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Good morning. The biggest story in Westminster today is the Afghan files scandal. The catastrophic data leak that occurred under Boris Johnson’s government endangered possibly tens of thousands of people. The remarkable super-injunction taken out by Rishi Sunak’s government — extended and defended in court by Keir Starmer’s — obscured both the breach and the secret visa route established to try and save people from the Taliban.
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Ignominious chapter
The accidental leak of a vast database containing the details of Afghan nationals who worked with the UK before the return to power of the Taliban in 2021 is among the most ignominious chapters in the recent history of the British state. (Our quick guide to the Afghan files scandal is here if you haven’t read it already, while all our coverage of it can be found here.)
It’s one thing to prevent disclosing the fact of a catastrophic data breach that had the potential to further endanger people who worked with the British government against the Taliban. But to also obscure the existence of a resettlement route for Afghan refugees? It’s not as if we didn’t know the Taliban had taken back control of Afghanistan and that some Afghan nationals who helped the British were in danger. Indeed, much larger numbers of people who have come to the UK from Afghanistan did so via publicly disclosed routes.
It’s not as if the Afghan nationals whose details were exposed in the breach were all informed about what had happened either.
We’ll see what the public reaction is over the coming weeks, but talk that the files could fuel far-right riots such as the ones we saw in the wake of the Southport murders feel pretty specious to me. Those riots were the result of misinformation about a horrific series of crimes. Whereas we already knew the UK government was taking in refugees from Afghanistan who worked with the British.
Resettling people is a difficult policy challenge because of language, cultural and employment barriers. Hiding the scale of what we were doing, and not just the cause, cannot possibly have helped.
Equally troublingly, history teaches us that when states find novel ways of avoiding scrutiny, they tend to return to them. This may have been the first super-injunction the British government has sought. But I would be very surprised if it turned out to be the last.
Now try this
I saw Superman at the Imax. It’s good fun and it looked great. I saw it with an old friend who, we realised shortly before it started, has only ever had rotten luck when we’ve gone to see something at the Imax before. So it was nice to see something enjoyable together for a change. Danny Leigh’s review is here.
