You may have seen news online about the British government secretly importing Afghan refugees to the UK and covering it up. The scandal is much worse than that, and that is why it is plunging the country in turmoil. We once again asked we asked Fred De Fossard, of the Prosperity Institute in London, to explain the UK to us.

The revelations this week that the British Government has transported around 24,000 Afghan refugees to the UK, at a projected cost of £7 billion, in complete secrecy – authorised by the courts – is one of the worst scandals in modern Britain. It is the latest example of a rotten, broken state, led by a political class which no longer serves the national interest or the British people. 

In summary, in 2022 a database of people from Afghanistan, with potential connections to the UK, being considered for evacuation after the fall of Kabul was leaked accidentally by a British soldier. The leak was discovered in summer 2023. The Ministry of Defence feared that this would endanger the lives of Afghans who had assisted British forces during the war in Afghanistan, even though the people concerned were, by that time, known to have left for Pakistan. 

In response, Government Ministers successfully secured a court injunction so strong that not only was reporting about the leak banned, but so was reporting about the Government’s response, and even acknowledging the existence of the injunction itself. By that point, multiple newspapers had become aware of the leak, and had their stories gagged, even though the list was circulating online. The Government subsequently evacuated the Afghans concerned – with far lower security standards than the original evacuations – and after the 2024 General Election, the newly-elected Labour Government successfully applied to continue the injunction, maintaining the secrecy.

The injunction was lifted this week, and the reaction has been explosive. Court documents revealed that Ministers and officials were concerned about crafting a public narrative to explain why so many more people from Afghanistan were arriving in the UK than expected. They conspired to lie. The cost to the taxpayer was not only hidden from the public but even from the National Audit Office, the British Government’s office which scrutinises the use of public money by government bodies. As Parliament is meant to provide the Government authority to spend taxpayer’s money, this is a huge constitutional breach by Ministers. 

While the original responsibility lies with the previous Conservative government, the current Labour government continued with the policy of secretly importing people from Afghanistan. Meanwhile both parties continued with a stated policy of stopping illegal immigration, while in reality the Government purchased hotel rooms up and down the country to house illegal immigrants and also, it now turns out, thousands of Afghan refugees in secret. 

A lot of the political commentary has focused on the data breach. This is much more comfortable territory for the political class, who can pursue a leak inquiry and come up with bureaucratic fixes to a bureaucratic problem. The reality is worse, and it must not be ignored. Severe disorder has erupted in the United Kingdom over illegal immigration in the last year. The most recent example has taken place this week in Epping, a suburban town which straddles the edges of London and Essex, and is nobody’s idea of a left-behind, or forgotten part of the country. 

American readers may see similarities between this affair and the illegal immigration saga of the Biden Administration, where migrants from Haiti and central America were placed in taxpayer-funded accommodation without local consent. This is a phenomenon seen across the Western world today. What makes it slightly different in Britain is the extraordinary latitude granted to the state by the courts to do this in secret. For example, the House of Commons’ Intelligence and Security Committee, which was established to scrutinise the actions of the security services, was kept entirely in the dark during this affair. This is a world away from the level of oversight that the US Congress enjoys over the American agencies. Evidently, without such oversight, all manner of bad behaviour can fester. 

This runs in contrast to Britain’s constitutional tradition. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the birth of modern Britain, the country has been run on the principle of parliamentary supremacy. The King’s government has been accountable to Parliament and all of its expenditure must secure parliamentary approval.  This is the bedrock of the British constitution and, ultimately, British prosperity. During Britain’s long 18th century war with Bourbon France, her democratic constitution was as much a weapon of war as the Royal Navy. Thanks to strong institutions like Parliament and the Bank of England, Britain was able to finance her war effort at far lower costs than France, where all public money was the personal property of the King and the state of the finances were a guarded secret. Transparency and openness create better governance and nurture prosperity. Governments which throw these aside also throw aside their legitimacy. 

Britain today is in a potentially Bourbon moment of its own. The public finances are shot, inflation and borrowing costs are climbing, the public are at boiling point over immigration, and the Prime Minister has some of the lowest approval ratings ever. In this context, the revelation of a secret plot to spend billions of pounds bringing unvetted migrants from Afghanistan to be housed at the British public’s expense is toxic not just for this Government, but for the broader legitimacy of the entire state and ruling class.

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