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.
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.
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.
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
Worse. The Labour government appealed AGAINST lifting the super injunction. They wanted it; they liked it
It is a feast of lies inside a carnival of lies. Many many people should resign, and the more you learn the worse it gets
Also looks like they increased the funding and scope of the programme once they got in. Hmmmmm, a trail of deceit and disgrace from Wallace onwards. Full inquiry!
Great, so we spend another £7 billion to find out that 'lessons have been learned.'
Really, we need to change so that Civil Servants are held accountable, legally and morally, for their actions. It may have been feasible in the past to blame ministers, when departments were small and most policy was directly controlled by them, but it simply isn't any more.
We still have, for example, a Permanent Secretary at the DfE who hosted an unlawful works party in lockdown and then gave completely the wrong budget to all schools plunging many of them into crisis. She's apologised for both, but that isn't good enough. She should have been sacked (as anyone in any other field would have been).
And Simon Case oversaw more car crashes than a medic at a junkyard rally, but he was eventually allowed to retire on health grounds.
As long as we continue to tolerate failures and disasters like this we will continue to have them. We need to start being more proactive as a country and political system in rooting them out.
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.
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!
The right thing done the wrong way would be my take. How outraged should we be by that? Reform don't help their case by implying it was the wrong thing to take in dirty Afghans.
And presumably the reason why the government did it the wrong way is precisely because of crocks of shit like Reform.
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.
It's cutting through - number 2 story on the BBC Most Read, which is my primary index of engagement. But Wallace has - admirably - stuck his head above the parapet, and the story is entirely about the cock up and an explanation of why there needed to be secrecy.
The sexual assault angle hasn't gone anywhere outside the Leonosphere. Yet.
The Mail had an interesting tit bit they are under a second injunction that they are forbidden from discussing individual cases.
Can PBers be clearer when they refer to 'Wallace' in postings? I immediately start thinking there's been an important new development with No Underpants Gate.
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.
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
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.
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
Worse. The Labour government appealed AGAINST lifting the super injunction. They wanted it; they liked it
It is a feast of lies inside a carnival of lies. Many many people should resign, and the more you learn the worse it gets
Also looks like they increased the funding and scope of the programme once they got in. Hmmmmm, a trail of deceit and disgrace from Wallace onwards. Full inquiry!
Great, so we spend another £7 billion to find out that 'lessons have been learned.'
Really, we need to change so that Civil Servants are held accountable, legally and morally, for their actions. It may have been feasible in the past to blame ministers, when departments were small and most policy was directly controlled by them, but it simply isn't any more.
We still have, for example, a Permanent Secretary at the DfE who hosted an unlawful works party in lockdown and then gave completely the wrong budget to all schools plunging many of them into crisis. She's apologised for both, but that isn't good enough. She should have been sacked (as anyone in any other field would have been).
And Simon Case oversaw more car crashes than a medic at a junkyard rally, but he was eventually allowed to retire on health grounds.
As long as we continue to tolerate failures and disasters like this we will continue to have them. We need to start being more proactive as a country and political system in rooting them out.
It was a total disgrace that the names of those involved in parties were censored. Should have been named and shamed and fired.
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.
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
Worse. The Labour government appealed AGAINST lifting the super injunction. They wanted it; they liked it
It is a feast of lies inside a carnival of lies. Many many people should resign, and the more you learn the worse it gets
Was it all-nighter or is the booze just very cheap where you are?
On my new Mounjaro regime I had another dry day. Eight hours’ delicious, peaceful sleep and I’ve woken up full of vim and venom
I’m afraid that this is what I’m like when I’m SOBER
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.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
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.
It's cutting through - number 2 story on the BBC Most Read, which is my primary index of engagement. But Wallace has - admirably - stuck his head above the parapet, and the story is entirely about the cock up and an explanation of why there needed to be secrecy.
The sexual assault angle hasn't gone anywhere outside the Leonosphere. Yet.
The Mail had an interesting tit bit they are under a second injunction that they are forbidden from discussing individual cases.
Can PBers be clearer when they refer to 'Wallace' in postings? I immediately start thinking there's been an important new development with No Underpants Gate.
I was referring to the Wensleydale addict if that helps!
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.
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
Worse. The Labour government appealed AGAINST lifting the super injunction. They wanted it; they liked it
It is a feast of lies inside a carnival of lies. Many many people should resign, and the more you learn the worse it gets
Also looks like they increased the funding and scope of the programme once they got in. Hmmmmm, a trail of deceit and disgrace from Wallace onwards. Full inquiry!
Great, so we spend another £7 billion to find out that 'lessons have been learned.'
Really, we need to change so that Civil Servants are held accountable, legally and morally, for their actions. It may have been feasible in the past to blame ministers, when departments were small and most policy was directly controlled by them, but it simply isn't any more.
We still have, for example, a Permanent Secretary at the DfE who hosted an unlawful works party in lockdown and then gave completely the wrong budget to all schools plunging many of them into crisis. She's apologised for both, but that isn't good enough. She should have been sacked (as anyone in any other field would have been).
And Simon Case oversaw more car crashes than a medic at a junkyard rally, but he was eventually allowed to retire on health grounds.
As long as we continue to tolerate failures and disasters like this we will continue to have them. We need to start being more proactive as a country and political system in rooting them out.
We need and will get a Revolution. Peaceful, I hope
I saw in my working life the horrendous consequences of data breaches when sensitive personal information about individuals and families was inadvertently sent to the wrong email address. It was often when the sender was overworked or just about to go on holiday.
It’s an esoteric issue in the maelstrom of our governance but I do think we need to ask questions about the accumulation of personal information from both the public and private sectors. It’s often been said knowledge is power but data isn’t knowledge and it’s my experience much of what is obtained is never accessed or used.
Adding to that are prevailing attitudes toward immigration in many quarters and I can understand why successive Governments sought to keep what was agreed confidential. The central question is what do we owe (if anything) those who supported our forces in Afghanistan and presumably backed the previous Kabul Government which collapsed so completely?
There’s a part of me that remembers how in the past we have offered sanctuary to those fleeing tyranny and repression.
Some we did owe an obligation to, some we did not, is all I can say at this point. Some people risked their lives against the Taliban, others just cut and run, or switched sides.
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.
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.
Ministers don't 'take out' superinjunctions. They have no rights over the matter. Courts grant them, and set their terms and conditions, ministers can apply for them. Courts can and will tell them to go away.
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.
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.
These particular Afghans were working for the British in Helmand as I understand it. Your obtuse interpretation of my original post notwithstanding.
That next leader poll – the two mayors not in parliament, NOTA and DK together account for 67 per cent. That's more than half.
If you're going to go with a fraction, I'd sat its two thirds rather than more than half.
I did wonder about dumbing down on here given that DJL felt the need to clarify that 67% is more than half. Taking Leon's comments on our collective IQs to heart?
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.
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.
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
Worse. The Labour government appealed AGAINST lifting the super injunction. They wanted it; they liked it
It is a feast of lies inside a carnival of lies. Many many people should resign, and the more you learn the worse it gets
Also looks like they increased the funding and scope of the programme once they got in. Hmmmmm, a trail of deceit and disgrace from Wallace onwards. Full inquiry!
Great, so we spend another £7 billion to find out that 'lessons have been learned.'
Really, we need to change so that Civil Servants are held accountable, legally and morally, for their actions. It may have been feasible in the past to blame ministers, when departments were small and most policy was directly controlled by them, but it simply isn't any more.
We still have, for example, a Permanent Secretary at the DfE who hosted an unlawful works party in lockdown and then gave completely the wrong budget to all schools plunging many of them into crisis. She's apologised for both, but that isn't good enough. She should have been sacked (as anyone in any other field would have been).
And Simon Case oversaw more car crashes than a medic at a junkyard rally, but he was eventually allowed to retire on health grounds.
As long as we continue to tolerate failures and disasters like this we will continue to have them. We need to start being more proactive as a country and political system in rooting them out.
We need and will get a Revolution. Peaceful, I hope
You have connections to the Conservative Party via your scribblings for their house rag. You could be the next Peter Wright.
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.
Technically in formal English 'an huge' is correct, as is 'an hotel' 'an hearing' etc. H was for centuries treated as a silent letter, in effect a glottal stop, so it was common to take the vowel sound from after it (in some dialects it still is, of course).
It's just it's very seldom used as it 'feels' wrong so I'm assuming it's a typo.
(This is your PB crazy fact for this morning.)
Dropping haitches has always struck me, in wannabe posh circles, as purely haffectation.
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.
It's cutting through - number 2 story on the BBC Most Read, which is my primary index of engagement. But Wallace has - admirably - stuck his head above the parapet, and the story is entirely about the cock up and an explanation of why there needed to be secrecy.
The sexual assault angle hasn't gone anywhere outside the Leonosphere. Yet.
The Mail had an interesting tit bit they are under a second injunction that they are forbidden from discussing individual cases.
Can PBers be clearer when they refer to 'Wallace' in postings? I immediately start thinking there's been an important new development with No Underpants Gate.
I was expecting fresh tittle-tattle about the Duke of Windsor.
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.
I don't think Zia is helping himself with Reform going in studs up on Suella (or Jenrick for that matter) I wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly 'doesnt want to spend his time getting Reform elected' again
The consistency in the polls is such that Reform really need to start thinking about how they would govern. Labour had been out of power for an age but they could still lean on plenty of serving MPs and grandees with experience of government.
Seems to me Farage would be well served by having a couple of ex cabinet ministers in his ranks to help navigate the den of vipers in Whitehall. The first job of a leader is to recruit well and we’ve not seen a lot of evidence Farage is much good at it. As 2029 inches closer will be fascinating to see what he does.
A point I made on Sunday, to two quite prominent members of that party. You aren't a party of protest any longer, you are likely to win if not the next election, then the one after that, and you have to prepare your core voters for some hard choices (like dropping the triple lock).
I saw in my working life the horrendous consequences of data breaches when sensitive personal information about individuals and families was inadvertently sent to the wrong email address. It was often when the sender was overworked or just about to go on holiday.
It’s an esoteric issue in the maelstrom of our governance but I do think we need to ask questions about the accumulation of personal information from both the public and private sectors. It’s often been said knowledge is power but data isn’t knowledge and it’s my experience much of what is obtained is never accessed or used.
Adding to that are prevailing attitudes toward immigration in many quarters and I can understand why successive Governments sought to keep what was agreed confidential. The central question is what do we owe (if anything) those who supported our forces in Afghanistan and presumably backed the previous Kabul Government which collapsed so completely?
There’s a part of me that remembers how in the past we have offered sanctuary to those fleeing tyranny and repression.
An interesting observation. The basis appears to be that the Public cannot be expected to act rationally on issues regarding immigration so we will hide it from them. Tend to agree that there is a distinct lack of adult discussion about the subject but it needs to be had. That and the cost of government.
Is it time yet to have those discussions or is everyone more interested in click bait?
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.
I don't think Zia is helping himself with Reform going in studs up on Suella (or Jenrick for that matter) I wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly 'doesnt want to spend his time getting Reform elected' again
The consistency in the polls is such that Reform really need to start thinking about how they would govern. Labour had been out of power for an age but they could still lean on plenty of serving MPs and grandees with experience of government.
Seems to me Farage would be well served by having a couple of ex cabinet ministers in his ranks to help navigate the den of vipers in Whitehall. The first job of a leader is to recruit well and we’ve not seen a lot of evidence Farage is much good at it. As 2029 inches closer will be fascinating to see what he does.
A point I made on Sunday, to two quite prominent members of that party. You aren't a party of protest any longer, you are likely to win if not the next election, then the one after that, and you have to prepare your core voters for some hard choices (like dropping the triple lock).
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
Indeed.
I fear this is story where people will want a straighfoward moral to extract from it. But in fact both democratic accountability, and the safety of people who assisted Britain, are simultaneously at stake..
I have never felt such bleak despair for Britain as I do, reading this story. It is a vortex of multiple failures, all meeting at one point: the failure of our legal system, our inept civil service, our incompetent and treacherous politicians, our stupid foreign policies, our self harming elite, our wasteful spending (mainly on foreigners), our bizarre unwanted levels of mass immigration
These ongoing narratives all meet here, in this one toxic story
The only solace I can take from it is that the story is SO bad it may be some kind of nadir. Rock bottom. It cannot get worse
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.
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
Worse. The Labour government appealed AGAINST lifting the super injunction. They wanted it; they liked it
It is a feast of lies inside a carnival of lies. Many many people should resign, and the more you learn the worse it gets
Also looks like they increased the funding and scope of the programme once they got in. Hmmmmm, a trail of deceit and disgrace from Wallace onwards. Full inquiry!
Great, so we spend another £7 billion to find out that 'lessons have been learned.'
Really, we need to change so that Civil Servants are held accountable, legally and morally, for their actions. It may have been feasible in the past to blame ministers, when departments were small and most policy was directly controlled by them, but it simply isn't any more.
We still have, for example, a Permanent Secretary at the DfE who hosted an unlawful works party in lockdown and then gave completely the wrong budget to all schools plunging many of them into crisis. She's apologised for both, but that isn't good enough. She should have been sacked (as anyone in any other field would have been).
And Simon Case oversaw more car crashes than a medic at a junkyard rally, but he was eventually allowed to retire on health grounds.
As long as we continue to tolerate failures and disasters like this we will continue to have them. We need to start being more proactive as a country and political system in rooting them out.
Simon Case was allowed to retire on ill health to the House of Lords.
What happened to Martin 'bring your own booze' Reynolds ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably Chaucer fans. He sometimes has people 'axe' a question.
I have never felt such bleak despair for Britain as I do, reading this story. It is a vortex of multiple failures, all meeting at one point: the failure of our legal system, our inept civil service, our incompetent and treacherous politicians, our stupid foreign policies, our self harming elite, our wasteful spending (mainly on foreigners), our bizarre unwanted levels of mass immigration
These ongoing narratives all meet here, in this one toxic story
The only solace I can take from it is that the story is SO bad it may be some kind of nadir. Rock bottom. It cannot get worse
Can it?
Its noticeable that when Reeves was approving of the continuing expenditure on ever more Afghan immigrants she was also planning on the winter fuel and disability cuts.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
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.
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 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.
I don't think Zia is helping himself with Reform going in studs up on Suella (or Jenrick for that matter) I wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly 'doesnt want to spend his time getting Reform elected' again
The consistency in the polls is such that Reform really need to start thinking about how they would govern. Labour had been out of power for an age but they could still lean on plenty of serving MPs and grandees with experience of government.
Seems to me Farage would be well served by having a couple of ex cabinet ministers in his ranks to help navigate the den of vipers in Whitehall. The first job of a leader is to recruit well and we’ve not seen a lot of evidence Farage is much good at it. As 2029 inches closer will be fascinating to see what he does.
A point I made on Sunday, to two quite prominent members of that party. You aren't a party of protest any longer, you are likely to win if not the next election, then the one after that, and you have to prepare your core voters for some hard choices (like dropping the triple lock).
It shows a lack of aspiration.
I imagine a lot of people actually prefer just to be a party of protest.
The problem is that much of the British establishment has shown over and again, that it has nothing but contempt for the people that it governs; that it will lie to them repeatedly (believing this to be "noble cause" lying); that it will cover up scandalous conduct; that it does not consider the voters' wishes or aspirations to be their priority; that their own mutual advancement is their most important guiding principle; that beyond a certain level, there are no penalties for failure or corruption.
And, it will keep on doing so, just like the late medieval Papacy, or the ancien regime nobility.
That has left perhaps a majority of voters now wanting to burn down the establishment, and they see Reform as the party that can do that.
This is my off topic video for the day, a 1:20 minute marketing video for graded accessible routes for an initiative of the national parks called "Miles without Stiles" in the Lake District. Most of the parks have done it.
The non-joined up Government bit is that their "Accessible for All" category includes 1:10 hills, which Disabled organisations (and the most applicable Government guidelines - LTN 1/20) will tell you is not accessible (try a 50m long 1:10 hill using a manual wheelchair or a scooter). They work for most, but not all.
We are all over "but public footpaths have hills"; yes, but that there plenty that do not eg rail trails canal towpaths. Except in my area when they did loads of rail trials in the 1990s they demolished many of the bridges etc they go over and made them unusable.
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.
Technically in formal English 'an huge' is correct, as is 'an hotel' 'an hearing' etc. H was for centuries treated as a silent letter, in effect a glottal stop, so it was common to take the vowel sound from after it (in some dialects it still is, of course).
It's just it's very seldom used as it 'feels' wrong so I'm assuming it's a typo.
(This is your PB crazy fact for this morning.)
An is only correct where the h is in an unaccented syllable, so yes an hotel is correct but it's a hearing.
However if the h in huge is silent, it's pronounced yooge and y counts as a consonant
Not always.
The vowel sound rule can be the reverse of the letter in both directions.
So you might go to "a university" to study chemistry where you might come across "an yttrium" chunk of metal.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
I see Johnny Mercer blames the British State for the problem, but fails to mention who was in charge of the State at that time.
Mind you I was reminded of that pic of people falling off the US transport planes as they fled the advance of the Taliban. Who would take such a risk if the incoming future government were seen to be reasonable.
Trump’s and Biden’s decision to cut and run was catastrophic. Not just for many Afghans, but for the message of weakness which it transmitted.
They only gave it 20+ years and a trillion+ dollars. The half-hearted, soppy fucks.
I see Johnny Mercer blames the British State for the problem, but fails to mention who was in charge of the State at that time.
Mind you I was reminded of that pic of people falling off the US transport planes as they fled the advance of the Taliban. Who would take such a risk if the incoming future government were seen to be reasonable.
Trump’s and Biden’s decision to cut and run was catastrophic. Not just for many Afghans, but for the message of weakness which it transmitted.
They only gave it 20+ years and a trillion+ dollars. The half-hearted, soppy fucks.
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.
It's cutting through - number 2 story on the BBC Most Read, which is my primary index of engagement. But Wallace has - admirably - stuck his head above the parapet, and the story is entirely about the cock up and an explanation of why there needed to be secrecy.
The sexual assault angle hasn't gone anywhere outside the Leonosphere. Yet.
The Mail had an interesting tit bit they are under a second injunction that they are forbidden from discussing individual cases.
Can PBers be clearer when they refer to 'Wallace' in postings? I immediately start thinking there's been an important new development with No Underpants Gate.
Too many Wallaces. Phonetically, I thought that you meant Wrong Trousers Gate.
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.
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.
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.
These particular Afghans were working for the British in Helmand as I understand it. Your obtuse interpretation of my original post notwithstanding.
And why were we in Afghanistan ? To help Afghans.
So the 'justification' for allowing all tens of thousands of Afghans to migrate here is that they were helping us to help them.
Britain being in Afghanistan wasn't helping Britain.
All we were 'achieving' there was to create some future entitlement for people to migrate to this country.
Perhaps you could point out when that became the official policy because I cannot remember any government minister saying it.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
Yes, there's still broadly support for HK migrants. I live in the SOA which is the single biggest target for HK migrants, and, despite pressure on schools etc (and the almost impossibility now of getting into a grammar school), they are entirely welcomed. They're the perfect immigrants: keen to integrate, hard working, low crime, Anglophone-ish. All immigrants are not the same.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
Yes, there's still broadly support for HK migrants. I live in the SOA which is the single biggest target for HK migrants, and, despite pressure on schools etc (and the almost impossibility now of getting into a grammar school), they are entirely welcomed. They're the perfect immigrants: keen to integrate, hard working, low crime, Anglophone-ish. All immigrants are not the same.
Whereas in any European country that collects the data, Afghans are at the very top of the list for sexual crimes
It is inevitable, statistically, that some of the tens of thousands we are importing will commit heinous rapes
How the government “manages” that information will be worth watching
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.
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.
These particular Afghans were working for the British in Helmand as I understand it. Your obtuse interpretation of my original post notwithstanding.
And why were we in Afghanistan ? To help Afghans.
So the 'justification' for allowing all tens of thousands of Afghans to migrate here is that they were helping us to help them.
Britain being in Afghanistan wasn't helping Britain.
All we were 'achieving' there was to create some future entitlement for people to migrate to this country.
Perhaps you could point out when that became the official policy because I cannot remember any government minister saying it.
No, we were in Afghanistan to help the US - and, ostensibly, to help improve our security by trying to destroy, as much as possible, Al Qaeda and their sympathetic hosts, the Taliban.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
Many of the Uber drivers I've spoken to in the last year have been Afghans ; a hugely varied collection of people, I've found. Some who seem to look, dress and think almost indistinguably from Mediterranean Europeans, some moderate family men with science backgrounds, some reasonably conservative, and about 20% very conservative.
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.
I don't think Zia is helping himself with Reform going in studs up on Suella (or Jenrick for that matter) I wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly 'doesnt want to spend his time getting Reform elected' again
The consistency in the polls is such that Reform really need to start thinking about how they would govern. Labour had been out of power for an age but they could still lean on plenty of serving MPs and grandees with experience of government.
Seems to me Farage would be well served by having a couple of ex cabinet ministers in his ranks to help navigate the den of vipers in Whitehall. The first job of a leader is to recruit well and we’ve not seen a lot of evidence Farage is much good at it. As 2029 inches closer will be fascinating to see what he does.
A point I made on Sunday, to two quite prominent members of that party. You aren't a party of protest any longer, you are likely to win if not the next election, then the one after that, and you have to prepare your core voters for some hard choices (like dropping the triple lock).
It shows a lack of aspiration.
I imagine a lot of people actually prefer just to be a party of protest.
The problem is that much of the British establishment has shown over and again, that it has nothing but contempt for the people that it governs; that it will lie to them repeatedly (believing this to be "noble cause" lying); that it will cover up scandalous conduct; that it does not consider the voters' wishes or aspirations to be their priority; that their own mutual advancement is their most important guiding principle; that beyond a certain level, there are no penalties for failure or corruption.
And, it will keep on doing so, just like the late medieval Papacy, or the ancien regime nobility.
That has left perhaps a majority of voters now wanting to burn down the establishment, and they see Reform as the party that can do that.
I have never felt such bleak despair for Britain as I do, reading this story. It is a vortex of multiple failures, all meeting at one point: the failure of our legal system, our inept civil service, our incompetent and treacherous politicians, our stupid foreign policies, our self harming elite, our wasteful spending (mainly on foreigners), our bizarre unwanted levels of mass immigration
These ongoing narratives all meet here, in this one toxic story
The only solace I can take from it is that the story is SO bad it may be some kind of nadir. Rock bottom. It cannot get worse
Can it?
Come on Peter Wright, put your money where your typing finger is.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
Yes, there's still broadly support for HK migrants. I live in the SOA which is the single biggest target for HK migrants, and, despite pressure on schools etc (and the almost impossibility now of getting into a grammar school), they are entirely welcomed. They're the perfect immigrants: keen to integrate, hard working, low crime, Anglophone-ish. All immigrants are not the same.
Whereas in any European country that collects the data, Afghans are at the very top of the list for sexual crimes
It is inevitable, statistically, that some of the tens of thousands we are importing will commit heinous rapes
How the government “manages” that information will be worth watching
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.
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.
These particular Afghans were working for the British in Helmand as I understand it. Your obtuse interpretation of my original post notwithstanding.
And why were we in Afghanistan ?
The same reasons for all of the UK's overseas adventures of the past 40 years.
We thought it would be easy. The US wanted us to. Senior politicians greatly enjoy the glamour and gravitas of war.
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.
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.
These particular Afghans were working for the British in Helmand as I understand it. Your obtuse interpretation of my original post notwithstanding.
And why were we in Afghanistan ? To help Afghans.
So the 'justification' for allowing all tens of thousands of Afghans to migrate here is that they were helping us to help them.
Britain being in Afghanistan wasn't helping Britain.
All we were 'achieving' there was to create some future entitlement for people to migrate to this country.
Perhaps you could point out when that became the official policy because I cannot remember any government minister saying it.
No, we were in Afghanistan to help the US - and, ostensibly, to help improve our security by trying to destroy, as much as possible, Al Qaeda and their sympathetic hosts, the Taliban.
That's why we went into Afghanistan in 2001.
But that reason had long passed by the end and certainly by 2011 when Bin Laden was killed (not in Afghanistan).
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
Many of the Uber drivers I've spoken to in the last year have been Afghans ; a hugely varied collection of people, I've found. Some who seem to look, dress and think almost indistinguably from Mediterranean Europeans, some moderate family men with science backgrounds, some reasonably conservative, and about 20% very conservative.
Well, we don't want more conservatives, do we. Look at the harm they've done to the country over recent years!
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.
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?
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
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.
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
Worse. The Labour government appealed AGAINST lifting the super injunction. They wanted it; they liked it
It is a feast of lies inside a carnival of lies. Many many people should resign, and the more you learn the worse it gets
Also looks like they increased the funding and scope of the programme once they got in. Hmmmmm, a trail of deceit and disgrace from Wallace onwards. Full inquiry!
Great, so we spend another £7 billion to find out that 'lessons have been learned.'
Really, we need to change so that Civil Servants are held accountable, legally and morally, for their actions. It may have been feasible in the past to blame ministers, when departments were small and most policy was directly controlled by them, but it simply isn't any more.
We still have, for example, a Permanent Secretary at the DfE who hosted an unlawful works party in lockdown and then gave completely the wrong budget to all schools plunging many of them into crisis. She's apologised for both, but that isn't good enough. She should have been sacked (as anyone in any other field would have been).
And Simon Case oversaw more car crashes than a medic at a junkyard rally, but he was eventually allowed to retire on health grounds.
As long as we continue to tolerate failures and disasters like this we will continue to have them. We need to start being more proactive as a country and political system in rooting them out.
"An enquiry" is idiotic. There are at least a couple of Parliamentary select committees which could do the job in a matter of months, at little cost.
And it is Parliament which should be investigating, as it was Parliament which was misled, by ministers, and by its own Speaker. If they don't sort this out, then the electorate will draw its own conclusion (as Leon already has).
Parliamentarians need to develop some spine, and deal with ministers who are unable to hold their won civil servants to account.
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.
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.
These particular Afghans were working for the British in Helmand as I understand it. Your obtuse interpretation of my original post notwithstanding.
And why were we in Afghanistan ?
The same reasons for all of the UK's overseas adventures of the past 40 years.
We thought it would be easy. The US wanted us to. Senior politicians greatly enjoy the glamour and gravitas of war.
It really isn't any more complicated than that.
All understandable initially but the trick is to get in, do the 'fun' things and then get out quick.
Instead foreign interventions become self-perpetuating with more and more long term obligations being secretly agreed to.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
Yes, there's still broadly support for HK migrants. I live in the SOA which is the single biggest target for HK migrants, and, despite pressure on schools etc (and the almost impossibility now of getting into a grammar school), they are entirely welcomed. They're the perfect immigrants: keen to integrate, hard working, low crime, Anglophone-ish. All immigrants are not the same.
Whereas in any European country that collects the data, Afghans are at the very top of the list for sexual crimes
It is inevitable, statistically, that some of the tens of thousands we are importing will commit heinous rapes
How the government “manages” that information will be worth watching
Interestingly, it appears to be a reasonable map for 'which countries the UK feels most comfortable with immigration from'.
Cross-gender friend ratio over top 200 friends?
I count friends in probably a few tens, with obviously a load more colleagues/ex-colleagues, acquaintances. But I guess this must be Facebook 'friends' or similar.
When I was on Facebook, I'd guess the ratio was near 50-50 for me or maybe majority female, but my actual friends a more often male, probably 2/3 or so.
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.
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 think it's a Jamaican accent. I had a work colleage from Jamaica, and he'd always say "aks" instead of "ask". He's also cut off t's at the end of words, e.g. saying "contac" instead of "contact". Incredibly smart bloke though; he was the lead software architect at the company.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
Yes, there's still broadly support for HK migrants. I live in the SOA which is the single biggest target for HK migrants, and, despite pressure on schools etc (and the almost impossibility now of getting into a grammar school), they are entirely welcomed. They're the perfect immigrants: keen to integrate, hard working, low crime, Anglophone-ish. All immigrants are not the same.
Whereas in any European country that collects the data, Afghans are at the very top of the list for sexual crimes
It is inevitable, statistically, that some of the tens of thousands we are importing will commit heinous rapes
How the government “manages” that information will be worth watching
Interestingly, it appears to be a reasonable map for 'which countries the UK feels most comfortable with immigration from'.
Cross-gender friend ratio over top 200 friends?
I count friends in probably a few tens, with obviously a load more colleagues/ex-colleagues, acquaintances. But I guess this must be Facebook 'friends' or similar.
When I was on Facebook, I'd guess the ratio was near 50-50 for me or maybe majority female, but my actual friends a more often male, probably 2/3 or so.
Still an interesting set of maps though.
Men tend to die you anger than women so as one gets older one's male friends 'slip away' leaving one with more female ones.
There was some discussion of strangulation yesterday
Most stupid people would try to throttle the windpipe to restrict breathing; this will not be quick way to kill
Gripping the collar with both hands and crossed arms, squeezing the carotid arteries with the forearms will result in a much faster death
Fuckin tough guy here. Careful everyone.
He's not wrong that the "impossible to strangle Epstein in two minutes" line is a load of bollocks, though.
I think the issue was that people were mentioning a 2 minute something cut in the tape and I questioned whether a third party or more could have got near his cell, into his cell, subdued him and killed him and set it up to look like a hanging in that time and so I pointed out that strangulation supposedly takes longer than that time scale alone.
I was mildly amused this morning that if the police look at my search history they will find the search “how long does it take to strangle someone”, PB might have to back up my excuse for the search if I’m a suspect in a strangling some time.
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.
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.
There was some discussion of strangulation yesterday
Most stupid people would try to throttle the windpipe to restrict breathing; this will not be quick way to kill
Gripping the collar with both hands and crossed arms, squeezing the carotid arteries with the forearms will result in a much faster death
Fuckin tough guy here. Careful everyone.
He's not wrong that the "impossible to strangle Epstein in two minutes" line is a load of bollocks, though.
I think the issue was that people were mentioning a 2 minute something cut in the tape and I questioned whether a third party or more could have got near his cell, into his cell, subdued him and killed him and set it up to look like a hanging in that time and so I pointed out that strangulation supposedly takes longer than that time scale alone.
I was mildly amused this morning that if the police look at my search history they will find the search “how long does it take to strangle someone”, PB might have to back up my excuse for the search if I’m a suspect in a strangling some time.
Sorry, mate, don't know nothin' about it. Can't help.
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.
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.
It's not just any Afghan. It's those who assisted UK forces and therefore are at risk of being tortured and killed, with the video uploaded to twitter.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
We backed the Karzai regime and then the Ghani regime for all the usual geo-political and strategic reasons but in the end it was all built on sand and much like South Vietnam in 1975, it collapsed quickly and completely when foreign troops were no longer around to prop it up.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
You haven’t noticed that there’s quite a difference between the average Afghan migrant and the average Hong Kong Chinese migrant?
Yes, there's still broadly support for HK migrants. I live in the SOA which is the single biggest target for HK migrants, and, despite pressure on schools etc (and the almost impossibility now of getting into a grammar school), they are entirely welcomed. They're the perfect immigrants: keen to integrate, hard working, low crime, Anglophone-ish. All immigrants are not the same.
Indeed and I probably should stop calling a spade a garden implement.
What’s changed attitudes isn’t as much the how many as the who or to be even blunter the quality as distinct from the quantity and this is why it’s not about immigration but integration.
People like people like themselves as I’ve always said and the closer those who come to this country are in terms of ethnicity and values the easier it is for them and the easier it is for us. We have always, albeit with initial reticence, welcomed those who seek to actively integrate and those who respect values of work, respect for the law etc.
We now find ourselves with a kind of reverse Rwanda. Instead of flying out people discretely to a processing centre in some far away country, we fly people in discretely from some far away country.
For all the shouting and political points scoring, this is often how Government works, in the shadows often in direct contrast to what they tell the public. If you want to change that, fine, I get that - you won’t get any better from Reform or the Greens or the LDs or Corbyn/Sultana.
The kind of Government you want - describe it and describe how it would work in the real world. Farage wants unaccountable, unelected people running Government departments because he is wedded to the view Government should be run like a business but it’s not the same.
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.
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.
Kemi has the opportunity to tear the Government apart. Will she take it?
It does seem rather fitting that nobody gets sacked for thinking it was OK to store secret highly sensitive data in one massive excel spreadsheet and pass it around on the email resulting in a £7bn bill, but a bloke allegedly said a naughty word 10 years ago in a pub and his feet doesn't touch the floor as they are booted out.
And naming and sacking the chap who lost the list of everyone who is vaguely a mate of the U.K. in Afghanistan would be a “Witch Hunt”
Action Item 1,456 for my UnDictatorship - make everyone in government watch Mission Impossible (original film). Then write out 5,000 times - “I must not create lists of everyone”
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.
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?
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.
Did they ? Was that not an estimate under the last government for the total cost of the evacuation from Afghanistan ? The cost of resettling those who assisted UK forces appears (AFAIKS) to be nearly an order of magnitude less.
Something else a select committee (the public accounts one) might quantify - if only to set Leon straight.
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?
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?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
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.
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.
Did they ? Was that not an estimate under the last government for the total cost of the evacuation from Afghanistan ? The cost of resettling those who assisted UK forces appears (AFAIKS) to be nearly an order of magnitude less.
Something else a select committee (the public accounts one) might quantify - if only to set Leon straight.
Given the hospital pass, Reeves signed off £7bn in funding.
It wouldn't have been fair, but the optics would have not looked great.
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.
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?
Labour, if they had any sense, might shoot her fox and give both of them the chop
Labour can't sack Hoyle. Do you mean Starmer and Healey should fall on their swords?
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?
Incumbent Defence Secretary. Looking forward to Jenrick's next video.
The email leak happened over a year before it was discovered - did anything happen to any of our Afghan 'allies' in this period ?
How many people in total have been evacuated from Afghanistan by all countries ? And how does this compare to the number who actually fought against the Taliban in 2021 or the actual strength of the Taliban.
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.
Comments
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.
Really, we need to change so that Civil Servants are held accountable, legally and morally, for their actions. It may have been feasible in the past to blame ministers, when departments were small and most policy was directly controlled by them, but it simply isn't any more.
We still have, for example, a Permanent Secretary at the DfE who hosted an unlawful works party in lockdown and then gave completely the wrong budget to all schools plunging many of them into crisis. She's apologised for both, but that isn't good enough. She should have been sacked (as anyone in any other field would have been).
And Simon Case oversaw more car crashes than a medic at a junkyard rally, but he was eventually allowed to retire on health grounds.
As long as we continue to tolerate failures and disasters like this we will continue to have them. We need to start being more proactive as a country and political system in rooting them out.
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
I’m afraid that this is what I’m like when I’m SOBER
Some coverups are in order to stop your colleagues learning about what's happened.
And some politicians make sure that they do not become officially aware of things that might be inconvenient.
You can see why everyone conspired to keep quiet about it, even if you don't agree with that position. It's even a risk for the media which have reported it now if, for example, that grandmother mentioned by the BBC is now killed.
Intelligent PB'ers should have better judgement. The unintelligent one we know will never change.
Is it time yet to have those discussions or is everyone more interested in click bait?
I fear this is story where people will want a straighfoward moral to extract from it. But in fact both democratic accountability, and the safety of people who assisted Britain, are simultaneously at stake..
These ongoing narratives all meet here, in this one toxic story
The only solace I can take from it is that the story is SO bad it may be some kind of nadir. Rock bottom. It cannot get worse
Can it?
Hulkenberg went from 19th to 3rd in the last race, and I tipped him to score at 7.5.
What happened to Martin 'bring your own booze' Reynolds ?
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.
We know Governments do things they’d rather weren’t in the public domain and complete transparency is a myth. I can understand knowing what little I do why successive Governments acted as they did.
Had the initial data breach never occurred, we’d not be talking about this now but again it comes back to a central question which is what did or do we owe those who supported us in Helmand and elsewhere such as translators for example?
There are other questions about data ethics and security which are also immediate but do we essentially sacrifice thousands of people on the twin altars of cost and prevailing attitudes to immigrants?
It’s amazing (it isn’t) to see how attitudes have changed. In the mid-90s, there was widespread support for plans to encourage tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents to come to the UK before the handover to China but times have changed and the experience of migration this century has been a big part of that.
The problem is that much of the British establishment has shown over and again, that it has nothing but contempt for the people that it governs; that it will lie to them repeatedly (believing this to be "noble cause" lying); that it will cover up scandalous conduct; that it does not consider the voters' wishes or aspirations to be their priority; that their own mutual advancement is their most important guiding principle; that beyond a certain level, there are no penalties for failure or corruption.
And, it will keep on doing so, just like the late medieval Papacy, or the ancien regime nobility.
That has left perhaps a majority of voters now wanting to burn down the establishment, and they see Reform as the party that can do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWv8fbidR0A
The non-joined up Government bit is that their "Accessible for All" category includes 1:10 hills, which Disabled organisations (and the most applicable Government guidelines - LTN 1/20) will tell you is not accessible (try a 50m long 1:10 hill using a manual wheelchair or a scooter). They work for most, but not all.
We are all over "but public footpaths have hills"; yes, but that there plenty that do not eg rail trails canal towpaths. Except in my area when they did loads of rail trials in the 1990s they demolished many of the bridges etc they go over and made them unusable.
Web page of 50 such walks in the Lakes:
https://www.lakedistrict.gov.uk/visiting/things-to-do/walking/mileswithoutstiles
The vowel sound rule can be the reverse of the letter in both directions.
So you might go to "a university" to study chemistry where you might come across "an yttrium" chunk of metal.
So the 'justification' for allowing all tens of thousands of Afghans to migrate here is that they were helping us to help them.
Britain being in Afghanistan wasn't helping Britain.
All we were 'achieving' there was to create some future entitlement for people to migrate to this country.
Perhaps you could point out when that became the official policy because I cannot remember any government minister saying it.
Most stupid people would try to throttle the windpipe to restrict breathing; this will not be quick way to kill
Gripping the collar with both hands and crossed arms, squeezing the carotid arteries with the forearms will result in a much faster death
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.
It is inevitable, statistically, that some of the tens of thousands we are importing will commit heinous rapes
How the government “manages” that information will be worth watching
👏
https://brilliantmaps.com/men-women-friends/
Interestingly, it appears to be a reasonable map for 'which countries the UK feels most comfortable with immigration from'.
We thought it would be easy.
The US wanted us to.
Senior politicians greatly enjoy the glamour and gravitas of war.
It really isn't any more complicated than that.
But that reason had long passed by the end and certainly by 2011 when Bin Laden was killed (not in Afghanistan).
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?
The country would be outraged if he gets sacked from Strictly following the Torode precedent.
There are at least a couple of Parliamentary select committees which could do the job in a matter of months, at little cost.
And it is Parliament which should be investigating, as it was Parliament which was misled, by ministers, and by its own Speaker.
If they don't sort this out, then the electorate will draw its own conclusion (as Leon already has).
Parliamentarians need to develop some spine, and deal with ministers who are unable to hold their won civil servants to account.
In another it is a postie. Because no one notices postmen. Part of the landscape.
I'll keep it in mind.
Instead foreign interventions become self-perpetuating with more and more long term obligations being secretly agreed to.
I count friends in probably a few tens, with obviously a load more colleagues/ex-colleagues, acquaintances. But I guess this must be Facebook 'friends' or similar.
When I was on Facebook, I'd guess the ratio was near 50-50 for me or maybe majority female, but my actual friends a more often male, probably 2/3 or so.
Still an interesting set of maps though.
BBC News - Co-op boss says sorry to 6.5m people who had data stolen in hack - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cql0ple066po
And again nobody will fall on their sword.
I was mildly amused this morning that if the police look at my search history they will find the search “how long does it take to strangle someone”, PB might have to back up my excuse for the search if I’m a suspect in a strangling some time.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/MOD-Judgment-No-4-final.pdf
What’s changed attitudes isn’t as much the how many as the who or to be even blunter the quality as distinct from the quantity and this is why it’s not about immigration but integration.
People like people like themselves as I’ve always said and the closer those who come to this country are in terms of ethnicity and values the easier it is for them and the easier it is for us. We have always, albeit with initial reticence, welcomed those who seek to actively integrate and those who respect values of work, respect for the law etc.
We now find ourselves with a kind of reverse Rwanda. Instead of flying out people discretely to a processing centre in some far away country, we fly people in discretely from some far away country.
For all the shouting and political points scoring, this is often how Government works, in the shadows often in direct contrast to what they tell the public. If you want to change that, fine, I get that - you won’t get any better from Reform or the Greens or the LDs or Corbyn/Sultana.
The kind of Government you want - describe it and describe how it would work in the real world. Farage wants unaccountable, unelected people running Government departments because he is wedded to the view Government should be run like a business but it’s not the same.
Action Item 1,456 for my UnDictatorship - make everyone in government watch Mission Impossible (original film). Then write out 5,000 times - “I must not create lists of everyone”
Was that not an estimate under the last government for the total cost of the evacuation from Afghanistan ? The cost of resettling those who assisted UK forces appears (AFAIKS) to be nearly an order of magnitude less.
Something else a select committee (the public accounts one) might quantify - if only to set Leon straight.
It wouldn't have been fair, but the optics would have not looked great.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_rsMwl4_c
The email leak happened over a year before it was discovered - did anything happen to any of our Afghan 'allies' in this period ?
How many people in total have been evacuated from Afghanistan by all countries ? And how does this compare to the number who actually fought against the Taliban in 2021 or the actual strength of the Taliban.
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.