Why the Afghan data breach isn’t just a Tory problem

0:00Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go. Easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer. Really? I hit 200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good. Offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. This is a Global Player original podcast. And yesterday the Defence Secretary set out the full extent of the failings that we inherited.

0:42A major data breach, a super injunction, a secret route that has already cost hundreds of millions of pounds. Ministers who served under the party opposite have serious questions to answer about how this was ever allowed to happen. The chair of the Defence Committee has indicated that he intends to hold further inquiries.

1:04Lewis Goodall:I welcome that and hope that those who were in office at the time will welcome that scrutiny. After one of the biggest acts of incompetence ever committed by the British state, at Prime Minister's questions, not a single backbench MP thought to rise to ask him to rule out whether super injunctions should ever be used in this way ever again to deny Parliament its right to know what the government is doing and why. 24 hours on from the lifting of that super injunction, who is going to pay the political price and who will be asked the questions about what happens next? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:51Jon Sopel:the news agents it's john it's emily it's lewis and what an extraordinary 24 hours what an extraordinary two years for you lewis kind of tied up with this court case that was never ending and only with the injunction lifted yesterday i just wonder given how closely you followed it and given what we have heard from the defence secretary from the previous defence secretary from the prime minister has anything changed your understanding of what unfolded no john not really

2:26Lewis Goodall:one thing that i am surprised to hear about though is the extent to which so many politicians seem to be saying well it's nothing to do with me gov and perhaps i shouldn't be surprised by that given the the sort of gravity involved but there has been a huge amount of deflection i would say which has taken place by politicians over the last 24 hours. In particular, both from the former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and indeed his successor, one of his successors, John Healy, suggesting that basically this super injunction was being kept in place by the courts and that therefore, I mean, I heard John Healy say something this morning, which was to say, you know, I had to do something to overcome these court decisions.

3:07Lewis Goodall:Can we just be absolutely specific about this? It was not the court that kept the super injunction going it was governments of both colors for two years right indeed to be absolutely explicit at one point as we said in our special episode the super injunction was discharged by the court at which point the government decided to appeal to take it to a higher court the court of appeal they did not need to do that it was the government conservative government and the labor government which has kept this super injunction in place for two years and it has only now just come to an end. So I'm just somewhat surprised to hear so many politicians seeming to suggest that this is a judicial problem rather than the political one.

3:48I've been calling around former members of the cabinet over the last 24 hours, in other words, the last cabinet under the Conservative government and it's been interesting to see how much pushback there has been about this story. One very senior member of the last government said to me, if you were responsible you would have made exactly the same decision and they put it like this do you burnish your transparency credentials feel good with your international law pals or do you try and save the lives of afghans who the government has entirely accidentally put at risk and to your point lewis this person went on and said all this was agreed by a judge who quite rightly told the government the time was limited and they needed to get on and deliver and design a repatriation scheme by the way this was all brief to healy and to starmer who are trying to have their words their transparency cake and eat it now i guess the pushback on that is everyone understands an injunction for a limited time everyone understands even a super injunction to say we need to get our ducks in a row we need to make sure the people who are right at the center of this are warned and alerted and can get the hell out of that country but i don't think it makes any sense then to leave it on for two years.

5:02Lewis Goodall:Well, the thing is, I think, is that my point to that, and I think this is why we're talking to talk about scrutiny, and I think that this is one of the big questions that needs to be answered, and I don't see anyone answering it at the moment, is that the positions you just outlined are incompatible for that person to say, which is that either it is the case, right, that this was so dangerous that it was such a potential risk. I do not understand in which case why it has been lifted right I sat in that court for two years for two years and I heard government lawyer after government lawyer say time after time after time that this massive restriction on press freedom this massive restriction on parliament's right to scrutinize the executive was justified because the risk to life was so grave so grave that if this data set ever ever became known just the knowledge of it became known then the Taliban would use it to kill people.

5:54Lewis Goodall:And one of the things I cannot understand, and I asked John Healy about it yesterday, I've still not heard a satisfactory answer. What happens? After two years, he commissions a review. This guy, Paul Rimmer, former civil servant, looks through it and goes, oh, actually, I don't think that risk to life is so great, after all. And that is, well, either the initial assessment was wrong, and this is right, or vice versa. It can't be both. Can I just come back on that one? That was exactly the answer I asked, which is like, is it great or is it not great. They said you need to get the people out whose lives are at risk.

6:26That's what they did. They got 4 ,000 here.

6:28Lewis Goodall:But there are still loads more that were affected. There are loads more who they've now decided are not at risk. I mean, I'm not I'm not making this case. I'm just saying arbitrary. It's so arbitrary. So apparently they got a lot of people across the border to Pakistan. Yes. They told them to get out of Afghanistan. 4 ,000 came here. They got other people out to Pakistan. And then they decided that the remaining ones weren't at risk. Now, Now, of course, you might say that's very convenient. But what I guess I'm saying is this is how they have justified what has happened to themselves. There was a duty of care that came first.

6:58It came ahead of transparency.

7:00Jon Sopel:And now I'm sure I'm sure a lot of people's gut instincts will be with the views expressed by those former cabinet ministers. Oh, my God, it's a terrible situation. There's been a mighty cock up. This data file has been leaked. Thousands of lives are at risk. right let's take out an injunction keep it quiet let's try and sort out the problem before we let the public know about it now you know i was with someone last night eminent kc who was expanding on that argument as well i've also been contacted by someone who senior at the mod who was part of this central committee that was established when the leak came to light and they were trying to figure out what to do and i think i'm right in saying there is considerable unease within the mod when there was suddenly this super injunction and officials are thinking my god there is going to be absolutely no scrutiny of anything how is this sustainable and exactly lewis to your point that it wasn't a judicial decision it may have been offered up by the judge initially but governments of both colors have thought oh yeah i loved it they could discharge the super at any moment.

8:13Jon Sopel:If it's unprecedented, they couldn't understand what they were being offered, right? Because it had never been offered before. But then you have got a real problem that, of course, you know, at times of war, there are going to be secret stuff happens and there is going to be no accountability because you can't have it brought before Parliament about what we're going to do about an invasion or what we're going to do about... Like the D-notice, you know, the safety of our own troops. Yes, but this falls into a slightly different category where you are inventing government policy. You're bringing Afghans in secretly.

8:44Jon Sopel:There is the expenditure of hundreds of millions of pounds. And as you were saying, Lewis, yesterday, but it could have been up to seven billion pounds that was being spent. And there is nobody who knows anything about it. And there is a super injunction that prevents the Speaker of the House of Commons from doing anything about it. I think that is a fascinating subplot to all of this. Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? The role of the Speaker in this, which is he's also under a super injunction. Right. so he cannot receive any questions about this. He cannot say anything about it. Because the whole point, we should explain, the whole point is that the Commons normally has this privilege, the right to ask privilege.

9:20We'll all remember the Ryan Giggs super injunction when John Hemmings said the name of the premiership footballer out loud in the Commons to end the super injunction.

9:31Lewis Goodall:Privilege is basically the MP is not subject to defamation as long as they say it in the Commons. They don't break the law if they say it outside. The fact that the Speaker couldn't actually act in his role as Speaker is extraordinary. I have always wondered, Emily, exactly that. I've always wondered, and I've never seen any explanation, how a super injunction applied to the Speaker of the House of Commons can possibly sit with a central principle to our constitution of parliamentary privilege. And I am very, very intrigued. And parliamentary sovereignty. And parliamentary sovereignty. And this is the thing that I continue to wrestle with.

10:03Lewis Goodall:I do not see, and I'm amazed, I mean, we can talk about this, I'm amazed that more MPs don't seem to be affronted, affronted that their rights as legislators sitting at the heart of our democracy. How can super injunctions, if they are to be used ever again, possibly cohere or sit with our constitutional system? They can't. They can't. Not over any prolonged period, because Parliament is sovereign. Parliament's ability to scrutinise the executive sits at the heart of our political system. And again, I go back. Number 10 has not ruled out their use in future. John Healy yesterday with me wouldn't rule out their use in future, although he said the bar would be high.

10:38Lewis Goodall:And if that were to become part of the armoury of the British state, then that would pose long term political questions about how our system can be expected to function. And I'm amazed that more MPs don't seem to be worried about it. I genuinely think there is a visceral response from many. and I think it's probably fair to say it will be more from conservatives who think that anything to do with military secrets or the MOD remains first of all a question of duty of care and another former cabinet minister I spoke to was sort of explaining this to me in very sort of you know step-by-step terms this happened and this happened and I said well it's extraordinary you make it sound like there's nothing to see here do you really believe there's nothing to see here and they said yeah i sort of do now okay two things can be going on here one they can be so terrified that they are all in kind of like slight shutdown mode you know they cannot believe what is coming back to haunt them because of what's gone on but the alternative is that as i say if you come from particularly a military background particularly something that respects the sort of the secretive nature of government more than transparency, then yeah, you completely convince yourself that this has to happen.

11:56Jon Sopel:The thing that I struggle with there is that there has always been in Parliament, you know, you go back over the decades and there have been those parliamentarians that have not been interested in ministerial jobs and being part of the party machine. Yeah, they're sitting as a Conservative MP or a Labour MP or a Liberal Democrat MP, whatever it happens to be, but they kind of think their first duty is to their constituents and to parliament itself and its sovereignty and maintaining the sort of right of parliament to hold the executive to account and a scheme and a super injunction like we have just seen absolutely denies any ability and there are mechanisms yeah but there are surely there are mechanisms you know i mean we had on the other day you know someone from the intelligence committee talking about the threat of iran where they get all the private briefings and they hear from mi5 and they hear from mi6 surely i mean i heard ben wallace on the radio the former defense secretary say uh well the intelligence committee doesn't hear stuff about defense not true yeah and you just think but why well it could do i mean why not there must be ways in which parliament through some kind of system of committee or whatever it happens to be they may have to be vetted all the rest of it look there has to be a way you can have an argument

13:17Lewis Goodall:about whether the super injunction was necessary to begin with you can have an argument about what the mod policy response was fine you know reasonable people might disagree about those things i think what you cannot argue or what i'm surprised which doesn't seem to be taking place to extent i thought it might is that you cannot argue is that this is constitutionally new and you would have thought that MPs might consider whether or not this ought to happen again in the future or if it were to happen in the future, as you say John, to your point, what the architecture around it ought to be to scrutinise it, to make sure that it is being properly observed and it is not being misused by the government or the executive.

14:00We don't know there isn't one

14:01Lewis Goodall:still going on. We just don't know that. That's the point, right? So when you asked John Healy yesterday, can he rule out any future super injunction? I mean, he said, there might be one, right? Or he might know that there is one and that's why he can't rule it out. And exactly. So I was pretty astonished today. I have to say, going back to what we said at the start, that, you know, this is today was the final prime minister's questions before recess. It was the final opportunity for MPs to put any of these matters to the prime minister. They've had 24 hours as well to internalise it from yesterday.

14:34Lewis Goodall:Yes, there was a statement from Healy yesterday, but they've had some time to actually think about the constitutional implications and what happened, the very profound human implications for all those people caught up with it in Afghanistan. and although the Prime Minister himself addressed it at the start and Ed Davey made a passing reference to it, not a single backbencher got up to ask about, to ask the Prime Minister, for example, whether he could guarantee that this would never happen again, to ask about what he intended to do in future to defend Parliament's right, their right as parliamentarians and for their constituents to scrutinise the executive and defend their own rights.

15:10Lewis Goodall:If Parliament isn't going to defend its own rights, then who will? Who will? And I thought it was a pathetic display.

15:17Jon Sopel:The thing that interests me as well about what Starmer said in the comments today, which was sort of difference in tone from what we heard last night, was he was trying to make it much more party political. He was pointing the finger at the Conservatives. They've got difficult questions to answer. They need to answer why they did what they did, etc, etc, etc. etc whereas i thought until then it was well look you know we inherited this from the government the previous government and we kept it on for a little while but we wanted to check what the security situation was and when we found that it was safe to do so we lifted this super injunction and so i just wonder whether it becomes a party political football or maybe maybe the indifference of mps you know when john healy was saying to you yesterday lewis accountability starts now accountability isn't going to start at all.

16:09I mean, one thing we should talk about is the Afghans who've just been receiving in the last 24 hours the news that their lives have been put at risk and in danger.

16:19Lewis Goodall:No, but it's all right, Emily, because they can go onto a website and put the details in and just check whether or not they've... I mean, they literally got an email or a text, you know, saying wipe your social media from the MOD. Wipe your social media. I mean, it's a bit like one of those things which is like don't repeat patterns, you know, don't repeat your patterns of life. Don't pick up the phone. Don't go to your door. If you knew nothing about this, and of course, because of the super injunction, they would have known nothing about this. And they suddenly get a message which will turn their lives upside down.

16:49And they're told not to respond to the email that they've just had, to wipe their social media and then to check. I don't know what checking on the MOD website means in the first place. I don't know what you'd do. I mean, some of them, it's fair to say, have started a class action. And we know this because Bearings, a law group, has actually put together a class action of people who are so profoundly horrified by the situation they found themselves in that they're now suing the government. I mean, that's a whole other expenditure, which could come probably to more than the actual repatriation.

17:21We don't know. But, you know, there are people who have just literally discovered that their names were on that list now who are thinking, do I have a life in Afghanistan? Should I get out? am I okay to believe that I'm now safer? Because the government, the UK government, who's in the middle of the war, there's absolute chaos, has just told me it's fine now. And that's the thing, this story fuses, you know,

17:43Lewis Goodall:literally tens of thousands of real people, often in desperate, desperate circumstances, with these grander but nonetheless extremely important constitutional questions that we're talking about. And that is why I think this question of scrutinising and internalising what has happened and thinking about what ought to happen in the future how these matters ought to be handled again in the future, particularly even relatively narrow things that aren't that narrow, like how the government handles data protection, how this even happened in the first place. And what are the mechanisms as that's going to happen?

18:13Lewis Goodall:Because the PM said that he hopes the Defence Select Committee can look into it. Well, the Defence Select Committee, of course, you know, has some great people on it and they will be able to hold hearings and so on. But they won't necessarily have the access to the full range of papers. They won't have the access to all of the people necessarily. You know, a lot of the people, as we know, who have been... I mean, Parliament is not set up to scrutinise the opposition. Most of the people who were involved in this have since left Parliament, like Grant Shapps or Ben Wallace. Yes, the Defence Select Committee could bring them in.

18:41Lewis Goodall:But nonetheless, I do think, and it's interesting, you know, you've got the Lib Dems suggesting they'd support this reform and are calling for it as well. I, you know, hesitate to pull on the public inquiry lever because I know it's too often done. But I do think that there is a special case for this. Given so much of this, in fact, all of it until now, has taken place in secret, in complete secrecy, that there would be a very strong case to have a time-limited public inquiry with statutory powers to look at this. Because, I don't know about you two, but I have been inundated in the last 24 hours with people emailing me, getting in touch with me on social media, saying, Lewis, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't like talking about the deep state, whatever.

19:20Lewis Goodall:But this has shaken my faith in the system. It really has. Because it's made me think, hang on, if we didn't know about this, what else don't we know about? What else could they use other circumstances around to justify keeping from us? And I do think that it is important for the robustness of our future politics and democratic system for people to have confidence and faith. If something like this were going to happen again, it's been properly thought about, properly reviewed. And there have been proper institutions and mechanisms in place to ensure that there is proper scrutiny.

19:53Jon Sopel:Am I right in saying, Lewis, that there are still things about this that you can't talk about? Yes. so even if you have a defense committee inquiry where you are calling evidence for people to give evidence presumably they are subject to the same restrictions that you are and therefore

20:13Lewis Goodall:wouldn't be able to discuss certain issues uh yes i mean there isn't there is i mean there are two slightly different issues there is an ongoing relatively limited injunction to prevent the disclosure of certain details about the case which could by the time next week for example be lifted and those things could be reported. I can't really say why there is, but that is the case. There will, of course, though, be lots of things. There will have been documents. There are documents that have been redacted that I can't talk about. Quotes, things that we heard about in the case, any quotes we wanted to use, we've had to get pre-authorised and authorised for usage in that.

20:47Lewis Goodall:And as I was explaining on the main episode we did, I would say between a third and half of all the court proceedings that we were party to took place in a further level of secrecy that we weren't allowed to, a further closed session, which we weren't allowed to attend. So indeed, you know, in terms of members of the public, journalists, there will be no one better informed about what happened than myself and the other journalists who were involved. But we ourselves are pretty much in the dark about a reasonably, you know, large percentage of what went on. And so, yes, this is what I mean and why I'm so sort of exercised about it is that, you know, even the Defence Select Committee might not have full access to all of those things.

21:25Lewis Goodall:So I think we've got to think carefully about how we review what has happened. The Ministry of Defence, even for Whitehall departments, is famously, famously prone to secrecy, sometimes for good reason. It's not especially cooperative. We've seen that its systems are clearly not fit for purpose in lots of ways. So I think that, you know, you would have to... I think we need to think hard about how we think about what's happened and what we do in the future.

21:55Evening.

21:56Jon Sopel:Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake.