Tag Archives: news agents

“There are some things that you just can’t polish.”

So I said when i spoke against the Government’s plans to bring secret courts into the area of civil law back in 2013. For some inexplicable reason, Nick Clegg had decided to agree to this dreadful proposal. The party, pretty universally, was livid. That’s one reasons why factions don’t usually work in this party. At the time, the Social Liberal Forum and Liberal Reform were at each other’s throats on economic policy but we were united in standing up for civil liberties.  You can read some of the background to that here.

We’ve learned a lot about how secret courts operate in the past couple of days thanks to Lewis Goodall from the News Agents. He found himself subject to a super-injunction back in August 2023 when he learned about the leaking of a data set containing the contact details of everyone who had applied to come to this country under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy. These were people, 18000 of them, who had worked for the UK Government while we were in Afghanistan and who had targets on their back when the Taliban took over.

Anyway, Goodall is a serious, responsible journalist. When he discovered this story, he went to the Ministry of Defence, making it clear that he had no plans to publish. That didn’t matter. The resulting super injunction was in force  until this Tuesday at noon. The second it was lifted, Goodall got out all the stress of the previous 23 months out in a blistering podcast which revealed:

• Secret courts and secret courts within secret courts
• How many of the 18000 people and their families the Tory Government actually planned to help. Spoiler, it’s less than you think, despite this being the main legal rationale for the super-injunction
• How Tory ministers avoided pushing this forward, silencing scrutiny
• How much this cost the public purse
• How the first judge to hear the case actually suggested to the Government that they go for a super-injunction

If you listen to nothing else today, listen to this now because it shows a chilling use of government power which, the Judge openly remarked, stopped democracy. Judge Martin Chamberlain said it was:

fundamentally objectionable for decisions that affect the lives and safety of thousands of human beings, and involve the commitment of billions of pounds of public money, to be taken in circumstances where they are completely insulated from public debate.

So what have Liberal Democrats had to say about all of this: