November 23rd, 1963

Recently buying a book online, I got a search result from Abebooks. I used to think this company was independent, but you guessed it—it’s owned by Amazon, so no escape from the ubiquitous grasp of Jeff Bezos there. However, with a few vain, spare minutes to kill I thought I would see what was on offer of my own, slim back catalogue. This can be a disappointing experience, when you find that one of your babies is advertised at a mere 0.01p. Presumably the retailer makes a few bob on the p&p. But lo! Abebooks had some seller in the UK trying to offload The Price of Power—the Secret Funding of the Tory Party (published 1999) for a very satisfactory £67. How they arrived at this price I have no idea, and unlike artist’s resale rights, there’ll be no reward for me here. But if it starts a trend (it won’t) I’ll take a measure of satisfaction from it. It is, after all some kind of afterlife.
 
+Leftists* have questioned whether it is a good idea to award a £330 million NHS data contract to US ‘spytech’ firm Palantir. Palantir’s founder is Peter Thiel, whose Wikipedia entry has him down as a major Trump supporter, who said “after the  September 11 attacks, the debate in the United States was ‘will we have more security with less privacy or less security with more privacy?’ He envisioned Palantir as providing  data mining services to government intelligence agencies that were maximally unintrusive and traceable. Palantir's first backer was the  Central Intelligence Agency's  venture capital arm  In-Q-Tel. The company steadily grew and in 2015 was valued at $20 billion, with Thiel being the company's largest shareholder.” What do we know about data mining companies? They always want more. Not only does data make big money, it also feeds the control mechanisms that inevitably comes with all the information they gather. That Thiel is also (according to Wikipedia) a ‘steering committee member of the Bilderberg group’ comes as no surprise. He’s clearly an influencer, but not perhaps in the mould of Kim Kardishan. What of Labour’s response to the award of our NHS data management to this conglomerate? This section from a recent (29/10/23) BBC news report is illuminating:
 
‘Responding to Mr Karp's [CEO of Palantir] comments, Ms Donelan [Secretary of State for Sceince] told the same programme [Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg]: ‘We're not in the business of damaging people's privacy or rights. We're not going to start selling on people's private data, of course, not without their consent, what we're talking about here is enabling us to utilise the data around the NHS to tackle some of the biggest diseases that people are facing so they can live healthier, longer, happier lives.’ Labour's shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said: ‘Labour is completely clear: we will not sell off NHS patient's data. Rishi Sunak must today issue a clear statement that NHS patient data will not be sold to private companies.’” (emphasis added)
 
Wes Streeting is thus on exactly the same page as the government, which is to say ‘we’re not in the business of damaging people’s privacy or rights.’ Now who’s going to own up to doing that? And the only guarantee apparently on offer here is that the data won’t be sold ‘of course,’ ‘not ‘without our consent.’ Are these mortals aware of how data travels these days? Selling it is not necessarily the issue, and the idea that our consent would be required before it was sold suggests that neither of these luminaries has ever given a second thought to, e.g. ‘accepting cookies.’ When was the last time anyone went through the long lists of those innocent sounding things?
 
One might argue that these private tech companies have qualifications governments lack. That should worry us. It means governments also don’t have the skills to keep these outfits in check.
 
*For example Clive Lewis MP, quoted by Open Democracy (23/8/23) ‘people want change under a Labour government and hosting some of these firms [at Labour Party conference] signals that the same palms are going to be greased. I do not think that organisations like Palantir and others are necessarily the kind of organisations that Labour in the year before a general election should be cosying up to, I think they should be saying: ‘Look, we'll deal with you but frankly, some of you are part of the problem’’

+ 'Knock, knock.'
'Who's there?'
'Doctor'
'Doctor Who?'

Yes, today is the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of Dr Who. It was my first memory of TV (the second was the news of Kennedy's assassination - but I must have got this mixed up - Kennedy was shot on the 22nd November 1963, but maybe the TV news I saw was the day after. A curious time for a ten-year old, anyway.)