
I think you mean £20 billion for that latter figure. This is largely because a significant amount of assets are held in ISA's (£20k a year contribution per person allowed) , or via personal property which is capital gains exempt or in a pension which is again, capital gains exempt.
Thus only the wealthiest are outside these boundaries, and they often will not liquidate holdings until their death to pay inhertiance tax, or in trusts which will liqudiate over decades as they can pay inheritance tax over a very long period.
This is not to mention the large amounts of off-shore holdings.
Many people opt for off-shore bonds (which have a number of advantages) which means paying normal tax instead of capital gains, so the capital gains figure doesn't really capture investment as a whole.
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Your entire comment is filled with false claims and figures.
In 2025-26 there are an estimated 39.1 million people paying income tax - 56.0% of the population [1]. Of course, in the last census, 20.7% of the population were children [2]. About 3.1% of the population are UK students in University education [3], and about 18.6% of the population are retired [4]. I've also missed all the 18-year-olds in their final year of school, which is roughly 1.1 million or 1.6% of the population [5]. About 8.8 million, or 12.6%, are pensioners who pay income tax that I have double counted, usually due to private pensions and other sources of income [6].
Totally these numbers gives a rough estimate that suggest only about 12.6% of working age people do not pay income tax. This is in line with the government's own statistics putting those claiming Universal Credit at 10.6% of the population [7], or those economically inactive at 12.9% [8]. This is wildly different to your implication that 61% of people are too lazy to work.
Unemployment, which is roughly defined as those out of work who are actively looking for work, is at 5.2% [9], which it is worth noting is slightly below the EU and Euro area average of 5.9% and 6.2% respectively [10]. Direct comparisons are difficult to make, but it is certainly indicative of the UK falling within what is considered a healthy range.
Furthermore, take-home pay on a £100,000 salary is £68,561 [11], giving an effective income tax of 31.4% - far below your claim of 71%. True, there is the so-called "£100k tax trap" which gradually reduces your tax-free allowance above this salary. But this still gives just a 37.6% tax on £125,000, or 41.1% on £200,000. You may consider these to be high, but they are far, far below your claim of 71% income tax.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/income-tax-liabilit...
[2] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-popula...
[3] https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/latest/insights-and-analysi...
[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dwp-benefits-statis...
[5] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/infographics-leve...
[6] https://www.ftadviser.com/content/291a4ce0-9287-4118-849b-ff...
[7] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dwp-benefits-statis...
[8] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
[9] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
[10] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[11] https://www.gov.uk/estimate-income-tax
I think the reason behind this is that the UK NHS is using a lot of budget on long-term ill people who they believe aren't really long-term ill, or who at least could be working. Essentially, they feel they can't trust their employees and want LLMs to do it instead.
So they want LLMs to look at all the files, and essentially kick a lot such people off the NHS. That's what they're paying for.
In other words they want to "Elon Musk the NHS, DOGE-style".
This is, of course, highly illegal to do. There is no way giving medical data to a US consultancy does not violate UK and EU law something awful. The government knows this, does it anyway. Which is one reason you won't be able to do anything about this: the government has zero intention to respect the law in this case. You will, of course, be expected to pay your taxes correctly.
More like 40% effective tax rate at £100k, even including employer side of things?
> paying 71% income tax
Do you have a citation for this? I'm interested in how this figure was extracted from where it came.
I think they're confused/disingenuous and talking about the _marginal_ tax rate at 100k.
There's a segment of a few thousand pounds where your marginal tax rate skyrockets because you lose your tax free allowance at that income level.
It's stupid, annoying and has some minor economic effects, but it's very different from a 71% income tax rate.
It was a rhetorical question, of course they were being disingenuous. Marginal tax rate doesn't have the same ring as 70% tax.
Don't care. I don't want any of the wankers over there at Palantir involved with the NHS.
(source: a UK voter)
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No.
I checked, and you can of course donate to Led By Donkeys either as a one-off or monthly via their web page https://donate.ledbydonkeys.org/ but they don't have a way to contribute to specific campaigns.
Thanks for mentioning them though.
Donated. Cheers
It'll come good any day now, the sensibles rightful place in charge of the plebs will be reaffirmed in 2029 I'm sure
You're really bashing a straw man of "the sensibles rightfully in charge of the plebs" to argue in support of a system that will be overtly in charge of the plebs without even nominal democratic accountability? Talk about mental gymnastics.
Entropyless? So you’re saying they’re highly efficient?
Welcome to the club.
"dumb". Call it what it is, corruption
Sorry but the Adam smith institute is a ridiculous think thank that cherry picks Adam smith, he would be spinning in his grave at the misuse of his name.
This is why I disagree with the idea that we should keep increasing funding to the NHS. The argument always seems to come to a false dichotomy of "either this or the American system" as though other systems don't exist, and as though the NHS isn't top heavy with bureaucrats and questionable contracts
The truth is that the NHS is very bad not due to funding, but for structural reasons.
The fact I can't even see a GP I'm not registered with (not even an option to pay extra) is ridiculous. You have absolutely no control over your health at all.
With private, you get exactly what you want, whenever you want it.
> With private, you get exactly what you want, whenever you want it.
In the US this isn't how it works. You can't see whoever you want unless you have a really, really good plan. Otherwise, you need referrals. And lots of specialists won't see you without a referral anyway.
And, the wait is often on the order of months. I know that's something people complain about in the UK but I assure you, it happens that way in the US too even though we're paying 10x as much.
I know private in the UK is quite good. What you need to understand is that the only reason it's any good at all is because of the NHS. It has to remain competitive. If you go full private, then it very quickly decays.
A specialist also requires a referral in the UK. There are also much more medicines which are prescription-only than in the US.
That's why in practice we have all these (private) services to get easy GP appointments via phone, video or even online forms. While everyone knows those appointments can't realistically do any real medical work, they serve to give you prescriptions and referrals.
It's just a gatekeeping mechanism, that you can more easily bypass if you have money. The more you pay, the more they care about your user experience and how streamlined it is.
In the US if I want to see my primary care doctor I need to wait 2 months for the appointment.
I pay $500 per month for the privilege (and a $50 copay)
So I’m paying $1000 in the time period where I’m getting no service.
Where in the US are you? I was able to book a visit with my primary the very next day less than a month ago.
Not the person you replied to but I'm in North Texas and I just recently had to reschedule my physical. And yup, the next appointment is 2 months out.
I also had cancer in the past and you might think that that would mean I get faster appointments. I do not.
And I have a very, very, very good PPO plan.
> I also had cancer in the past and you might think that that would mean I get faster appointments. I do not.
Sadly you do not may be because lower life expectancy -> lower return on treatment "investment".
That was my thinking... even for specialists, I can generally get into a new one within a few weeks.
My SO is on state Medicaid (cancer) and does experience the kinds of waits mentioned above... so I guess it does follow similarly for government/state backed healthcare, where I'm mostly out of pocket.
But even when I had relatively typical coverage, I didn't have issues getting into a doctor more often than not. I think getting my sleep study was the longest wait I had for anything, they were months backed up with appointments... but my kidney and retina specialists were somewhat easy to get started with.
As usual when people say "the US", we're papering over the fact that the United States is really 50 countries in a trench coat.
> the United States is really 50 countries in a trench coat.
Appropriate attire... when you're in a trench :)
You can absolutely see a GP you’re not registered with if you are travelling and need to. I have done it multiple times. I have been offered it same or next day after calling 111.
You can call any GP surgery to get emergency treatment for up to 14 days if you're not registered with a GP surgery or are away from home. https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/gps/gp-appointments-and-book...
While away from home, my son (5 yo) cut his finger and was in need of disinfectant and a bandage (steri strips).
Pharmacy was useless, no medical skills or knowledge of their own products. Asked me to figure out myself what I needed and put it on my son myself.
Local GP surgery sent us away: no registration, no visit. Me saying this was an emergency just made them suggest A&E.
A&E is where we ended up, and while that definitely works, going to the emergency services of a large hospital for every little thing is not only a waste of my time but also of resources. It seems however to be the NHS way: whenever the littlest of troubles arise, just go to the hospital, or even call an ambulance.
Sorry for being too American to understand, but why would you need to talk to any medical professional to put a bandaid on your kid? Is this about NHS being paying for the bandaid? About medical expertise to apply a bandaid?
Not all disinfectants are child safe, and the wound was serious enough to require steri-strips (an alternative to sutures) -- it was not a matter of a bandaid.
The chemist can sell you the right stuff for that.
You would have been best served by a Minor Injury Unit but not every town has one, so A&e is not excessive. The great majority of people going there do not need the full capabilities of it (resuscitation etc).
1. Water is child safe
2. Steri-strips are available over the counter at any supermarket or pharmacy (in the U.S.)
And 111 was unable to help, even the GP they assigned to you turned you away?
You call 111 if you don't want to bother the 999 guys. 111 will tell you what you need to do, including "go to A&E".
What is wrong with going to A&E for an (as you said yourself) emergency?
A pharmacist dispenses medications and should know about their safe usage. They won't tell you how to bandage a wound.
Getting a minor wound bandaged up is not what A&E is meant for, it's for life-threatening injuries.
Going to A&E and waiting there also means you're losing 4 to 6 hours.
111 you just get some robot asking you a never-ending list of inane questions before someone tells you to either self-care at home or go to A&E.
A pharmacist should be able to administer the supplies they sell, particularly wound dressing and care. It's a requirement in some other European countries like France (where pharmacists are doctors), but in the UK the reality is that most are unable to do so.
111 do a lot more than that, they will get you a GP visit even if the GP claims to not have slots, and they will get medical professionals to come to you.
If it was in hours, I'm surprised they didn't get a nurse appointment for the cut.
Pharmacy. Not pharmacist.
Pharmacies provide much more than just medicine.
A pharmacist is someone who is a chemical practitioner though?
“Man, these cryptographers didn’t know a thing about tailwind. Useless!”
With private, you get exactly what you want, whenever you want it... If you can afford it.
Pending availability of specialists, willingness to travel, etc.
If you're in a major metro area it's generally not too bad.
Compared to the system of no access
Same system, for the not-wealthy.
So naive. Private only works this way in Britain because it doesn’t have to be responsible for anything. It’s a luxury good and works accordingly.
We have insurance, it’s amazing! But it’s fake. If you want to know how a whole system of this would work, look at the US
* if available in your area or within your means of travel, which may include flying to another state
If only there were some system where the incentives could freely flow through and permeate every level of the sector. Where those organisations that provide sub-standard care die and those that excel receive outsized funding...
Unfortunately, a system with these qualities doesn't exist in practice. You just end up with the same too-big-to-fail macro organization minimizing their point-of-care labor spend and maximizing their management spend either way.
As someone who largely worked at startups and smaller companies before joining the NHS it genuinely confused me how no one would ever say no to anything when I first started working there.
The projects I worked on were genuinely absurd... My team alone spent millions on things that literally wouldn't have made any difference to the quality of healthcare in the UK.
Apparently we were given a budget and we had to find a way to spend it otherwise it would be cut. At any normal company we should have all immediately have been made redundant.
The rate of increase of healthcare funding for the UK is 2,000% higher than France's rate of healthcare funding increases from between 2010 and 2019, according to World Bank data.
The UK healthcare system is uniquely incompetent, administratively bloated and drives very suboptimal value for money.
UK citizens appear to be in a collective delusion about the NHS that allows them to continue ineptly bumbling through mediocrity while perpetually fleecing more tax money to line the pockets of administrators.
Meanwhile actual frontline workers in the NHS are completely ripped off in salary. Nurses get paid peanuts, while even neurosurgeons earn less than 1/6th of their American counterparts.
To plug the gap by skilled healthcare workers bailing over these horrific conditions, the UK has been importing people to fill these gaps, often with severely lower competence (usually because of completely faked qualifications or outright fraud [1]).
[1] https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/news/hundreds-of-nhs-nu...
The rate of increase is an interesting one to choose, what about some absolute numbers ?
Partially redacted details here. The award was over 5 years for half that amount, but could be extended to 10.
https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/0f8a65b5-2...
The NHS is a huge organisation (~2 million employees alone) with enormous problems along these lines - they should pay 10x if it delivers.
But they'll pay even if it doesn't deliver.
AND they're putting private information at risk by working with Panantir
Isn’t this true for any project ever attempted? The only reason this project exists is because millions have already been wasted on trying to do this in house
Yes, but the comment I was replying to sounded like it was saying that the large cost wasn't an issue, because it would have such a big impact. But the odds of it actually accomplishing anything useful need to be taken into account, too. If it has a low chance of success, then a large price tag isn't worth it.
as often the case with eternal consultants it probably won't deliver, plus the NHS will be perpetually on the hook for maintenance
this isn't a "delivery" product, it should be an institutional pillar of the system
A system whereby millions of people seek services from thousands of potential providers, with a life-or-death need to track which services and products were delivered where and when ... ya. It is a billion-dollar data problem. But that is the cost for the luxury of being able to walk into any hospital in the country and expect them to know everything about your conditions at a moment's notice.
I mean, for comparison, the UK Gov "Integrated Data Service" costed around £250m and delivered literally nothing.
Building software for and integrating 200-ish NHS trusts, who generally have their own cloud/tech stack etc, is not actually super cheap.
I assume the purpose of Palantir is to enable the Federal government to circumvent the constitution by framing their new spy agency as a public/private partnership. From that lens the funding makes sense.
The purpose of Palantir is to watch over Mordor and the other lands of Sauron. He's only got one eye, one attention span, he needs intelligent agentic processing to administrate the realm. Who are you going to entrust, Gorthak The Orc? The Nazgul? They have their own priorities, their own limitations.
It was incredibly expensive to run East Berlin as a panopticon state, with a large fraction of the population on the payroll as informers to the 100,000 Stasi agents. Obvious conclusions were missed all the time because of the sheer difficulty of keeping track of facts cross-referenced on paper in filing cabinets in a large office building. This volume of classified siloed information is toxic for the occupation, operationally unusable. People were disappeared or even executed on mere suspicion because it would have been too difficult to rustle up proof.
Thiel looked at our prospects for effectively running an authoritarian surveillance state in Afghanistan and Iraq, looked at how many American contractors we would have had to devote to that, how many people we would have had to torture on a routine basis, how fast we might learn the language, and said "I think I can do better. A softer touch, a smarter system for controlling people. This is what AI is for, running society after this liberal democracy fiction falls away"
NB: The Palantir were created by the Elves, not by Morgoth or Sauron. The problem is that it takes a lot of will to use one and not have things of importance hidden (it shows what you think is important, not what is important), and as it turns out holders of one stone can influence what holders of other stones can see, if their will is greater. The Enemy doesn't get ahold of a stone until Minas Ithil falls and becomes Minas Morgul, and that's well into the Third Age. Two thousand years after the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, the second defeat of The Enemy, and the first destruction of Sauron. Which is still a thousand years before the start of Frodo's adventure. Lots of time in Middle Earth.
The rest of your comment is, unfortunately, spot on.
It's amazing how some people can read Tolkien's works and come away with an idea that it would be a good thing to create new powerful artifacts that will inevitably fall under the control of evil. Perhaps because their minds have already been corrupted by the One Ring.
I suppose it's just the Don't make the Torment Nexus effect with a different motif.
There's no federal government in the UK, nor constitution
There is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
More importantly, the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy, with ultimate legislative power vested in Parliament rather than the Monarch.
From your link: "This enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched."
It doesn't look like a duck, it doesn't quack like a duck, yet you insist that this goose-shaped creature is a duck.
>It doesn't look like a duck
Some special amendment procedure is not the only or even defining feature of constitutional law. There is non-constitutional law that has this property and there is constitutional law that does not.
I notice you are using the phrase "constitutional law" now, where as the original question was whether the UK can be said to have "a constitution."
The oddities of this "duck" go far beyond its lack of entrenchment. It also lacks form and definition in the way that a puff of smoke lacks form and definition. It includes such nebulous elements as common law, unwritten convention, and even legal commentary of various law scholars. It's also said to be in constant flux as it evolves over time.
It may be a useful abstraction within the context of UK law to refer to this amorphous blob as the "constitution," but for anyone unfamiliar with the UK's system of government, to say the UK has a constitution is grossly misleading in as much as all of the conclusions the listener will draw from that assertion will be false. It's like characterizing a chicken eating grain out of your hand as being "attacked by a dinosaur." The chicken may belong to the clade "Dinosauria" and may have inadvertently pecked your palm in its feeding frenzy, but in as much as it communicates information contrary to fact, it is a confabulation. At best, it's a lawyer's lie, to coin a phrase.
I've heard it said that they have a constitution but it's written in pencil...
...in the air
ice cream castles…
And that's absolutely not what the commenter up-thread meant.
I find it weird that people would downvote this, I know you should not complain about it, but this comment is correct. The UK does have a (uncodified) constitution. Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.
>> There is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document. <link>
That's got to be the understatement of (many) centuries. AFAIK the UK constitution isn't even even codified into millions of documents, let alone a "single" one. Saying it's not in a "single" document is like saying my trillions of dollars aren't in a "single" bank account. The number of partitions really isn't the problem with that statement here.
Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution", let alone an arbitrary citizen who needs to be able to become aware of them to be able to follow them? (Note I'm not asking for interpretation, but literally just listing the sentences.) Could they even do this with infinite time? Is it even possible to have an oracle that, given an arbitrary sentence, could indisputably tell you if it is in the constitution?
Maybe that's asking too much. Forget enumerating the laws. Per your own link: "...this enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched."
If this doesn't itself sound silly, hopefully you can at least forgive people for getting irritated at the proposition that there totally exists a "constitution"... that nobody can point to... and that doesn't actually do the one thing many people want from a constitution: being more entrenched than statutes.
> Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.
Not sure what countries you're referring to, but at least in the US, this is not the case. There is a single document that is the constitution, and (thankfully, so far) nobody is disputing what words are in fact written on that document. And that document absolutely is supreme to statutes.
Interpretation of the words is obviously left to courts in the US, and courts can interpret it differently changing the effective law, but "constitution" is not a synonym for "effective law", and nobody argues over what the words to be interpreted are. And even those interpretations are still written down!
I believe interpretation is a part of the definition of a constitution, you do not, we have different definitions, oh well. I also believe the uncodified/codified distinction is not binary, it is obvious that the US constitution is far more codified than the UK constitution, the two are at opposite extremes.
> I believe interpretation is a part of the definition of a constitution, you do not, we have different definitions, oh well.
You can't just brush it aside as some quibble about definitions. It's a fundamentally substantive difference in the two structures: one of these has an indisputable source of truth (a foundation everyone can witness) that everything else is built on top of -- however shakily! -- and the other does not. Regardless of whether you include the upper parts of this metaphorical building in your definitions or not, the foundations are not the same.
> It's a fundamentally substantive difference in the two structures
Yes, it is a substantive difference but it does not follow that this difference provides the 'constitution' property.
> one of these has an indisputable source of truth... the foundations are not the same
They are so similar as to be almost the same and if an 'indisputable source of truth' exists anywhere, it is not in the written documents or their structure but unwritten norms and rituals sit beneath both.
What stops a President from simply choosing to ignore a Supreme Court ruling and what prevents the King from returning to personal rule?
The lack of arbitrary rule is a defining feature of both and relies on something that emerged rather than something imposed from without by written words.
> What stops a President from simply choosing to ignore a Supreme Court ruling and what prevents the King from returning to personal rule?
Legally? The fact that everybody under the president -- including those in the military -- understand they are swearing their oath to the constitution -- not the King, not the Crown, not God, not the Supreme Court, not anything else. And that the Supreme Court says what the constitution means. And that if there is a clear and direct contradiction between the Supreme Court and the president, the former trumps (no pun intended) the latter.
Physically? "Nothing", yeah. Same goes for non-presidents. If you can get enough people to follow you (or maybe at least enough of the people with guns) everything else becomes irrelevant, including whether your title was president or King or God or Constitution or whatever.
> The lack of arbitrary rule is a defining feature of both
It is emphatically not. There are lots of countries with constitutions that nevertheless have arbitrary rule. As there are countries without constitutions or arbitrary rule.
> They are so similar as to be almost the same and if an 'indisputable source of truth' exists anywhere, it is not in the written documents or their structure but unwritten norms and rituals sit beneath both.
No, that's exactly what those are not. Unwritten stories, traditions, and rituals are very much disputable. That's kind of the entire point of writing things down, and the point of the game we call Telephone. The indisputable bits are physical artifacts everyone can see with their own eyes.
> And that if there is a clear and direct contradiction between the Supreme Court and the president, the former trumps (no pun intended) the latter.
The extent to which members of the executive branch adhere to their oaths is not written down. Ofc the oath is written and its power may partly derive from its written nature (clear; predictable; well publicised etc) but there is a lot more than its written nature that might cause a general to refuse to follow a Presidential order to arrest all people suspected of voting for their opponent.
> The lack of arbitrary rule... is emphatically not [a defining feature of both]
I guess it depends on whether you (or most reasonable people) would call countries like Russia a 'constitutional republic'. Of course there are plenty of dysfunctional and dictatorial countries which superficially describe themselves as XYZ but it lacks substance.
While there may be a textbook answer, I strongly suspect it is debatable within the field and comes down (like so many things) to how you define your terms. Do you define 'constitutional' as attaching more to the codified and written nature of any rules or whether it is more to do with predictable and enforceable rules limiting arbitrary government. My view is that it attaches more the latter.
If you go into the etymology of the term, I don't think codification is baked in - that you can find a large number of books discussing the English or UK constitution (using that term) is testament to the fact that it's not just some niche view. I do suspect the influence of US popular culture (e.g. Hollywood) has biased the term towards the US' arrangement vs. the alternatives.
Yes, the foundations of the constitutions are not the same, one of them has a mostly codified constitution, the other has a mostly uncodified (uncodified but mostly written down, that is not a contradiction!) constitution. They both have constitutions however, so the phase "Britain has no constitution" is wrong. To be clear, I am not saying that is good or bad that Britain has an uncodified constitution, just that from my definition (and most political and legal definitions) of what a constitution is the phrase "Britain has no constitution" is wrong. Britain of course has laws, and laws about how new laws are made, etcetera. This forms a constitution.
> Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution"
No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not?
>> Is there a single human (or even computer program) that could even definitively list all the sentences in this "constitution"
> No, it's a living thing. Why is this your sticking point on the existence of a constitution or not?
Do you never write down or sign contracts? Are verbal promises adequate for you in all transactions?
If you don't see the value of laws being written down - especially the most important ones! - I can't really convince you of it here on HN.
But what I can tell is that most people who care about the legitimacy of government believe it is fundamental to fairness that there be a single source of truth that can tell them the laws under which they would be rewarded or punished, before those happen.
I think you have diverged too much...well from reality, in order to try to prove a point. Do you think most people, or lawyers, or judges in the UK spend their time trying to enumerate all the laws of the land before they proceed in their court cases? Do you think that people think that the UK system of government is illegitimate? What point are you trying to make? Because it is not grounded in reality. You can debate the merits of a codified constitution versus an uncodified one, but the UK does have a constitution, the vast majority of which is codified into many documents. The following two links might help you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncodified_constitution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_(political_norm)#Un...
Note the second one applies to the US - a country with a mostly but not completely codified constitution.
> If you don't see the value of laws being written down
I don't think this is helping much in the US right now. The orangefuhrer has shown he is willing to ignore clauses that are inconvenient.
Nobody claimed it's helping or hurting. The debate is over what constitutes a constitution, whether good or bad. There have been great governments without a constitution and terrible governments with one. "You don't have a constitution" does not mean "your government sucks", but it seems somehow people take it as such.
> If you don't see the value of laws being written down - especially the most important ones! - I can't really convince you of it here on HN.
It's a shame you can't really explain it. It's ineffable, isn't it.
"I like scrambled eggs."
"I do too, but the way Trump is behaving, pretty soon it will be illegal to ..."
Pretty soon you won't be able to afford eggs.
> Do you never write down or sign contracts? Are verbal promises adequate for you in all transactions?
I generally deal with written contracts but verbal contracts are recognised as having equal legal validity. I'm not sure how that's relevant.
> If you don't see the value of laws being written down - especially the most important ones! - I can't really convince you of it here on HN.
Where have I made a value judgement either way? I'm only pointing out that the constitution needn't be explicitly codified in order to exist.
> But what I can tell is that most people ...
[citation needed]
That's an excuse for the list being not bang up to date. It is no excuse for the list being non-existent.
It does exist, it's the house of lords.
You are technically correct. But the distinction between devolution and a Federation of states gets very blurry when you take a look at what's happening with voting in the US these days.
You are technically incorrect about the UK not having a constitution. It's just not all compiled into a single written document.
Technically correct only if you accept "vague set of traditions" as a valid definition for "constitution". This both contradicts common usage and enables tyranny, so I recommend rejecting it.
The UK constitution isn't a "vague set of traditions", it is spread across a number of acts of Parliament.
Where can I find the official list of which acts are part of the constitution? And what additional obstacles exist to changing those acts beyond the obstacles to changing non-constitutional acts of parliament? In common usage, a constitution is something that restricts changes to ordinary law. If a "constitution" is made entirely from ordinary law it cannot function as a constitution.
Before you demand more explanation on the spot, you know there's a Wikipedia page for that. It explains the components how they are legitimated and the mechanisms of the UK government that rely on it.
It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.
I suppose the issue is that the NHS themselves have historically been terrible at managing their software. Nobody I know who I rate as even mediocre and above would or have worked at the NHS, and those I do know who have have, I wouldn't hire into junior roles.
I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is. GP surgery's have for years had to send paper files across to new practices when a patient moves. The new NHS app is great, but I can see from my history that > 90% is missing.
Another great example of how good the NHS is at this, is the fact that nurses & doctors would have to scroll down a combo list without any typeahead to pick a medication, which would be in an A-Z list of every medication ever.
So, closing the circle, is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence, who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT? Yes. There are many.
There will always be concerns about data, about security, but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it than an unknown company getting billions in contracts, building software worse than someone with a $20 Claude extension, and then leaking it to hackers.
Just my 2p
> I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is.
Yep, as someone who's worked at a couple of small startups trying to sell into the NHS, it's terrible. A big part of the problem seems to be that there's no centralised procurement: each trust (of which there are ~200) does their own precurement. And a lot of the companies (the big established players are the worst) at most pay lip service interoperability. So you end with a big mess of system that don't talk to each other.
And they're not setup to pay "market rates" that are competitive with private employers to their in-house developers. So it's hard for them to attract and retain good in-house developers where they have them (although there are still some great people working there).
Internal restrictions are such that even aspiring software Devs find hurdles to doing basic automation. I know someone who wanted to use python, yes just use it, and it took months to be allowed to do that on an NHS machine.
Does it run on Windows 95?
> is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence
Is there no one in the UK with any competence?
> who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT?
Why on earth do you think that's Palantir?
> but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it
Until the US government wants it, at least.
> but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it
So would I and I think Palantir will leak it.
Is there any proof that Palantir has ever leaked client data? From a security perspective they are one of the few companies that hold IL6, which means they can handle highly classified/top secret information.
They work with many international governments and companies, and I would imagine any sort of unapproved leak would be disastrous for their brand.
Have you found any evidence of them leaking anything in the last 20 years?
Imagine the kind of open source EPR that could be built with £330 million.
But it looks like lobbying by US corporations has resulted in the NHS quietly deleting it's open source policy https://www.digitalhealth.net/2025/12/nhs-england-quietly-re...
Can we get an MP to ask about this?
> It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.
I'm not 100% convinced that the consultancy/implementation being the same as the software vendor is a bad thing.
Depending on the contract it can give you better exit clauses, implementation costs can be subsidised by SaaS revenue, you might have novel clauses for PS overspends, you get rid of the 'implementation vendor blames software vendor' thing, if you need modifications/enhancements to the base product then it sits with the same person, plus we don't know if Palantir's system is easily made for an independent implementation consultant to pick it up and be able to do everything without having to do some backend magic.
A contrarian view although I do dislike contracting with foreign companies for roughly similar reasons: Palantir's technology looks good and I think it probably works. Most things don't work.
The Palantir brand has become incredibly toxic and, from what folks report, the software just isn’t very good either. A lot of smoke and mirrors hype not matched by substance.
From what I've heard their money product is taking all the various government data systems and indexing them for search on one platform. Doesn't seem like much of a moat, but I guess that is what the bribes are for.
It’s not. The moat is just that it’s challenging to get into that world as a vendor, but by all indications and observations folks cite the tech is pretty meh by 2026 standards.
> While Louis Mosley, the executive vice-chair of Palantir in the UK, maintains that such campaigns are ideologically motivated and could harm patient care,
this is EXACTLY why it is of outmost importance to own those critical systems, and not delegate them to foreign companies, especially if from a country explicitly hostile towards Europe
Too late. The NHS is already heavily reliant on AWS. Not the only ones either.
As things are Europe (except Russia and a few others) is utterly reliant on Americas. Read up on how difficult things became for the ICJ judge the US sanctioned. If the US ever blocked almost any European countries access to online services they economy would collapse.
Any government that hands over citizen's data to a private entity, even more so one that is primarily foreign, should be investigated for being a traitor to the public. That's a general statement, not solely confined to the Palantir guys. They kind of gave it away by chosing that name alone already - damn thieves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr).
... are we saying government should never use any corporate to deliver services? Not Outlook? No Google Workspace? No AWS? I am so confused.
For those wondering, FDP stands for Federated Data Platform
> Our mission for the NHS Federated Data Platform is to provide a secure, flexible system that connects data across NHS organisations to improve patient care, streamline services, and support informed decision-making.[1]
[1] : https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/nhs-federated-d...
palantir is a US company subject to the cloud act. patient data from 123 hospital trusts is now one mlat request away from us law enforcement regardless of where the servers sit.
Only if Palantir owns the servers and the storage. A lot of what Palantir does is on a clients infrastructure. The entire platform is installed on client infra. At least the one we have where I work is.
> Only if Palantir owns the servers and the storage.
I believe no, MLAT scope is not limited to servers/stored owned by the target entity.
If it was, MLAT would be routinely defeated by targets hosting on AWS, for example.
How would Palantir extract the data if nhs specifies the security infrastructure?
Send Palantir engineers to vault over the data centre wall and extract it on a USB stick like James Bond, presumably.
Palantir is under immense economic pressure to deliver this integration at high quality on time. This incentive structure, combined the publicly traded nature of the company, risks corrupting its core founding goals of embodying the evil of Sauron on earth and hurting as many people as it can, as badly as possible. However, Thiel is an extremely competent, mission focussed leader and I agree with the doctors: he will get this program back on track mission-wise without pissing off shareholders too much.
(</s>? Maybe? hard to say tbh)
The reality is that no program so far has really been successful within the NHS. Money is burnt at an alarming rate and the companies taking on these contracts are incompetent at best.
If staff don't want to work with it then they're not fulfilling their roles.
What if any of us took a job and then refused to work with Microsoft or [Insert company] due to personal reasons? We'd be jobless.
People arent robots, they are allowed their own thoughts and free will. Your comment implies any behavior against the interests of a corporation is somehow a sin. This is such a gross take.
They are allowed to have thoughts and free will, and a company is allowed to fire you for not doing your job. It's not a sin, it's just business.
I imagine this is the argument police officers used when they refused to use body cameras.
> People arent robots, they are allowed their own thoughts and free will.
Modern HR culture is working hard to address this terrible failing. </s>
> The reality is that no program so far has really been successful within the NHS.
Could you be a bit more specific? No IT initiative at all? No attempt to create a national data spine?
And yet - when I go my GP they enter and lookup data on the computer there which is linked to national system.
Do I as a patient get to opt my medical information out?
What were NHS execs thinking signing a contract with palantir?
Either they are completely ignorant about what palantir is and who it's owned by (would be very concerning) or they are corrupt and were bribed.
> completely ignorant about what palantir is and who it's owned by
Perhaps you could give your take? When I look at the facts, I see a fairly humdrum data integration company that was a slightly early adopter of applied machine learning.
Or those execs are ignorant about their staff's concerns.
down voted by all the tech bro billionaire wannabes on hackernews
no british person would down vote this - at least not one with any integrity
Or, the non politicized take is that they think the software could improve the data landscape of the NHS, which, if we are bring honest, has a lot of room for improvement.
I am an American so the plight of the NHS has no direct impact on me, but I'd argue that Palantir is a fundamentally political company and thus there is no room for non-politicized takes.
Have you used Palantir or know the infra on how it provides services? Or just giving sound bites you’ve read on media?
You can mandate an installation on self managed infra. We install / use it on a completely self managed cloud install with pretty solid exfiltration protections. It’s a data platform, provides interesting connections in the data. But that’s where its utility ends.
Do they work with US defense and govt? Sure they do. But you don’t have to share your data outside of your cloud infra.
What I am talking about has nothing to do with their technology. To know Palantir is an inherently political company you just need to hear Alex Karp speak.
They’re all political animals. Alex karp Is just gunning for a bigger share of the govt and defense data market.
When you read the Anthropic and DoD (or DoW) saga, Anthropic ceo was happy to provide exceptions for use of clause.
An almost literal "No True Scotsman" fallacy, IRL.
Boring comment. Let’s say things that add value to the conversation please.
Reductive take
There have been recent articles in the FT about a man (who surname, funnily enough, sounds like swindle) who was an advisor to Palantir while also being chair of 4 NHS Trusts and pushing the trusts to put more of their data into Palantir.
Definitely not a conflict of interest...
As an interesting linguistic coincidence (or not), FDP is a commonly used acronym in Portuguese, standing for "filho da puta", literally, "son of a whore", but semantically it's approximately "asshole/jerk/dickhead".
P.S.: Fuck Palantir.
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We've banned this account for posting several egregious comments in the past few days. (This one isn't the worst; I'm just commenting here because it's the most recent.) This account holder has a history over several years of registering new accounts and continuing to post in blatant breach of the guidelines. Please stop wasting everyone's time with this practice. Very few people see the comments.
> This account holder has a history over several years of registering new accounts
How do you know this is the registrant of all?
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fire them easy decision
Why do Epsteinist Companies feel they have the right to not only billions of dollars of citizens in other countries, but also their health record data?
"Epsteinist Companies" What does that neologism mean?
Companies whose board contains Epstein associates, who appear I the files a significant amount of times.
Companies related to the network of Epstein associates. They seem to have zero respect for people's rights and privacy. True enemies of freedom and children. We should not appease these people with incredulity when they are directly and specifically and correctly called out for destroying society.
fire them, plenty would be happy to have the job
Brits: left EU, drifted to US that treats them like crap. A wise choice, what can I say.
"We send the EU 350 million pounds a week. Why not send it to Palantir instead?"
I know they're similar numbers, but all you're really doing is making this look cheap, because it isn't a weekly contract.
(Not that the comparison would make much more sense if it were, apples and doorframes.)
Spoiler alert: Brits were not sending the EU 350 million pounds a week. That was a bullshit number made up by Brexiteers. Crazy, I know.
Yes they were and it wasn't made up. The objection was that the number is gross but some of that money the EU chose to spend in the UK.
But that's irrelevant to this point because the EU didn't spend any of that money on healthcare. It went on the commissions priorities and projects, not the NHS. So the claim that it could be spent on the NHS instead, but only on leaving, was correct.
A lot of EU countries are using Palantir and dependent on US big tech too
> The US technology company was awarded a £330 million contract in 2023
The total contract value was £182,242,760 over 5 years.
For context that's Roughly 0.0002% per year of NHS budget.
https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/2e8c61c0-f...
That would imply that their annual budget was £1.8e14, which I seriously doubt.
Even if I assume that you meant 0.02%, which is equal to 0.0002, that would put their budget at £1.8e12, which I am also strongly inclined to doubt.
The NHS's actual current annual budget is £195.6B in 2025/2026 [1]. The contract value declared at the link given above is £182M over 5 years. So:
100 × ((182/5)/196000) = 0.019%
Which, to me, still seems too high a number for a data management function: I make it about 1000 persons-worth of per-capita GDP.
[1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/financial-performance-u...
I think you would need a lot more context to say if 0.019% is too high. If this platform is driving real operational improvements and is the core software backbone, then it doesn't seem particularly unreasonable.