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I can’t find much mention of the Afghan story in The Sun. But this is one that will reverberate through WhatsApp and pub chats. Reform going in hard vs Jenrick and Braverman.

https://x.com/ziayusufuk/status/1945212705721192806?s=46

This should not be reduced to an anti-immigration hobbyhorse. It's a serious matter of democratic accountability.

Reading between the lines on here, I would conclude that Baldy Ben, who I like and respect (Braverman and Jenrick - I'll just spit that out) did the right and proper thing with 24,000 Afghans who looked after our boys and girls in Helmand. Why Healy with the support of the Speaker kept the injunction going seems to be where the problem lies.

Reform really are a bucket of sh*t for trawling the original safety issue up and turning it onto a skin toned race issue. They are nonetheless welcome to chase down this government for the subsequent cover-up. Healy and Hoyle should be gone!

Looking after Afghans who had worked with British forces was absolutely right. Covering this story up through a general election was not even mildly excusable.

Hoyle, who seems to have been involved throughout, should be considering his position - or MPs should be questioning him at length, with a view to giving him the chop. Healey needs to explain to Parliament in detail why he didn't act, and unless he comes up with some very good reasons indeed (which seems unlikely), I agree that he also needs to go.

Starmer got a bit lucky with the rebellion over welfare cuts. Imagine if a couple of weeks after voting to take £5bn off disabled people, it came out they had agreed £7bn for thr Afghan scheme.

Would Healey and Hoyle suffice, or do you need Starmer too? Fantastic opportunity for your team. Will Kemi take the win?

Why does Healey have to go?

Because he's sat on the story for a year, and (for now) appears to have continued to approve the super injunction. He certainly needs to explain himself better than he has so far.

As much as it makes me self-loathe I have to defend Healey if the advice he was getting from civil servants and/or government lawyers was along the lines of “you need to keep this super injunction and shell out loads of money or people will die” then what else is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to say “sorry guys, I know much more about the situation in my one year in charge than you do and I know the law better than government lawyers so drop it now”?

We get angry about the idea of Ministers making decisions based on their own prejudices or interests and ignoring advice so if Healey has followed what he can only consider the best advice then he can’t be blamed.

What is vital is that, if the advice from CC and legal was to continue (to both parties over the period) then how do we avoid bad advice, is there independent oversight etc to stop such a situation in the future.

Could she really not have known about this? And what is ‘an huge’ all about?


I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.

It is an huge betrayal of public trust.

Those responsible in both Governments and the bureaucracy need to be held to account.

thetimes.com/uk/defence/art…

https://x.com/trussliz/status/1945206550089314477?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q

Northern (Leeds) roots for "an huge". We don't waste time sounding out consonants round 'ere

Which reminds me, I discovered a few months ago that my son (six at the time) thought 'huge' was pronounced 'fuge'. I got him to repeat something he said and it was clearly an 'f' there. Challenged on the spelling/phonics, he said he'd just assumed it was one of the ''harder to read and spell' words. Massive huck up by the educations system. Or the parents

ETA: A few years into our marriage, I had great difficulty explaining to my (Yorkshire born and bred) mother in law that I was going to be working in Hull for a few days. "Hull," I said, "Hull". My wife laughed at me and said, "Oooll!" and comprehension dawned

Can anyone explain why some people say "arks" instead of "ask"?

One of my sisters-in-law-in-law does it, and it just sounds daft.

Mind, she is from Birmingham, so that is the least of her linguistic problems.

It’s seems to be a common thing with black English speakers. If you watch any tv series with lots of black characters, whether UK like Top Boy or US like the Wire as two examples, it’s a noticeable tick that “ask” is pronounced more like “aks”.

I know a weirder one which I have never been able to understand.

My mother in law was from Co Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland and had the normal Irish accent you would expect, so three became tree, and so on. However, she reversed the process with some words beginning with t-e-a, so teacher became theacher. This is such an unnatural thing to do that I can only guess she was doing it deliberately to overcompensate for something she thought of (wrongly) as poor pronunciation.

I can't say I've ever come across any other Irish person exhibiting this quirk. Has anyone here?

I’ve also noticed another weird Irishism in that every Irish person I know says “Euro” when referring to a plural of Euros. I don’t know why they do it - the same people say Dollars and Pounds. My life must be very dull as it inexplicably winds me up.

I can’t find much mention of the Afghan story in The Sun. But this is one that will reverberate through WhatsApp and pub chats. Reform going in hard vs Jenrick and Braverman.

https://x.com/ziayusufuk/status/1945212705721192806?s=46

This should not be reduced to an anti-immigration hobbyhorse. It's a serious matter of democratic accountability.

Reading between the lines on here, I would conclude that Baldy Ben, who I like and respect (Braverman and Jenrick - I'll just spit that out) did the right and proper thing with 24,000 Afghans who looked after our boys and girls in Helmand. Why Healy with the support of the Speaker kept the injunction going seems to be where the problem lies.

Reform really are a bucket of sh*t for trawling the original safety issue up and turning it onto a skin toned race issue. They are nonetheless welcome to chase down this government for the subsequent cover-up. Healy and Hoyle should be gone!

You've got it the wrong way round.

The Afghans weren't looking after 'our boys and girls in Helmand', our boys and girls were looking after the Afghans.

At very considerable cost in British lives and money.

I do not remember any government minister telling us that the reason we were in Afghanistan was to give ever increasing numbers of Afghans an entitlement to migrate to Britain.

It seems for at least the last ten years in Afghanistan our purpose there was setting up a future immigration program.

Horrible to be so pessimistic but I feel there's a dearth of talent everywhere.

Good morning, everybody.

And also with you.

Beyond a certain point, you can't keep blaming the poor buggers who try and fail to run the country well. Maybe the job as currently configured is essentially undoable.

As an analogy, consider a formerly great but currently struggling football team. (I'm from near Portsmouth- I know of what I speak). Changing the manager every five minutes rarely helps and often makes things worse.

If that's what's going on, what's the answer? I don't think that being bought out by some shady foreign squillionaire is an option.

I agree - no government is going to satisfy the current electorate which seems to expect to be given everything they want without really doing much or contributing more. Most seem to prefer to sit on the sidelines and whinge about everything.

The country is not in an economic position to deliver more than a fraction of what the voters want and feel entitled to, but heaven help any politician that dared to tell them that. The voters simply don't want to know, they prefer to bury their heads in the sand and blame it all on somebody else.

Former defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace said he makes "no apology" for stopping the reporting of a leak that revealed data about thousands of Afghans who had supported British forces.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1k8yvj89kyo

Did anyone expect him to ?

While there might have been a case for the injunction for a relatively short period of time while damage was assessed (6 months perhaps), there's absolutely no case for keeping this covered up for so long.

Labour were right to review it - but why did it take them an entire year to come to what ought to have been a completely obvious conclusion ?

Did they come to the obvious conclusion?

From the reporting last night, it seems that the Judge made the decision for them, so they never did.

I honestly don't know; the story has only been out for a day.
At least their DefSec has had the grace to admit being troubled by it. That hardly excuses him, but it is a recognition that the issue is serious.

As for Wallace, the original leak ought to have been a clear resignation matter for him - there had been a similar leak earlier, and he had specifically promised that there would be no repetition.
Covering it up via super injunction - and keeping Parliament and electorate blind on contentious political issues throughout an election campaign - is blatantly undemocratic.

Wallace should be condemned across the political spectrum.
The relevant select committee should call both him and John Healey before them immediately.

Apparently, the Speaker has also been involved throughout in ensuring no Parliamentary questions on the matter.
MPs need to question him, and probably sack him. His job is to act for them, not the government.

The problem Healey has is that Labour kept the super injunction in place for longer than the previous government, so clearly not that troubled.
That aside this absolutely requires a parliamentary inquiry and accountability

Let's be honest, if this had all come out before the election, it would have been curtains for the Tories and quite possibly denied Labour a majority.

How would it have denied Labour a majority?
And if it had come out before the election it would have been 'we found out 6 months ago, injunction in place to protect those on the list whilst we assessed the damage, we have concluded that we will do the following.....'and they'd have taken a hit on incompetence which was already pretty much priced in

The usual suspects are getting way too excited, yet again, about the end of the political world being nigh.

Intelligent PB'ers should have better judgement. The unintelligent one we know will never change.

Former defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace said he makes "no apology" for stopping the reporting of a leak that revealed data about thousands of Afghans who had supported British forces.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1k8yvj89kyo

Did anyone expect him to ?

While there might have been a case for the injunction for a relatively short period of time while damage was assessed (6 months perhaps), there's absolutely no case for keeping this covered up for so long.

Labour were right to review it - but why did it take them an entire year to come to what ought to have been a completely obvious conclusion ?

Did they come to the obvious conclusion?

From the reporting last night, it seems that the Judge made the decision for them, so they never did.

I honestly don't know; the story has only been out for a day.
At least their DefSec has had the grace to admit being troubled by it. That hardly excuses him, but it is a recognition that the issue is serious.

As for Wallace, the original leak ought to have been a clear resignation matter for him - there had been a similar leak earlier, and he had specifically promised that there would be no repetition.
Covering it up via super injunction - and keeping Parliament and electorate blind on contentious political issues throughout an election campaign - is blatantly undemocratic.

Wallace should be condemned across the political spectrum.
The relevant select committee should call both him and John Healey before them immediately.

Apparently, the Speaker has also been involved throughout in ensuring no Parliamentary questions on the matter.
MPs need to question him, and probably sack him. His job is to act for them, not the government.

The more info that comes out the stranger it gets.

Wallace said this morning that he only applied for an injunction.

Mercer is saying that Sunak asked him to sort out the departments who were involved and their bun fight over the matter.

Is there the possibility that politicians have been railroaded by govt lawyers and civil servants to follow a course of action and accept their judgement? Did ministers instruct govt lawyers to actively upgrade the injunction to super injunction or was this something the lawyers decided was necessary or civil servants did?

I can understand why initially the gov pt wanted to keep this quiet but something must have happened to turn this from a four month injunction to what it became.

Somewhere, in cabinet minutes, civil service minutes or legal opinions it will show either Rishi as PM said “we need to cover this shit up or were doomed at the next election” (yes I know), there was substantial advice from Civil Servants/cabinet Office that PM or ministers followed blindly, or Civil Servants/Lawyers just pushed along a route independently.

If it was Rishi and Ministers who thought this was a good idea then they will get all the opprobrium that’s possible but if it’s either bad advice or independent actions then it raises vital questions regarding how the CC or Law office act.

The minister is responsible. No one forced him to take out a super injunction, and if he wasn't capable of seeing that such a thing over any extended period of time was completely unacceptable, and doing something about it, then he wasn't fit to be a minister.

And in any case, he ought to have been considering resignation over the leak.

He's just making excuses.

I agree with the resignation over the leak issue. My point is more about when and how this morphed from an injunction to a super injunction. Who pushed the upgrade, when, who had to ok the decision.

We are talking about democratic accountability so part of that is knowing if the decisions were made by democratically elected politicians or alternatively civil servants/government lawyers.

If we know how these decisions were made and authorised then it’s a lot easier to try and avoid it being able to happen again.

At the moment however we don’t know who had the power and ordered government lawyers to upgrade this to a super injunction and we don’t know who provided the advice and what the advice was that ensured the situation rolled on for a couple of years.

Cyclefree posted the judgment in the last thread. HMG asked for an injunction and it was the judge who upsold them a super-injunction. See paragraph 6:-
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/MOD-Judgment-No-4-final.pdf