Contra populum

The case for honesty with the public

The British are a secretive people. It’s been a tendency since as far back as Francis Walsingham, who developed the first spy network under Elizabeth, while in the 20^th century the United Kingdom would be a pioneer in creating espionage agencies. The British seemed to actively enjoy it.

Indeed, one arguably unappreciated reason that communism and fascism didn’t take off here is not just due to the instinctive moderation of the British people, but because the deep state, as it was then, did its best to undermine extremist movements. Most of the public were unaware of this - and if they did know about it, they didn’t care, since as far as they were concerned the man in Whitehall was on their side.

In recent years, however, it’s become notable how much more secretive the British state has become, and keen to keep details from the electorate. It has become increasingly fearful of giving them facts, keen to weave a ‘narrative’ and at the same obsessed about ‘misinformation’. The public cannot be trusted with information, because they might react violently – so the truth is covered up, and the problem gets worse.

This tendency has been highlighted by this week’s scandal involving the last Conservative Government’s secret scheme to bring in thousands of Afghans at huge public expense.

The story begins in February 2022, when a Royal Marine officer based in London, responsible for vetting asylum seekers, emailed a group of people involved in rescuing former interpreters and members of the Afghan National Army Special Forces, who faced reprisals following the Taliban takeover of the previous August.

The officer in question had intended to email a filtered list of about 100 individuals, but accidentally sent the full Excel file naming 25,000 people, including family members, who had applied for asylum in Britain. It also contained the details of British special forces and spies.

British foreign policy in Afghanistan: not always a success

The email was passed on and shared, eventually appearing on a Facebook group. Eighteen months later the Government was made aware of the problem when an Afghan man, who had been denied resettlement in Britain, attempted to blackmail them by threatening to tell the Taliban about the list. He sent a list of 79 names and their personal details to prove he had it.

This became apparent on August 10, 2023 when a support worker for Afghans settling in Britain sent an email to Luke Pollard, the Labour MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, and James Heappey, a Conservative defence minister, warning that the email had been shared, and that the Taliban had a copy of the list. The Government was apparently made aware of this four days later, and on August 25 defence secretary Ben Wallace, in one of his last acts in the job, applied to the High Court for an injunction to stop the leak being made public.

The government’s injunction of August 2023 was upgraded to a ‘superinjunction’ on September 1, a legal tool which had so far largely been used by celebrities to protect their private lives (and affairs); this not only prevents anyone from reporting the details of the order, but even its existence. This also meant that no one could be aware of the Government’s response to the leak - which was to bring over 16,000 people mentioned on the email to Britain, without the public’s knowledge or consent, and without discussion.

As The Times reported, the Government’s superinjunction was unprecedented, and ‘its gagging power was so wide-ranging that journalists were prevented from asking basic questions about how the leak happened, who knew what when and who should be held to account.

‘Parliament was misled and important scrutiny of a multibillion-pound operation to handle the fallout and rescue potentially endangered Afghans was impossible. In one of the most shocking hearings, behind locked doors in courtroom 27 of the Royal Courts of Justice, lawyers discussed MoD plans to “provide cover” for the numbers of Afghans arriving in Britain with a statement to parliament.’

The injunction contra mundrum, which means either ‘against the world’ or ‘defying everyone’, was supposed to be in place for four months, but government lawyers fought for it to continue and eventually admitted there was no longer an ‘end date’.

Last May it was lifted by Mr Justice Chamberlain, who called it a ‘wholly novel use of the remedy’ that ‘stifled public debate’. He said in an earlier judgment that it was ‘completely shutting down accountability’ and ‘corrosive of the public’s trust in government’. It was also ‘likely to give rise to understandable suspicion that the court’s processes are being used for the purposes of censorship.’ Justice Chamberlain, after learning about the cost of the cover-up, had said: ‘I am starting to doubt myself – am I going bonkers?’

However, the Government won an appeal, and it was reinstated.

The Telegraph reported how Tom Forster KC, appointed by the judge to challenge the Government, said the lack of scrutiny had put ‘the democratic process in the deep freeze’.

The judge had invited journalists aware of the leak – who were told they would go to jail if they revealed it – to question senior Ministry of Defence official Natalie Moore: ‘The journalists pointed out that the issue could affect the forthcoming general election and made the case anew for the public to be told the truth.’

But ‘Ms Moore told the court a statement would be made to Parliament to “provide cover” for why so many Afghans were arriving in Britain. A government briefing paper shown to the court said that ministers wanted to “control the narrative” and use a “robust public comms strategy” to set out “the scale but not the cause” of the Afghans arriving.’

Later, the Labour defence secretary John Healey, in a memo seen by the court, said that ‘political and reputational considerations’ had been a consideration of the previous government’s response.

The judge said that the government had hidden the facts about spending by ‘making a statement that provides cover and agree a narrative which is not a true narrative… It is a very, very striking thing.’

Indeed - the resettled Afghans weren’t even included in Office for National Statistics migration data. Very striking!

The Ministry of Defence had argued that without the superinjunction, up to 100,000 Afghans were at risk, ‘yet this had not been announced to Parliament nor subjected to any public scrutiny. The money to do so was drawn from the Treasury’s reserve funds and not the MoD, Home Office or Department for Communities and Local Government’s budgets.’

The Telegraph also reported that ‘During that time there was a sinister shift in ministers’ reasoning for keeping the public in the dark. The Government’s lawyers told Mr Justice Chamberlain that it wanted to put an “agreed narrative” in place to explain away the arrivals of large numbers of Afghans – in other words, lie to the public.’

In October, a Cabinet sub-committee of the new Labour Government decided to extend the extend scheme. So the injunction remained in place, for 683 days - until last week, when the Government decided that the threat to any Afghan lives was ‘less than previously thought’.

It has been described as the most expensive email in history; in reality, it wasn’t the email that was expensive but the reaction to it.

By the time that the superinjunction was lifted, some 16,156 individuals affected by the breach had reached Britain, the entire secret Afghan secret scheme costing between £850m and £1 billion, even before we look at the lifetime costs of the migrants and their children. This is only part of a total cost of £6 or maybe £7 billion for the entire Afghan settlement, which has involved housing being set aside across the country (including a housing estate near me). At one point, 20 per cent of all Ministry of Defence accommodation was being used to house Afghans.

To put this into perspective, the total overspend currently bankrupting councils is £564 million; the total raised from inheritance tax on farms, which farmers consider a life and death issue, is £520 million; this year’s cuts to the armed forces total £500 million.

As it turned out, the Taliban had access to the names already, and including all payroll data for military and police workers, informer records and the interior biometric database. The Labour Government’s independent review by an anonymous retired civil servant concluded that the data was ‘unlikely to provide considerably new or highly pertinent information to the Taliban’. It was all completely unnecessary, and illustrates the benefits of open discussion; openness increases the total of available information, leading to better judgements.

Defence and foreign affairs broadcaster Mark Urban wrote this week on his substack about how a culture of secrecy had grown over the last four decades, so that ‘Bit by bit a system where journalists, academics, and parliamentarians could have regular access to the forces, so that all sides were better informed, has been crushed. The Malcolm Tucker tendency, control freakery, the fatal illusion by panic-stricken spinners that controlling that day’s headlines might dictate real world outcomes, has done for it. It has been a long and dismal rearguard action against openness.’

Urban noted that ‘even Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, cleared for top secret hearings, and whose reports are vetted by Downing Street, was kept in the dark about the Afghan data leak.’