This week a so-called tremendous injunction – a gagging order – was lifted on a once-in-a-generation scandal.
The earlier Conservative Government had been secretly relocating 1000’s of Afghans for 2 years—all as a result of their names had been revealed in an information breach from the Ministry of Defence. They did this in secret, with out permitting MPs, like me, to scrutinise the choice.
Now we uncover that the personal details of serving British military and intelligence personnel working in Afghanistan have been additionally leaked within the information breach. I spent two years in Afghanistan and my preliminary thought was – am I on the listing? Are my colleagues who’re nonetheless serving on the listing? Are the Afghans I labored alongside on the listing?
The Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) incompetence is aware of no bounds. Let’s choose aside what has occurred.
The unique determination to cover the information breach was the precise one – it protected British personnel and the Afghans who had labored alongside us to bravely battling terror for therefore a few years.
However the MOD determined to maintain Parliament out of the loop – and particularly the Committees just like the one on which I sit – the Defence Choose Committee – whose job is to regulate what the MOD is doing. In consequence, the then Tory-run MOD ran a secret relocation channel costing a billion kilos. This isn’t on.
But it surely’s not the simply the earlier Government that has inquiries to reply. The Labour Defence Secretary, John Healey, informed my Lib Dem colleague Ian Roome MP on Tuesday that, to the perfect of his information, “no serving member of our armed forces [was] put in danger by the information breach”.
Now we all know that to be false, he wants to come back to Parliament and proper the file.
