Why is Starmer firing his MPs?

18:47Lewis Goodall:Under various bits of legislation which govern the way it operates, it would normally always be informed of something like this, a super injunction being applied in a way that it has been applied, and this huge operation to resettle people from Afghanistan, as we've been reporting on all week. Now, the Intelligence and Security Committee were not informed of all of this. Indeed, I was at a court hearing when the judge involved actually asked why the Intelligence and Security Committee had not been involved, because at least that would have been some parliamentary scrutiny. They hear stuff that's more classified than this all the time, is my understanding.

19:25Lewis Goodall:At least that would have been some limited parliamentary scrutiny. and the government lawyer at the time said well there are questions about the sensitivity relating to these matters and informing certain politicians on this now there's a question therefore as to whether the government broke the law in not informing them and the intelligence and security has been meeting today in some anger and they've issued a statement about all of this and they said following correspondence on tuesday from mod ministers regarding a lot of data relating to the Afghan Relocations and Assistant Policy, applicants in February 2022, the committee has today written to require, under the statutory powers the committee has, that defence intelligence and joint intelligence organisation assessments must be provided to us immediately, together with any other intelligence assessments referred to in the case.

20:15Lewis Goodall:The reason this matters, remember, people who've listened to our episodes on this will know, this entire case rests on that first assessment made at the beginning by the ministry of defense that if their status set got into the hands of the taliban it would represent a lethal threat to those involved we now know the government has turned around and said actually we're not sure it is such a lethal threat so what the committee want to see is that initial defense assessment that we have never seen and i've spoken to a source on the committee who is skeptical about that initial assessment. Who knows whether it even exists in the way the government has suggested it has.

20:51Lewis Goodall:Because remember, so much of this, even in court, is taken on face value on what the government says. So this is a very serious charge, because if the government has misled the court about that initial assessment, it is contempt of court. I'm very serious. Just on that, the government could have broken the law. What's the sanction? Well, there could potentially be contempt of court sanctions for those involved. And officials now john obviously the question is as with all of this stuff if anyone is ever going to be held accountable because so far i'm not sure anyone will be but nonetheless there is some form right people might already be getting echoes a government comes along with an assessment about intelligence that turns out to be not quite right not quite right or not quite as billed although at least we saw that assessment the point of the matter is the fact of the matter is is that you know parliamentarians who as i say we've been saying all week they've been denied the right to scrutinise this stuff.

21:43Lewis Goodall:They're waking up to that fact and starting to ask some very serious questions about what has gone on. I mean, if the point of a super injunction is that you can't even mention it because you risk being sent to prison, then presumably the punitive sort of sanction of that is enough to stop people from leaking it. So it makes no sense for them not to tell the chair of the body that's literally called the Intelligence Committee And just to your point, it's not that the whole committee expects to know. It's not that every member expects to know, but the chair and somebody that I was talking to said, look, if this was in the US, if there was a moment at which the chairs hadn't been told about this, it would have been blue murder, frankly, that the difference between the respect for these bodies here and in the US is massive.

22:33and I think you can both believe that the injunction was the right thing to do as actually many still in the security community do but still prefer to be informed of it and by not informing those people I guess you risk creating a backlash of people who are even more suspicious that they've missed out on something that wasn't right in the first place anyway

23:00Lewis Goodall:Well, I mean, just to go back to the centrality of this assessment, I mean, this is something the judge himself in the case and in his judgment this week has expressed concern about. So Justice Chamberlain presided over the case, said he discharged the super injunction that the MOD needed. And when he did so, said the Ministry of Defence must explain more about the basis of the secret intelligence. He noted that the MOD's original assessments in 2023 were very different from its recent review, which he said could only be put down in parts to the passage of time. He said an examination of the way the initial assessments in this case were prepared and whether the courts were or are generally right to record such weight to assessments of this kind is a matter for consideration.

23:43Lewis Goodall:Mark Stevens, a media lawyer, has said that is judicial language for I'm very concerned that the court and the court system has been abused by the government.

23:52Jon Sopel:It's so interesting, isn't it? It's the way decision making works in government. And, you know, on this podcast, we said our job, I can remember on sort of day one, our job is to pull a curtain back on how the decision making is made, you know, in all these areas of power in our public life. and what we are seeing is a curtain being pulled back where you can just imagine a minister telling to a civil servant or whatever civil servant, look, make this, we need a report, we need to make this look as dire as possible and then Labour comes into power, wants to get rid of the super injunction, we need a report that makes it look like it's not as bad.

24:28I don't understand that. I just want to go back to your last line. The idea that the courts have been abused by the government because I thought we'd understood that the person who suggested the super injunction was the judge himself.

24:42Lewis Goodall:Indeed so. But on the basis of, I think, what the main judge in the case is suggesting is that the government may have misled him and misled his court as well about the nature of the initial defence assessment. There is, I mean, you've mentioned the kind of, the spectre of the 45 minutes and the dodgy dossier. There is another spectre that comes up. I don't know if this is too strong. I'm just sort of trying it out now. But there was absolute uproar when Boris Johnson prorogued Parliament, right? And I remember we were all in the Labour Party conference. I think one Keir Starmer was actually on the stage when Lady Hale came back with her decision that it had been unlawful and that the prorogation could not go ahead.

25:23I mean, it was only the beginning of the prorogation she stopped it being extended. But it does seem to point to the same kind of clash, essentially, which is the executive trying to stop the legislature from doing their job through a very heavy-handed use of the judiciary, right? And the judiciary at that time of the prorogation came out and said, you can't do this. At this time, the judiciary is being used as the tool by which they could. Now, you know, I have to say in the fullness, a lot of the people I've spoken to did not have a problem with that super injunction. You know, as I said, I think more and more it is dividing down party lines.

26:02It is dividing down people who think that nothing is a greater priority in public life than intelligence, national security and all the rest of it. And I think maybe there is a sort of there is a leaning from the conservative side towards that. And there's a lean towards transparency from the Labour side. But I think that whole sense of whether the executive is putting things in place that have never, ever been tried before, because it then takes Parliament out of the question completely, is a bit like prorogation.

26:32Lewis Goodall:I think there are real parallels with that. And the judiciary reacting very badly to the idea that they are being used. I think the point about this is, is this, in this case, even the judge who obviously sat through all of the closed material and sessions as well, in a way we didn't. ultimately he has to take on face value the assessments that he's given and the things the government say about those assessments. So he has to take those things on face value. So what I think he is saying there, and I think what the Intelligence and Security Committee are saying, is that it is important for these assessments to be seen in full and to actually confirm that they exist.

27:14Lewis Goodall:Because if they don't exist or they don't exist in the way as billed, That is a very serious thing for the government to have misled the court about. And therefore, the whole basis of the super injunction, which has been the basis for Parliament being denied its right to know about what was going on, falls away. The other place that we're starting to hear a real disquiet is from the people who are actually doing the government financial calculations. The National Audit Office is another body which is now coming forward and saying, I think we should have known about this. because the money that you're spending, whether it's on relocation, whether it's, you know, on future court cases, on sort of class actions, is something that will come out of affect government coffers.

27:55This is taxpayer money. And actually, why wasn't the National Audit Office involved in discussions of quite what this would mean for the British state? I mean, you know, we speak every other week on this podcast about the minuscule amount of financial headroom that the Chancellor has, you know, to do things with. And the fact that whatever the sum ends up being, at the moment, I think it's 400 million. But if that doubles...

28:23Lewis Goodall:It's 400 million so far and another 400 million. Exactly. So there you've got, you're just south of a billion, right? At some point, somebody who's doing the government maths probably needs to know about this too.

28:36Jon Sopel:The extraordinary thing is that years and years ago, when I was Paris correspondent, it came to light that there was this thing called les fonds secrets which dated from the second world war where a bank of france van would drive around government departments and deliver 500 franc notes to the minister in that department to do with as he saw fit there was no accountability and it was only ended in the early 2000s when i was in paris and it dated from the second world war and the resistance and the idea that we had to be able to do things in a clandestine way and it carried on. You would think that in 2025...

29:14Jon Sopel:Weird that they didn't shut that one down, isn't it? Weird that those French ministers were... Of course they were, for entertaining and doing whatever, and paying for mistresses, the whole bloody nine yards. It was so corrupt. The idea that in Britain today there is still hundreds of millions of pounds being spent... Unaccounted for. Unaccounted for. I guess the government will say, we accounted for it, we just didn't tell you. Tell you where it was being spent. And up to a point, we can't tell everyone everything because that is not a super injunction.

29:39Lewis Goodall:Well, I mean, and that's just the cost of resettlement, which, by the way, 800 million is, I think, basically going to be the lowest estimate. I think, you know, it's very likely that it runs into the billions in the end. And part of that cost, that's just the resettlement cost. Part of the other cost, which is now being, is starting to gear up, you've already referred to it, Emily, is the compensation. Yeah, the class actions. The class actions. I mean, we sat in court with a law firm we talked about the other day, Bearings. They've got over 600 cases already just ready to go. So I was talking to a source yesterday and they were saying the way to think about this, this is going to be by far and away.

30:13Lewis Goodall:Let's just think about the compensation by far and away. The biggest and most expensive data breach the British government will ever, ever paid for. Why is that? Well, obviously, there's a number is 18 ,000. But the way they put it to me to think about it is usually when a data breach happens and the government has to pay some compensation, it's often quite like minor data. It might be your email address, maybe your telephone number, more serious, maybe even your address, quite serious. But this is all right-to-life stuff. They said the way to think about it is the closest thing that it comes to would be if there was a data breach, which has very occasionally happened, on a witness protection programme.

30:46Lewis Goodall:And this has happened to 18 ,000 people plus their dependents. So just think about how expensive that might end up being. They're assuming that there aren't going to be 18 ,000 petitioners on this class action, not least because half of them now are out of Amazon. Rachel Reeves Blackhole could be about to get a whole lot bigger. The data set is out there and there will be law firms who may be able to obtain the data set and literally use it to go through the contact details. It will be like this really dark, sinister, horrendous version of PPI or something. It's kind of like so comprehensive. There will be people ringing them up and going, has your data been stolen or lost?

31:27Lewis Goodall:And the government have literally set up a website where you can check for yourself. So it is this weird thing. I mean, this source was talking to me saying that the Ministry of Defence is thinking, you know, could easily be 250 million pounds plus, if not way more. So this is just starting. The financial consequences of this, which you might say a second order by comparison to rights, life and everything. But nonetheless, the financial consequence of this are only just starting to unravel and unroll. We'll be back in just a moment.

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32:59Lewis Goodall:This is The News Agents.

33:04Jon Sopel:Before we go, the government has announced today that 16 and 17 year olds will be able to vote in time for the next general election, a change of the law. No longer 18 is the voting age. it's come down to 16 starmer says if you're old enough to go out to work then people who are 16 and 17 years old and are old enough to pay taxes they're old enough to vote as well contrary tories are saying if you're too young to go to war or get married or even stand in elections then you're too young to vote and it is a kind of really interesting mismatch isn't it because I always thought it was absurd the idea that you could die for your country but not be able to vote for the government that sends you to war to die for your country.

33:51Jon Sopel:But now we've got a situation where 16 you can vote but you've still got to be older before you can join the armed forces. Yeah I think what it really speaks to is what each party thinks it will do to their voter base and clearly Labour believes that there are more people who would naturally vote Labour in the 16 to 18 group and the Tories are dead worried that nobody of that age would vote Tory. And so I think that's what you're seeing in the reaction. And ITV News has just come out with quite an interesting poll on the back of this announcement by Angela Rayner. We should say, you know, the Rayner announcement comes this morning almost entirely overshadowed by, you know, the suspension of the four MPs.

34:34This is what happens when you sort of make a big dramatic action. You are in danger of making this story, you know, the and finally, as opposed to the lead story, which it might otherwise have been. But the poll for ITV News suggests that 49 % of those they talk to don't think the voting age should be lowered. And only 18 % would definitely vote if the election were held tomorrow. So I think that's, I mean, I'm assuming this is a poll of 16 to 18 year olds. So 49 % of those who are asked don't actually want the vote. And in this polling, Labour does come out with the most support, 33%, but reform is next at 20%.

35:19And I think one of the unknowns at this point is where the reform, which, you know, in its earlier guises as UKIP or Brexit Party have definitely been the party of the of the older white man, is now managing to sort of spread its tentacles into different demographics, particularly the younger man.

35:43Jon Sopel:No, that poll is exactly where I kind of, one, two predictions. The turnout will be really low among 16 to 18 year olds. And there'll be a very large number of that small turnout who will vote reform because we've seen it elsewhere. We've seen the pattern in America. A very low number who vote reform. No, a very large number that vote reform. It will be a very low percentage of 16 to 18 year olds who vote. But of that low percentage, a large number will vote reform. Yeah, many more might vote Labour, but a large number nevertheless will vote reform. And we've seen that pattern in America in last November's election, where young people, young bro vote.

36:22Jon Sopel:We talked about it a lot. We're going to go to for Donald Trump. And that sure enough as hell happened. We saw it with the most recent German elections. We're alternative for Deutschland. We're polling very well among young people, too. It's probable the same thing will happen here, even though at the moment reform are saying we shouldn't be extending the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds. There's good news for one former party leader in this poll, going back to the ITV numbers, which is that Jeremy Corbyn comes out as most favoured amongst the young. He has very high approval ratings. And after him, the kind of figures that the young say they'd vote for, Greta Thunberg, 27 percent, the YouTuber Mr.

37:05Beast on 21 percent and, drumroll, Jeremy Clarkson on 17 percent. And so, yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it, that I think the young are probably more politically engaged than ever before. But it's politically engaged without all the kind of, you know, the stability that used to come from generations of 18 year olds. You know, people without houses, people without mortgages, people without people probably who are, you know, maybe two decades away from marriage or any kind of formal sort of family commitment. You might not be even thinking about marriage until you're close to 40 now. So that's 20 years of the vote without that being at all relevant to how you're living your life.

37:52Right.

37:52Jon Sopel:Look, we've talked about how in America, you know, do the Democrats need to have a celebrity candidate at the next presidential election who can rival the sort of luster that Donald Trump or someone like that brings? You know, with 16 year olds, it's going to be the latest TikTok trend or the latest YouTube influencer or whatever it happens to be. You could just see someone coming along. I think that polling of, you know, who are the people that young people would vote for kind of shows that it's great to widen the franchise, to have the largest number of people voting. But it comes with risks as well.

38:27Yeah. And I think the clearest thing it tells us is that the next election will be, you know, I would say now the TikTok election. But whatever comes after TikTok, you know, that everything is going to be fought in the medium of social media from now on. You aren't going to look up and see a party political broadcast that has any kind of sway at all. We will see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Bye for now.

38:48Jon Sopel:This is a Global Player original podcast.

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