Peter Thiel's New Model Army

The Palantirisation of the UK military is a national security disaster

A note on who I am and what I’m doing: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I coined a word to describe the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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This newsletter is going to cover three crucial subjects today:

1. How Britain’s national security is hopelessly compromised. We’ve sold out our military to a key Trump ally in what I believe is a catastrophically naive and dangerous deal. (If you’re American, this affects you too.)

2. The global war on truth. And why sticking to the facts is now a radical act.

3. How we fight back. In which I post a whole smorgasbord of inspiring videos that I grabbed off social media that you didn’t know you needed.

I’ve never started with a bulleted list before but then I can’t remember a NATO country threatening to invade a NATO country before either. I figured you might need 3) after reading 1) and 2).

1) The UK’s national security is hopelessly compromised

This morning, the BBC ran an interview with Peter Mandelson, the self-described ‘best pal’ of Jeffrey Epstein and until he was sacked, the UK ambassador to Washington.

Mandelson’s firm, Global Counsel, also represents Palantir, the US surveillance defence company founded by Trump ally, Peter Thiel. When Keir Starmer visited Washington, a trip arranged by Mandelson, he had only two meetings: one with Trump and one with Palantir.

If we never heard from Peter Mandelson again, it would be too soon. And yet here he is, all over the national broadcaster refusing to apologise to Epstein’s victims and praising Trump’s “graciousness”.

But this was not all. Because also on the BBC this morning was his client, Louis Mosley, the CEO of Palantir UK and the grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

I’m not linking to either of these videos because they were both absolutely abject failures of journalism. This is the second time Mosley has been invited onto this same Sunday morning show as some sort of legitimate political pundit.

He is no such thing. His company is an integral part of the US defence and homeland security apparatus and the illegal data gathering operation carried out by Elon Musk’s DOGE to say nothing of its involvement in profiling kill targets for the IDF in Gaza. The only circumstance he should be on the BBC is to be subjected to a journalistic grilling, not asked a couple of softball questions on his views on global politics.

The UK Ministry of Defence has just signed a new £240 million contract with Palantir. Actually, it’s not a contract, it’s more than that. The UK government describes it as “a strategic partnership”. A “partnership” entered into without any sort of competitive tender that was announced during Trump’s visit to the UK and which disastrously compromises our entire national security infrastructure.

We have embedded a notorious US military surveillance company whose founder is a close ally of President Trump into the heart of our military at a moment in which the US is threatening to invade our NATO ally, Greenland.

If you’re British and reading this, please send it to your MP. The level of understanding in UK politics and media about Silicon Valley’s alliance with Trump and the geopolitical and security consequences of this appears to be non-existent.

If our national security rests on US technology, we have no national security.

It sounds like writerly hyperbole to describe the UK as a vassal state, but I mean it in its most literal sense. It’s explicitly stated in the ur-text of Trump’s White House’s foreign policy, the National Security Strategy document, that US companies will be used as instruments of state power. There is no hidden agenda here: Trump has set it all out. (For a breakdown of this document and what it all means, see this week’s piece in the Nerve by former British diplomat, Arthur Snell.)

What will it mean to embed American software into the UK military? Well consider, Tesla. You don’t really buy a car when you buy a Tesla, you rent the software that remains the property of Elon Musk industries who can choose to immobilise your car or any feature of it at any time.

Palantir is the most terrifying of the US companies but it’s also just one of a whole raft of compromising, self-sabotaging deals that the UK government has entered into. The UK ‘Sovereign Cloud’ has been contracted out to Oracle, owned by another key Trump ally, Larry Ellison, the man whose son is behind the disastrous buyout of CBS and the upcoming US TikTok takeover. And then there are deals with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon, BlackRock, Nvidia and Scale AI.

And this was the “win”, the brilliant triumph that Keir Starmer pulled from the jaws of defeat in the trade tariff negotiations. It is the opposite of that: it’s surrender, the cost of which won’t just be measured in pounds or dollars. I fear the cost could be much, much higher, paid in blood and pain.

It barely even registered this week that Trump announced he was increasing the US military’s budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

I wrote this in last week’s newsletter, on Saturday morning, hours after the US attacked Venezuela and before America woke up:

“This should precipitate a whole new global crisis. It’s an unprovoked military assault on a sovereign nation in breach of international law. What should worry us more is if it doesn’t…

Trump isn’t just a rogue, out-of-control president, America is a rogue state. And the longer we fail to acknowledge that, the more danger we are in.”

Trump’s actions should provoke a global crisis, I said. And it should worry us more if it doesn’t. A week later, the news is in: prepare to be more worried.

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2) The global war on truth..and what it means when your own PM joins it

I’m posting this interview between Gary Gibbons of Channel 4 News and Keir Starmer on Monday because it feels like a crucial moment that we should footnote and mark.

Starmer, an international human rights lawyer, is unable to say the attack on Venezuela was in breach of international law. This is the leader of a G7 nation, unable to confirm that black is black and white is white.

All week, pundits in the UK media have wanged on about how Starmer couldn’t have his “Hugh Grant moment” - a reference to the scene in Love Actually in which he Prime Minister Grant stands up to President Billy Bob Thornton (after seeing him making moves on his lady crush) and missed the far bigger point.

It’s the same pundits and journalists who applauded Starmer’s actions in sucking up to Trump, laying on a state visit, a royal banquet, the full works and celebrating the “win”, a deal that didn’t land Britain with a disastrous trade tariff.

But what they failed to point out is that Starmer paid Trump’s ransom - the disastrous, self-sabotaging tech deals detailed above. It’s not that Starmer risks “offending” Trump or is “caught in a bind” or “is in a tricky position” or any of the other phrases I’ve read and heard all week, it’s that he - and we - have been captured.

These deals represent the corporate capture of the UK state including, our cloud capacity, National Health Service, and now our military establishment. And the blindness, ignorance and ongoing denial is the most dangerous thing about this moment.

Starmer’s inability to speak the truth is not diplomacy. It’s evidence.

We are now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump fascist project. We’ve sold out everyone in America who’s trying to fight back against it. Worst of all, we can’t even see it yet.

I’m not using the f-word lightly or facetiously. I’ve avoided it for a year. But what is so dangerous right now is the assault on truth, on facts, on the evidence of our own eyes. What is happening right now in America is fascism. And we, the UK, are now up to our necks in it too.

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3) How to fight back

Congratulations! You’ve got through the depressing bit of the newsletter. This last section is a compendium of clips and images that I’ve seen this week that is the evidence you need that nothing is hopeless.

This is Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis. He’s using the f-word too.

A masked paramilitary gunman murdered a Minneapolis citizen in cold blood, and this is what the city’s mayor told ICE at his press conference. “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

It’s a painful contrast to Keir Starmer and a necessary corrective. What Trump is doing is meant to scare us. And not being scared, speaking the facts, taking the piss and recording it all on your phone are all radical acts. All week, I’ve been collecting individual responses to hard power ranging from the courageous to the creative to the comedic.

I loved this footage of an Uber driver that embodies all three of these qualities. Watch him taking on US border guards who asked to see his ID. Why, he asks them? You have an accent, one of them says. “You’re going by accents now?” he says incredulously. “You guys need psychiatric checkups,” he tells them when they ask where he was born. He satirically taunts them until they eventually give up.

This was how London greeted the news of the Venezuela strike. A “nonce” is Britspeak for “paedophile”.

I also loved and admired this woman’s response to ICE agents who stopped to threaten and intimidate her for following their vehicle. I don’t want you to make a bad decision, the ICE agent tells her. “That’s funny coming from you!” she says smiling away at him.

And this is another brilliant official, Rochelle Bilal, the sheriff of Philadelphia, pointing out all the ways that the actions of the ICE agent who shot Renee Nicole Good were in violation of both “legal law” and “moral law”. ICE, she said, was “made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement”.

I know, I know, this is probably too much content. But consider this a public service, I’m saving you from the algorithmic scroll which threw up this for me: Canadian comedian Trent McClellan dressed up as a NICE agent to terrorise tourists in Halifax. His weapons are Canadian-levels of courtesy and free candy. It’s from two months ago but I only just clocked it and I think it’s a really useful reminder that none of this is normal. This is normal:

Finally, it’s been extraordinary to witness what’s happening on the streets of Iran. You’ll have seen the incredible rivers of protestors flooding the streets of cities all across the country. That’s what people power looks like. Is it finally the revolution that Iranians have been longing for? The world is holding its breath.

I’m not sure who this woman is but this week’s newsletter is dedicated to her and the people of Iran and, especially, the incredible, gutsy, powerful women who have simply had enough.

Thank you to everyone who’s reading this. It’s one of my own personal rays of hope. If you like it, please share it with your friends and family and tell me in the comments whether I’m right, wrong, too doomery, not doomery enough, whether you like the vids and anything else that strikes you.