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While the Trump administration deploys Palantir to create detailed portraits of millions of Americans, the UK Data (Use and Access) Bill sits on its own edge of becoming law. This could mean more Palantir as they already have contracts here—notably the £330 million (nearly $440 million) one developing the NHS’s Federated Data Platform (FDP). The same Palantir of course said to be enabling ICE with their mass US deportations through their innocently called Immigration Lifecycle Operating System (ImmigrationOS).

Most UK politicians—especially Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle—like to give voice trendily on modernisation. As if it somehow grants the elixir of youth. They talk of clean, slick lines of efficiency, perhaps in between glances at the mirror. But I swear there’s something else below the surface—a distant sound, like boots on cobblestones at night. The kind you don’t normally hear until it’s too late.

The government says it’s progress. They always do. But critics, those who still care about liberty and a person’s right to be left alone, call it something else: surveillance. Deep and wide and nasty. Like a net cast by men who never expect to be pulled down themselves. I suspect we will all be drowning not waving soon. Or as Michel Foucault—who died in 1984—put it in Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

The UK’s increasingly unfathomable Labour Party took power in July 2024. By October, they placed the DUA Bill before the Lords. They spoke of order. Of trimming the fat. The old data bill had died quietly in the spring, like a seal on a rock. Parliament dissolved, and with it, what little restraint remained.

Now, the new data bill’s caught in a game of parliamentary ping pong—a term probably as unserious as the stakes are grave. This is when........

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