The New Dark Age

Monday, 20 April 2026 — medConfidential

No magic, just software and monopoly.

In the Westminster Hall debate on Palantir, the Minister insisted they’ll keep using Palantir, as Palantir becomes the new Fujitsu, with all the consequences that come over that Horizon.

Until now, the branding and promotion of the ‘Federated Data Platform’ has been entirely controlled by the Department of Health in England.

Anything said both officially and publicly has been PRed to remove useful details that might inform debate. The NHS is a very big place, it does lots of things, and there is a tendency for silos to believe they are the whole elephant.

In the context of the current debate, some independent advocates for FDP have decided they want to talk themselves. This is to be encouraged, because informed debate is better than competing soundbites that don’t relate to each other.

In the debate, the Minister said “NHS England publishes data on how the FDP has benefited patients and the NHS. The data collected up to the end of March will be published in May. I can share the figures with Members now.” This may have sounded like it was new information, but Palantir’s twitter account had in fact posted those figures a few days before. Members weren’t getting the ‘sneak peek’ the Minister implied.

One of the issues on which both sides talk past each other is vendor lock-in.

It is helpful that those who see this as good internally are starting to make their case, as this will better inform where things go from here.

Blogger Tom is correct to point out that all of the small bits of code his team writes can be copied from current Palantir systems to an Apache Spark instance from a competitor. It’d take a few seconds for an AI to change a few constants, and a few hours to quality assure that the new system gives the right answers.

But those bits of code are not all of the FDP functions; they aren’t the FDP functions causing concern, and they aren’t the FDP functions that were talked about in the debate. The real concern is with the flagship FDP “Products”.

Cancer360 is a monopoly Palantir Product.

OPTICA is a monopoly Palantir Product

If the NHS wanted to swap from the Palantir “Platform” (i.e. Foundry, which the NHS has rebranded as FDP) to an equivalent competitor tomorrow, they could do so – but, to quote NHS England, “Palantir retains intellectual property rights in their existing Foundry product” and “data included in the NHS Federated Data Platform vary depending on the particular software application (called a “Product”) being used and what is needed for that specific purpose”.

So Cancer360 (for cancer care) and OPTICA (to manage the patient discharge process) wouldn’t move across, unless Palantir chose to run their Products on their competitor’s platform – which would be like Apple rewriting its own iOS apps for Windows. They might do it, but only if and when it’s in their own corporate interests…

Palantir may sometimes live up to the caricature of cartoon baddies, but they could help undermine this caricature by clarifying in public whether they would do the work necessary to support Cancer360 and OPTICA to run on an instance of Apache Spark from a competitor. A simple Yes/No answer would suffice.

The NHS can move the small internal things quite easily if it wants to – it’s the big stuff that doctors and care pathways depend on where the incumbency matters.

All the bits of work that blogger Tom’s team does are important in keeping the NHS running, just as the (proverbial) janitor who cleaned the floor at NASA’s offices ‘helped put a man on the moon’. They did, but that didn’t make them an astronaut. Tom’s job is moving figures around NHS England – it’s basically what Chandler from Friends did – and as important as his tasks may be, they’re rarely vital or irreplaceable.

Tom’s also entirely right in omitting to mention something that’s simply not there: Palantir isn’t magic. It’s just software, and he likes FDP because it’s better software than he had before – which can be entirely true, while Palantir is still a toxic choice. (His argument is like saying that leaded petrol is useful for his team driving around. He can be entirely correct in that assertion, but that doesn’t make it right to use leaded petrol when unleaded also exists.)

Missing the point in this way is one reason why DH/E so closely limits what can be officially said about FDP. The more debate, the worse their comms get. But informed debate is how things can move forward, unless (PR) budgets matter more than patient outcomes…