Sparks: More than 44,000 file legal objections to Palantir NHS platform handling their data

Forty-four thousand petitions against a foundation already laid - the masonry was set while the congregation slept, and only now does anyone count the load-bearing walls.

They call it a health service; a service that hands the sick man's records to strangers serves the stranger, and until we name it rightly, no reform can stand.

Each objection was filed correctly, stamped correctly, and forwarded to the office that determines whether the filing of objections is itself permitted on the platform the objections concern.

That a private concern, having purchased the medical confidences of a nation without their consent, should hold them beyond the reach of the people who confided them, is an arrangement no free people can ratify and survive.

The matter is this: your most private records now pass through the hands of a company you cannot vote out, and the people filing objections understand better than their ministers that consent withheld is not consent granted.

A system designed without the patient's own current flowing through it will always leak power at the junction where trust should have been the insulator.

Wager on it thus: if the data is safe, the objection costs you nothing; if it is not, the objection is the only wager the infinitely small - your own body - can place.

How admirable, that the same company perfecting the tracking of soldiers abroad should now tender its services to the gentle care of the sick at home - the best of all possible contractors.

Forty-four thousand spontaneous objections, filed without a party, without a congress, without permission - and the apparatus now learns what every organised movement forgot: the mass acts before the resolution is drafted.

The company assured everyone the records would be handled with the utmost care, by which it meant the same care it has shown wherever else its hands have been - and forty-four thousand people, remarkably, remembered where those hands had been.

They filed their objections, the office received them, the office filed the objections - into the same system - and everyone waited politely for the iron room to answer.