The same BCG that helped set up the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation" (GHF) is now directly involved in Burnham's 10-year plan for the UK.

Burnham's chief of staff, James Purnell, was a senior adviser at BCG.

The GHF hired mercenaries, through a security firm BCG itself helped create, who opened fire on Palestinians as they were herded into tight, enclosed spaces, desperately hoping to secure food for their starving families. Israeli occupation forces (IOF) slaughtered hundreds of them at and around those sites.

This is the firm Andy Burnham's government has brought in to help write his vision for Britain.

Britain keeps giving taxpayers' money to two American firms, BCG and Palantir, that have been directly involved in Israel's war crimes and genocide in Gaza. BCG put its own money into setting up the GHF, and its staff costed the expulsion of half a million Palestinians. Palantir expanded its support to the Israeli military after October 2023, and a UN special rapporteur found "reasonable grounds to believe" it provided an artificial intelligence platform for decisions on the battlefield.

At Labour's conference in September, Burnham said Britain had become "a country run for vested interests", and promised to "make a break with the direction of the past 40 years". In July, days before he became Prime Minister, he told Labour MPs he would rein in outsourcing and attacked "an outsourced state with little accountability", the Financial Times reported.

This weekend The Sunday Times revealed that Boston Consulting Group, the American consultancy where Purnell used to work, is working on Andy Burnham's vision for Britain, the ten-year plan due around Christmas. It is meant to set out his long-term ambitions on welfare, economic growth, energy and public control of utilities like water and buses. A senior BCG executive has been contacting Whitehall officials to ask for their views on policy questions such as how to grow the economy.

The government says BCG is providing one consultant, for "specific specialist advice". Its statement does not say what that advice is, what BCG is being paid, or how the firm was chosen. In the same statement it promised to keep cutting what the government spends on consultants. The Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, has called for BCG to be removed from the plan.

Notice the difference. The government says one consultant, giving specialist advice. The Sunday Times found a senior BCG executive asking Whitehall how to grow the British economy.

So we dug into BCG: what it did in Gaza, what it has been paid in Britain, and who keeps moving between the firm and the state.

What BCG did in Gaza

BCG blames two partners it has since fired. Its own letter to MPs shows what its people did.

In July 2025 the Financial Times exposed BCG's work on the GHF. Liam Byrne, the Labour chair of the Commons business and trade committee, wrote to BCG's chief executive, Christoph Schweizer, demanding details of the work and of BCG's internal investigation. BCG's reply, dated 22 July 2025 and published by the committee, sets out the timeline in its own words.

• October 2024 to January 2025. A BCG team in the United States, led by two partners, worked to set up the foundation that became the GHF. BCG calls it "a pro bono project supported by BCG funding". In plain words, BCG put its own money into building the GHF.
• March to May 2025. The lead partner signed a paid contract with McNally Capital, the American private equity firm that owns the security contractor Orbis, to plan the GHF's operations and logistics. BCG says it cancelled the invoice once it understood what the work was, and collected no fees.
• March 2025. BCG's chief risk officer told the same partner not to do any reconstruction work that did not involve the people of Gaza. He ignored the instruction. His team built a financial model of what BCG calls "post-war" Gaza, discussed it on Signal, and did not keep the messages, against BCG's own rules.

The Financial Times saw that model. It put a price on removing Palestinians from their own homeland: "relocation packages" of $9,000 a head, for 500,000 people in Gaza. It assumed a quarter of Gaza's people would be gone, and that three in four of those expelled were unlikely ever to return. It worked out that every Palestinian forcibly expelled would be $23,000 cheaper than one who stayed, Middle East Eye reported from the FT's investigation.

In that model, a Palestinian staying in their own home, on their own land, is a cost to be cut, and a Palestinian expelled for good is a saving. Offering cash to people Israel had bombed out of their homes and starved does not make their removal voluntary. It is ethnic cleansing, and BCG's staff costed it.

In August 2025 The Washington Post reported that the financial modelling behind the GREAT Trust, a plan for Gaza circulating in Donald Trump's administration and drawn up by some of the same Israelis who created the GHF, "was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group". The plan offered each Palestinian $5,000 to give up their homeland, and included a "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands". BCG told the Post it had not approved that work.

BCG told MPs that the only British organisation its team dealt with on that modelling was the Tony Blair Institute.

BCG fired the two partners and brought in the law firm WilmerHale to investigate. It told MPs it "will not publish the findings of this investigation".

The mercenaries, and the firm BCG helped build

BCG was chosen for the GHF work because of its ties to one man, the Financial Times reported. Phil Reilly, a former CIA paramilitary officer with 29 years at the agency, was a senior adviser at BCG for eight years from January 2017. In late 2024 he founded Safe Reach Solutions and left his BCG role. Safe Reach was the company the GHF contracted to run its sites. BCG staff then did "more detailed business planning" for Safe Reach and the GHF, and Safe Reach signed a contract with BCG worth over $1m for eight weeks of work.

Safe Reach hired the armed guards through a subcontract with UG Solutions, an American private military company, Mother Jones reported. Two UG Solutions contractors told the Associated Press in July 2025 that live ammunition, stun grenades and pepper spray were used at nearly every distribution, even when there was no threat, and that gunfire sometimes went towards people. One of them said:

AP verified videos filmed at the sites. They show hundreds of people crowded "between metal gates" and squeezed into "a narrow, fenced-in passage" to reach the food. Safe Reach told AP that its staff fired live rounds only into the ground and away from civilians. The GHF called the report false and said it was taking legal action against AP.

Médecins Sans Frontières ran two clinics near the sites. Between 7 June and 24 July 2025 they received 1,380 casualties, including 28 people who were killed and 71 children with gunshot wounds. MSF found "both targeted and indiscriminate violence by Israeli forces and private American contractors", and gave its report a title that says it plainly: "This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing."

The UN human rights office counted the dead. By 31 July 2025, nine weeks after the GHF opened its first site, at least 1,373 Palestinians had been killed trying to get food: 859 of them at and around the GHF's sites. "Most of these killings were committed by the Israeli military," it said. Human Rights Watch said the IOF's killings near the GHF's sites "amount to war crimes", and called the scheme a system "that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths".

This was Israel's genocide in Gaza. In September 2025 the UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide there. The GHF stopped handing out food at the October ceasefire and shut down in November 2025.

BCG funded the work to set up the GHF, planned its operations, and did the business planning for the company that ran its gates. Those are the gates where starving people were shot.

What BCG has been paid in Britain

BCG has done very well out of the British state.

During Covid, BCG was the fourth-largest recipient of government consultancy contracts, The Sunday Times reported. The Guardian found it charged about £10m for 40 consultants to work on Test and Trace for four months, at up to £6,250 a day, with no information on how the Department of Health would get value for money. BCG declined to comment.

Under Keir Starmer, BCG was paid almost £2m for at least two months' work evaluating HS2. And while Burnham was mayor of Greater Manchester, BCG was brought in to help the combined authority's long-term planning, on a two-week contract that paid its consultants hundreds of pounds an hour to "rapidly develop the case" for how Greater Manchester could deliver preventive healthcare.

So this is not the first time BCG has been paid public money on Burnham's watch. This time it is shaping his plan for the whole country.

The people move with the money. Sir Alex Chisholm, who ran the Cabinet Office as its permanent secretary through Covid, became a paid senior adviser at BCG in 2025. The government's appointments watchdog barred him from lobbying government for BCG for two years. Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Wigston, the former head of the RAF, took a paid role at BCG the same year.

The man who runs Burnham's No 10

James Purnell sat in Gordon Brown's cabinet alongside Andy Burnham. After he stood down as an MP in 2010, he went to work for BCG as an adviser to its public sector practice, before he joined the BBC in 2013.

In 2024 he became chief executive of Flint Global, a political advisory firm registered as a lobbyist in Brussels. Flint keeps its British clients secret: it has declared two in five years, Democracy for Sale found. In March 2025 Purnell hosted the trade minister Douglas Alexander at Flint's London headquarters, at a breakfast with almost two dozen companies that Flint chose. About half of them are listed as Flint clients on the EU's lobbying register, among them Uber, Amazon and Diageo. Flint declared no lobbying to Westminster's lobbying register for that period.

Burnham picked him in June. Purnell resigned from Flint, which says he has "no ongoing financial interest in the company of any kind". On 20 July he became the Prime Minister's chief of staff.

Now BCG, the firm he advised, is working on Burnham's plan, in the building Purnell runs, and Downing Street has not said how it got there. That is the revolving door between government and the consultancies, and it now runs through No 10. It is exactly the "country run for vested interests" Burnham told his party he would end.

Starmer had Mandelson and Palantir

Labour promised to stop this. In October 2023 Rachel Reeves told Labour's conference: "We will aim to cut consultancy spending in half over the next parliament." Under Keir Starmer that became a promise to save £1.2bn by 2026. Last month a Labour peer accused the government of "fudging" the figures by moving its consultancy bill into the category of financial services; the Cabinet Office denied it.

Starmer sent Peter Mandelson to Washington as ambassador while Mandelson owned 24% of Global Counsel, the lobbying firm he co-founded, which counted Palantir as a client. In February 2025 Starmer and Mandelson went to Palantir in Washington and met its chief executive, Alex Karp. No record was kept. A government minister, Baroness Anderson, later said "it was not a meeting, and so minutes were not taken". In September 2025 Palantir hired the Ministry of Defence's director of industrial strategy. In December the MoD gave Palantir a £240.6m contract without competition. The Cabinet Office says Mandelson had no involvement in that award.

A UN special rapporteur has set out Palantir's record. In her report to the Human Rights Council in July 2025, Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, wrote that in January 2024, three months into the genocide, Palantir announced a strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv "in solidarity". When Palantir was accused of killing Palestinians in Gaza, its chief executive, Alex Karp, answered: "mostly terrorists, that's true". The report says both are "indicative of executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-à-vis the unlawful use of force by Israel".

Then there is Tom Watson, Labour's former deputy leader. In November 2024 he took a paid seat on Palantir UK's Public Services Advisory Board and put it on the Lords register. Over the next 16 months he voted 30 times on the Crime and Policing Bill while Palantir was pushing the Metropolitan Police for a £50m contract, and five times on the Data (Use and Access) Bill, which changed how public bodies, the NHS included, share data. None of it broke the Lords rules, which let a peer vote on anything while a company pays him, as long as the payment is on the register.

On 26 March 2026 Watson took leave of absence from the Lords, for cancer treatment, he has said. On 14 May his register of interests was replaced with one line: "On leave of absence; exempt from registration". On 18 September, two months into Burnham's premiership, he joined Palantir as senior vice president. Parliament still lists him today as a Labour peer. Burnham's government decides by December whether to use the break clause in Palantir's £330m NHS contract, and The Times reported that Watson was hired to see off the MPs who want it used. Our full investigation is here.

Starmer had Mandelson and Palantir. Burnham has Purnell and BCG.

Burnham ran as the break from Starmer. He told his conference: "I am ready to do things my predecessors wouldn't." On this, he has carried on exactly where Starmer left off. His government restates Labour's promise to cut consultants in the same statement that defends bringing in BCG. A former lobbying-firm boss runs his No 10. A Labour peer who now works for Palantir still sits as Labour while Burnham's government decides whether to keep Palantir's NHS contract. And two American firms keep getting British public money, while Labour figures keep turning up on their payrolls, or their lobbyists', on the way into power or out of it.

Who moved between government and these firms

How it happened

A firm that put its own money into setting up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and whose staff priced the removal of Palestinians from their homeland at $9,000 a head, has no place in Downing Street, and Andy Burnham should never have let it in.

Sources: BCG, letter to the Commons Business and Trade Committee, 22 July 2025; Katie Tarrant, Andy Burnham aide's former consultancy shapes PM's vision for Britain, The Sunday Times, 8 November 2026; POLITICO London Playbook, 9 November 2026; Andy Burnham, speech to Labour Party Conference, 29 September 2026; the Financial Times on Burnham and outsourcing, as reported by Computer Weekly, 15 July 2026; the Financial Times investigation of BCG, as reported by Middle East Eye, 5 July 2025; Middle East Eye, Ex-CIA officer running Gaza aid security advised Boston Consulting Group, 6 June 2025; The Washington Post, 31 August 2025, as reported by Common Dreams; the Associated Press, 3 July 2025; Mother Jones, 17 September 2025; Médecins Sans Frontières, 7 August 2025; UN human rights office, 31 July 2025; Human Rights Watch, 1 August 2025; Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, From economy of occupation to economy of genocide, A/HRC/59/23, July 2025; The Guardian on Test and Trace, via Yahoo News, 14 October 2020; ACOBA advice to Sir Alex Chisholm, 2025; Adam Bychawski and Peter Geoghegan, Democracy for Sale, 30 June 2026; Civil Service World on Rachel Reeves, 10 October 2023; LBC, 20 March 2026; Progressive International, 24 February 2026; UK Parliament, Lord Watson of Wyre Forest, checked 9 November 2026; NewsCord, Palantir paid a Labour peer for sixteen months of votes, 20 September 2026.