Following the lifting of a superinjunction, it has been revealed that the UK Government established a hidden resettlement route for Afghans who were supposedly in danger of Taliban-led persecution after a catastrophic data breach involving a Ministry of Defence (MoD) official.
With the data error revealing the personal details of up to 100,000 Afghans (with around one-fifth already in the UK or scheduled to come here), the total amount earmarked has been calculated to be in the region of £7billion.
If one had to design a scandal that would do immeasurable damage to public trust and confidence in the British state, it would be this one.
It is a truly toxic mixture of rank incompetence and gross establishment opacity. For the UK government to use the judiciary to keep all this under wraps is something one would expect in an underdeveloped country defined by rampant institutional corruption.
While it is understandable for those who govern to keep certain information confidential in the interests of national security, this scandal, which implicates both of our major political parties, reveals the serious transparency deficit which lies at the heart of an ailing democracy defined by dangerously low levels of trust in Westminster.
This ground-breaking revelation was made the same day a new report flagged public concerns over immigration and asylum against a background of declining political trust.
There are growing sections of the British electorate which are fast drowning in a pool of disaffection because their perfectly reasonable anxieties over matters of immigration, integration, and identity continue to be overlooked.
PA
| The Afghan immigration cover-up proves yet again that the British people are an afterthought - Rakib EhsanIt is quite astonishing that there are members of the British political establishment who believe that it is acceptable to set up, in a panic, a relocation scheme for people from Afghanistan without providing civil society with the opportunity to examine these plans, identify their drawbacks, and express concerns from a social cohesion perspective.
With the superinjunction being discharged by the High Court after almost two years – covering both the back-end of the Sunak government and the start of the Starmer’s reign as prime minister - it has been reported that fifteen of the twenty ‘hotspots’ for last summer’s violent disorder took place in local authorities which are in the top fifth in the country in terms of the number of supported asylum seekers and resettled Afghan nationals.
Some of the most deprived and disadvantaged parts of the country have not only been treated as dumping grounds for the small-boats emergency, but also for a secret resettlement programme on the back of an inadvertent data leak by a MoD official.
This is not to excuse the violent, riotous criminality from last summer for a moment – what it tells us is the need to be honest about the risks to community cohesion and public safety in left-behind areas, which are expected to absorb culturally distant newcomers at the expense of the British taxpayer in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. Of course, this was impossible to do, due to the gagging order.
While there will be some Afghan families with deep links with the British military and a fondness for liberal democratic values, Afghanistan is ultimately a hotbed of Islamist extremism, antisemitism, and misogyny.
Considering that this unprecedented process of secret resettlement was hastily created, questions must be asked about the robustness of security checks, as well as the true strength of the connections between those resettled and the Armed Forces.
What can be said with absolute certainty is that, once again, the British public has been treated by its political establishment as nothing more than a mere afterthought.
While some of our top politicians are only too ready to blame media coverage and online disinformation for the decline in political trust, they should have a hard look in the mirror.