2026: Week 20 - Back to Parliament

After the State Opening of Parliament and the King’s speech last week, it was back to normal Westminster business, if only for a short while before recess.

I spoke this week in Parliament about the shortcomings of the King’s speech, highlighting that it didn’t go far enough in ensuring that the UK benefits better from not only defence spending, but from other services as well.  For too long we have seen the same pattern time and time again. Services and systems that are set up to serve the public gradually drift away from having purpose, to simply extracting rents, and our time all wrapped up in a bureaucratic mess.  We need to move back to an economy and set of systems that we build, understand, and control. The people in this country need to know that the systems they rely on such as public health, transport, housing, have purpose to the people, not just bottom lines to fill.

The Chancellor this week announced a package of measures designed to help ease the price increases seen as a result of the US conflict with Iran.  The temporary 5p cut in fuel duty will stay, despite the Chancellor previously saying it would end.  In addition to this she will offer free bus travel for children during August, cut tariffs on some food imports and cut the VAT rate on tickets for summer attractions to 5%.  The Government are labelling these measures as the “Great British summer savings scheme” but these measures do not go far enough.  The onus is on businesses to pass these savings on to the customer, at a time when businesses are already struggling with the rises in the minimum wage and employer NI contributions.  These “savings” will also do nothing to help those families that are already struggling to put food on the table, let alone considering taking their family on a summer day out.

If the Government are serious about tackling the cost of living crisis they need to start making proper changes that will benefit everyone, not just the better off in society.

In other news this week it was good to hear that the London Mayor has blocked a £50 million deal between the Metropolitan Police and Palantir, citing a clear and serious breach of procurement rules.  The deal would have allowed the use of Palantir’s AI technologies to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations. 

Deals of this size have to be approved by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, which highlighted that the Met had only seriously engaged with the one supplier (Palantir). It also had the potential for locking the Met into Palantir’s technology; the office also reported that the deal did not “ensure or demonstrate value for money”.

This is a welcome step forward towards the UK becoming untangled from Palantir’s ever increasing grip, and will allow UK companies to bid for future contracts in a fair and transparent process.