NHS Staff Told ‘Stop Criticising Palantir or Lose Your Job’ | Novara Media.

https://novaramedia.com/2026/04/14/nhs-staff-told-stop-criticising-palantir-or-lose-your-job/

"NHS staff have been told they might lose their jobs if they criticise NHS England’s controversial £330m contract with IDF-contractor Palantir."

#nhs #palantir #NovaraMedia #UkGovernment #democracy #HealthCare #uk #jobs #england #money

New Statesman | The silent coup by Will Dunn

On 20 April 2025, an official in the British government emailed their colleagues a story from that day’s Financial Times. The headline read: “UAE set to use AI to write laws in world first”. The officials, all of whom are involved in implementing AI in the running of the British state, read the article with amusement. “We were tempted to say: ‘We got there first,’” one of them told me. But they felt that the UK was “not fighting for the crown of the first AI-written line of legislation”, so they decided not to make public a fact very few people know: text composed by a large language model has made its way into an act of parliament. British laws are already being written by AI.

This is a matter of sovereignty. The software products we refer to as “AI” are all built on advanced “foundational models” from the US and China. This is a technology we do not control, but which plays an increasingly active role at every level of the British power structure. It is part of every conversation, drafting emails between officials, summarising ministers’ briefings and composing speeches delivered in the House of Commons. The Bank of England is using machine learning to inform its decisions on interest rates. The BBC uses AI to redraft articles. Every student at Oxford – where 31 of our previous prime ministers were educated – is now being educated with the help of OpenAI. There is little public understanding of how quickly this technology is moving through the institutions of power, or how enthusiastically it’s being pursued by a government that believes AI software could solve all its problems.

In dozens of interviews with current and former government officials and advisers, technologists and MPs – most of whom asked not to be named, in order to speak freely – I have been told about a quiet handing over of control in the frameworks of advice, intelligence and decision-making that underlie every government decision. This is not just a simple software upgrade. Large language models (LLMs), the software behind AI program such as ChatGPT, are built to produce answers that will be accepted by users – not to calculate, but to convince. This highly persuasive software, built primarily overseas, is being handed an unknown amount of political power.

Read more: https://www.newstatesman.com/technology/2026/04/the-silent-coup

#artificialintelligence(ai) #politics #technology #ukgovernment

UK Government to Cap Interest Rates on Plan 2 and 3 Student Loans at 6%

📰 Original title: Interest rate to be capped on some student loans

🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: It's not clickbait ✅

View full AI summary: https://killbait.com/en/uk-government-to-cap-interest-rates-on-plan-2-and-3-student-loans-at-6/?redirpost=cbe0a598-e182-4d8f-9600-5b4648772fe1

#economy #studentloans #interestrates #ukgovernment

UK Government to Cap Interest Rates on Plan 2 and 3 Student Loans at 6%

📰 Original title: Interest rate to be capped on some student loans

🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: It's not clickbait ✅

View full AI summary: https://killbait.com/en/uk-government-to-cap-interest-rates-on-plan-2-and-3-student-loans-at-6/?redirpost=cbe0a598-e182-4d8f-9600-5b4648772fe1

#economy #studentloans #interestrates #ukgovernment

https://winbuzzer.com/2026/04/07/uk-courts-anthropic-london-expansion-pentagon-feud-xcxwbn/

UK Pitches Anthropic on London Expansion as Pentagon Feud Deepens

#AI #Anthropic #UnitedKingdom #Claude #AISafety #AIArmsRace #DefenseTech #Pentagon #UKGovernment

MARMALADE MADNESS: The Easter breakfast row that’s got politicians in a sticky situation

It is the preserve that launched a thousand panicked headlines — but the Government says Britain’s beloved marmalade is going nowhere, despite a week of political boiling over the nation’s breakfast tables.

Reports emerged this week that Keir Starmer’s planned food deal with the EU could force manufacturers to relabel their marmalade as “citrus marmalade” — sparking outrage from Tory and Reform politicians and prompting one newspaper to ask what Paddington Bear would think.

The row centres on the Government’s proposed sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement with Brussels, under which the UK would align with updated EU food rules. Among those rules is a 2024 EU directive that widened the definition of marmalade — allowing spreads made from fruits other than citrus to use the name, as long as they specify the fruit involved.

The change came about because in several EU countries, the words “marmalade” and “jam” are used interchangeably. Before the update, only citrus-based spreads could legally be called marmalade under EU law — a rule that itself originated from British lobbying in the 1970s, which gave orange marmalade a special protected status in Brussels.

Critics including shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel accused the Government of letting EU bureaucracy creep back into British kitchens. Writing on X, she said Labour was “attacking the great British marmalade” and accused the Prime Minister of being “desperate to fit in with his EU pals.”

But the Government hit back with some relish — pointing out that marmalade on British supermarket shelves is already typically labelled as “orange marmalade” or “Seville orange marmalade,” which already complies with the new EU wording. The directive itself states that “citrus” can simply be replaced with the name of the fruit.

A Government source said: “This isn’t such a sticky situation after all. The only ‘marmalade madness’ is the Tories and Reform boiling over with rage about jar labels that won’t need to change. Despite false claims that the name orange marmalade is toast, it will be preserved — so there’s no need to spread alarm.”

For Wales, the story is not entirely without substance. Welsh food producers who export to EU markets have long navigated labelling requirements, and any SPS agreement would affect producers across the UK including those in Welsh food and farming sectors.

The World Marmalade Awards, held annually at Dalemain Mansion in Cumbria since 2005, said it planned to keep its competition restricted to citrus-based spreads regardless of any rule changes. The awards’ director said the competition aimed to uphold what she described as “rock solid British standard marmalade, the type which has been eaten for centuries from Elizabeth I to James Bond.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs confirmed that UK firms will need to adapt labelling to comply with the updated EU directive under the proposed SPS deal — but insisted most manufacturers had already made, or were preparing to make, the changes for export purposes anyway.

The Government said the deal would make it easier for British-produced marmalade — alongside other classic products such as Cumberland sausages and Scottish smoked salmon — to be sold across EU markets.

Whether Paddington would approve remains unclear. The fictional Peruvian bear, whose passion for marmalade sandwiches has made him a cultural institution, has not commented.

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