“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:

In the Commons on Tuesday, our Defence spokesperson Helen Maguire asked what the Government was doing to make sure this never happened again.

I thank the Minister for the Armed Forces for his briefing on this issue this morning.

I am pleased this House now has the opportunity to scrutinise this alarming data breach. It was right that the then Government moved to introduce a new scheme to try to minimise the risk to the Afghan soldiers and their families caught up in this breach involving 18,714 individuals in total. It is the very least we owe them given the sacrifices they made to support our campaign in Afghanistan, and I welcome the apologies from both sides of the House as a result of this data breach.

There are, however, serious questions raised about how this data breach was allowed to happen under the Conservatives’ watch, and the heightened level of risk it has created for the Afghans involved. What steps have been taken to address the root cause of the breach and ensure that it cannot happen again? Reporting by the Financial Times this afternoon suggests that an original relocation scheme considered for all 25,000 Afghan personnel could cost up to £7 billion. Will he confirm what assessment his Department has made of that figure, and why that was kept hidden from the public?

The immediate priority must be to ensure the safety of all those individuals caught up in this breach, so what assurances can the Secretary of State provide that lifting the super-injunction does not heighten dangers for the individuals concerned? What steps is he taking to ensure that the individuals whose data was leaked are aware of the incident? What additional support is being provided to them directly now that the case is in the public domain? In the light of these developments, can he outline when the casework and final relocations under this and the ARAP scheme will be completed?

Later, she called on the Government to come clean on whether there were other super-injunctions:

The disastrous withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 and now this data breach, shows how the previous Conservative government badly let down so many individuals who supported our Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

Ministers must now bring forward measures to prevent such breaches from ever happening again. The Defence Secretary also needs to confirm if the MoD has other super injunctions in place so that Parliament can provide much needed scrutiny.

Most importantly, the Government must ensure we fulfil our obligations to those who helped us, putting their lives and those of their families at risk throughout the conflict.

Ed Davey has also called for a public enquiry into the whole scandal:

The disastrous withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 and now this data breach, shows how the previous Conservative government badly let down so many individuals who supported our Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

Ministers must now bring forward measures to prevent such breaches from ever happening again. The Defence Secretary also needs to confirm if the MoD has other super injunctions in place so that Parliament can provide much needed scrutiny.

Most importantly, the Government must ensure we fulfil our obligations to those who helped us, putting their lives and those of their families at risk throughout the conflict.

In all of this there is an even more worrying long term consequence. Why would anyone ever want to help Britain ever again if this is how they are going to get treated? The Conservatives have a lot to answer for the ways in which they have trashed our international credibility and reputation.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social