In this week’s issue
- How Palantir exploited lucrative corporate loophole to slash its UK tax bill, as it rakes in millions from public contracts
- Our investigation into the death of a TikTok content moderator in Kenya exposed allegations of exploitation and labour traffickin
- What Western fears over an AI apocalypse miss about China’s hyper-futuristic tech boom
- How a campaign to protect Albanian wetlands from Jared Kushner-backed mega-resort exploded into a nationwide ‘Flamingo Revolution’ against corruption and land grabs
- Why Andy Burnham’s choice of chief of staff has fuelled fears of a corporate-friendly ‘Blair tribute act’
- An overlooked multi-billion-pound criminal crisis could be the unlikely secret weapon Burnham needs to reshape British politic
- The first episode of our new podcast, How to Find Queer Elders, follows a Ghanaian trans woman’s search for queer elders when LGBTQI lives across Africa have been violently rendered invisible
Last year, Palantir recorded about £320m in revenue in the UK, but paid less than a million pounds in tax. Revenue is not profit, as the accountants keep telling us – and that’s where the magic happens, as we reveal in our exclusive investigation into Palantir’s multi-million-pound tax shield.
“At a time we are asking for more scrutiny into the Federated Data Platform contract, it is mindboggling that Palantir are siphoning millions of pounds out of the UK,” Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley said in response to our investigation. Green Party deputy leader Mothin Ali, said our findings “expose the staggering extent to which Palantir is taking from our country while giving back as little as possible.”
We keep hearing about how the Treasury has no money; now we know why.
Our cover investigation this week is from Kenya, where longtime openDemocracy contributor Mukanzi Musanga re-traces the circumstances behind the death of a Tiktok moderator to find a shocking pattern of people being allegedly trafficked across Africa to work long hours scraping disturbing content from your TiktTok feed. As Mukanzi shows, Big Tech is producing whole new forms of labour exploitation – which we will be exploring in greater depth in our reporting this year.
Do read Selina Xu’s wonderful essay on ‘The People’s Republic of Techno-Optimists’. “China feels profoundly more future-oriented out of necessity – it cannot afford to not keep up with the future,” Xu writes. “The cost would simply be too high.”
Plus: Paul Rogers on money laundering in UK politics, Ethan Shone reveals lobbyists are already sinking their claws into Andy Burnham, and Nandini Naira Archer on Flamingos, Jared Kushner and Albania and more!
Holding Big Tech accountable while the taxman won’t is hard work! Give us a hand by supporting our investigative reporting.
Aman Sethi, Editor-in-Chief
Aman Sethi
As disinformation networks spend millions to manufacture confusion, openDemocracy relies on reader donations to dig up the facts. We don't have corporate backers, billionaire owners, or hidden political affiliations. We only answer to you. If you value journalism that refuses to look away, stand with us.
Mukanzi Musanga
Selina Xu
Nandini Naira Archer
Ethan Shone
Paul Rogers
Ayodeji Rotinwa
Weekly Poll
Do you believe big tech taking over our lives is “inevitable”?
Reader Comments
This is great stuff but as for a possible PM Burnham achieving “UK” growth through social care, this is devolved in Scotland where I live.
Apart from the fact that Burnham would have no social care remit in Scotland, I personally would have no expectation that he would ever adopt such a strategy for England.
The Labour Party has been gutted and sold its soul to the highest bidders.
–Eddie via email
Carla Abreu
This week in history
The Democratic Republic of the Congo's Independence • 30 June 1960
On 30 June 1960, the Democratic Republic of the Congo officially won its independence from Belgium. At the formal handover ceremony, newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba delivered a blistering, unscheduled speech that shattered the facade of the event. Refusing to politely praise the Belgian King, Lumumba instead indicted the brutal, extractive reality of colonial rule.
"Who will forget the rifle-fire from which so many of our brothers perished, or the gaols in to which were brutally thrown those who did not want to submit to a regime of justice, oppression and exploitation which were the means the colonialists employed to dominate us?"
His uncompromising stance made him an immediate hero to the global left and the Pan-African movement, but marked him as a threat to Western capitalist interests. He was assassinated just months later with Belgian and CIA complicity.
Our archive piece traces the bloody continuum of Western imperialism. It links the horrors of King Leopold's rubber plantations directly to the Western-backed assassination of Lumumba, placing Congolese liberation within the broader context of global racial capitalism and modern movements for justice.
Maged Mandour
What we're reading
Yesteryear - Caro Claire Burke
I was writing about trad wives before it was cool, so I immediately bought the hyped-book of the summer: a trad wife influencer waking up in the 1850s and forced to live the life she was selling to her Instagram followers. But this book was just a huge disappointment, a sentiment shared by most readers I know. The main character was underdeveloped – from her experiences of religion to motherhood to politics, the latter of which the novel constantly shied away from. While there was some engagement with the far right, the book never had the courage to dig into these issues. The sections in the past were vague and unsubstantial, there were so many unanswered questions, and Burke seemed to spend more time on how to get Instagram followers than researching pioneer living. All that said, it was immensely readable. It’s just a shame the book did not meet the promise of the concept.
Sian Norris, senior investigations reporter
