The British state put thousands of lives at risk. It covered up its blunder with an unprecedented legal gag on Parliament and Press, with threats of jail for anybody even thinking about breaking it.
It launched a massive clandestine resettlement scheme for thousands of the victims of its bungling to relocate to the UK. The tab – hundreds of millions of pounds and rising – was picked up by British taxpayers, even though they were kept entirely in the dark about the whole shambles.
That, in a nutshell, is the Afghan data-leak scandal. Both the previous Tory government and the current Labour one are complicit. Nobody, of course, has been held to account – and perhaps never will be, such is the British way these days.
But now the grim details of this sorry saga are at last emerging – with much more to come – I expect the fury of public, Press and parliament to be monumental. As it should be.
The scale of the scandal is breathtaking. Not just the stupidity of the original data breach but the fact that the British state conspired against its own people to bring – behind our backs and at huge expense – thousands of Afghans into the country, while going to enormous lengths to hide the fact it was doing any such thing – all to cover up its own incompetence.
At a time when trust in politicians is already at an all-time low it would be hard to imagine anything more damaging, more designed to see trust plummet even further. The sense of anger and betrayal will soon be palpable.
Tory and Labour governments have got away with a total absence of scrutiny on the matter for more than three years. Those responsible should now brace themselves to be scrutinised as never before. This story doesn’t end now. It is just the start.
A refugee who was relocated to the UK, fears the leak has put his family at greater risk. His family home has been repeatedly raided by the Taliban (pictured), his brother beaten and accused of ‘sharing the blood of an infidel spy’ and his mother violently questioned
The original blunder and its aftermath happened on the Tories’ watch. So they have most to answer for.
It was also the last government that decided to shut down all the usual forums of democratic accountability – parliament, Press, public debate – by seeking and obtaining a court-ordered super injunction, which didn’t just impose a total blackout on what was going on, it forbid even mentioning the very existence of the injunction.
But Labour, whose Defence Secretary, John Healey, had been briefed about developments in opposition, didn’t exactly rush to restore accountability. Healey posed as the champion of transparency on the BBC yesterday but he kept the super injunction in place for a further year as the secret resettlement scheme continued unabated.
The fact we know a lot more than we did only two days ago is down less to Healey and a lot more to relentless legal action by the Daily Mail and a few other newspapers to get the injunction lifted. In the end even the courts realised it was nothing less than state censorship, originally meant to be temporary but (surprise, surprise) still going strong almost two years later.
There are elements of farce to this story which have more in common with the Keystone Cops than good government.
The original email, sent in February 2022 by the military to various contacts to check on the suitability of certain Afghans for resettlement in Britain, was meant to include only a handful of names. Instead it contained a spreadsheet with 25,000 applications, totalling 100,000 when families are included, in 33,000 rows of information. Even then, for 18 months, the MoD had no idea what it had done.
It was only in August 2023, when a member of the public emailed the then-Armed Forces minister to say he had a copy of the spreadsheet and, he suspected, so did the Taliban (since it was circulating in Afghanistan), that the balloon went up.
Defence Secretary John Healey making a statement to MPs in the House of Commons following the lifting of reporting restrictions relating to the relocation of Afghans who worked with the UK Government
When an anonymous post on Facebook also revealed they had a copy, with the ominous words ‘I want to disclose it’, the enormity of what had happened at last struck home. An injunction was sought to brush it all under the carpet and the hush-hush resettlement scheme (Operation Rubific) launched to rescue those whose lives British incompetence had put in danger.
So many questions remain unanswered, not least the cost.
In court submissions the government put a £7billion price tag for resettlement. Healey has since claimed that refers to the total cost of all the various schemes to resettle Afghans, though that is not what the court documents say.
He claims Rubific will cost up to £850million, which is high enough. So far 18,500 Afghans and their families have been resettled here, with 5,400 more to come. It looks like the remaining 75,000 will simply be abandoned, at obvious risk of Taliban retaliation. Sometimes it is not easy for proud Brits to hold their heads high these days.
Of course the cost does not end there. It costs £1.25million over three years to house an Afghan family of four in MoD or hotel accommodation, where many are now staying. It’s half that if social housing can be found for them. But with 1.3million households already on social housing waiting lists, that’s not a solution – and that’s before you factor in the risk of community tensions if newcomers are seen to jump the queue.
Nor will the liability of the British taxpayer end there. The usual legal ambulance-chasers are going full pelt to line their own pockets by demanding compensation for Afghans named in the spreadsheet.
One Manchester law firm is aiming for 5,000 clients and an average compensation of £50,000 a piece. A nice little earner.
A government-chartered plane carrying Afghan refugees, many of whom worked for the British and fled when the Taliban reclaimed Kabul, arrives at Stansted Airport
The lawyers say Britain ‘owed a duty of care for their dangerous work’. Which is true enough for Afghan translators, soldiers and others who fought alongside the British in Afghanistan. This newspaper has fought a sustained and principled campaign for Britain to do better by these people.
But it turns out a lot of names on the spreadsheet do not fall into that category but were just ordinary Afghans who chanced their luck by applying for asylum in the hope it would lead to a passage to Britain.
In a striking example of the ineptitude for which the British state is becoming infamous we have managed to open our doors to thousands of Afghans with no or few links to the UK while still doing nothing like enough for the Afghan translators and special forces to whom we owe debts of honour and gratitude, many of whom are still stuck in Afghanistan, Pakistan or even Iran.
It also turns out that Afghans named in the now notorious email might not be as much at risk as feared. It looks as if the Taliban already has all the information it needs – it probably has the email, too – and is in a position to mete out retribution whenever it is so minded (so far, it’s not been much inclined to do so). Which makes you wonder if that injunction was ever really necessary.
Democratic scrutiny and disinfecting sunlight will now have their day. As revelation is piled upon on revelation, there should be ruin for reputations and carnage for careers.
Without penalties for failure, the British state will continue to wallow in a default modus operandi of screw-up followed by cover-up (not to mention stitch-up of those who won’t toe the line). It will rip asunder the implicit contract of trust between voters and leaders without which no democracy can survive.
