Rory Stewart

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Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Alastair Campbell.

Well, we've got a lot of really interesting questions this week.

We're going to begin with a conversation about Palantir, under a lot of scrutiny and criticism recently of this enormous American tech company having access to all this data and what does it do with this data.

We're then going to get into the issue of why the Foreign Office has closed its international humanitarian law section.

We're going to talk about mental health, young people, Gen Z, including the question of how people reported the war in Gaza, the language they used, the types of adjectives they used, and the way in which bias can be identified simply almost through sampling statistics of the use of words.

Now, where do you want to start?

Yeah, well, look, the Palantir debate in terms of the public debate

involves a lot of people who feel very, very angry about a US company connected to defense and the CIA getting their hands on British data.

The story is, of course, like a lot of these stories, a little bit more complicated.

What does Palantir actually do?

Well, what it does is it deals with how data is managed between different databases and government, and through looking at data, promises to deliver real efficiency.

So I, when I was the prison's minister, for example, was pitched by Palantir.

And what they pointed out is that it was impossible for me, for example, to find out how many prisoners had an undergraduate degree, which was important in terms of my funding with that.

They pointed out that, well, I can't remember what, like 92 different databases in the prison service.

and none of them speak to each other.

Some of them were essentially put together in very old software systems.