Ministers face £5bn Nuked Blood bill as they refuse to reveal evidence
Ministers have uncovered government plans to conduct radiation experiments on troops, but refused to give details to Parliament.
It comes days after the Defence Secretary told MPs he was 'deeply uncomfortable' about a super-injunction that prevented him discussing a £7bn data leak about Afghan troops and translators.
Now the Mirror can reveal that his department is again hiding potentially expensive errors behind the cloak of a 'ministerial review' - with final costs estimated at a further £5bn.
Tory grandee Sir John Hayes said: "Given that the ministers will have discovered a great deal in this review, it's important they inform Parliament of it at the earliest opportunity to maintain good faith, and I will be raising this in the House as a matter of urgency."
The inquiry was ordered last year after a BBC documentary showcased our investigation of the Nuked Blood Scandal, a Cold War programme of mass blood and urine testing on servicemen conducted in Australia and the Pacific for more than a decade.
The results are missing from medical files, effectively denying them war pensions, compensation, and the right medical treatment. MoD officials have repeatedly told Parliament and the courts that blood testing never took place.
Veterans Minister Al Carns has been asked several times by MPs of all parties to reveal his findings from the 10-month review of Ministry of Defence archives, but has rejected the calls, saying he is hunting for evidence of an official policy of blood-testing. 'I will update the house when I am in a position to share the findings of the exercise that is looking at concerns raised with me about some nuclear test veterans' medical records,' he told the Commons.
His staff have examined 43,000 files, amounting to more than a million pages. They include a 1957 request from Charles Adams, the scientific director of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment that blood counts should be done on troops even if others 'thought it unnecessary'.
A second AWRE letter examined by his team says blood tests are needed 'from the medico-legal aspect' for all troops and civilians before they leave the UK because 'we wish to exclude people with existing pathological conditions... we wish to be able to demonstrate that this has been done in any case in which a claim for damage is made'.
The review is also thought to have uncovered a 1958 operational order from Bomber Command stating that 'all personnel who go to Christmas Island should have the following blood examinations made and the results recorded in [their file]'.
READ MORE: Video of Labour's broken promises to nuke veterans gets 3 million views as pressure grows
It is not known whether these documents have been personally shown or briefed to the minister, but his officials are known to have examined the files between January and July. The MoD is facing a lawsuit from veterans and widows about non-production of the medical records, estimated to top £5bn.
Alan Owen of campaign group LABRATS said: 'The data leak which has caused so much outrage was blamed on the previous government, but this happened entirely on Labour 's watch.
'They set up the review, they've been briefed on the findings, and they've refused repeated requests from Parliament to reveal what they know. They don't even have the excuse of a super-injunction to hide behind - this is the government's own doing.'
A spokesman for the MoD said: 'The Minister for Veterans and People has commissioned officials to look seriously into unresolved questions regarding medical records as a priority, and this is now underway.
"This work will be comprehensive, and it will enable us to better understand what information the department holds in relation to the medical testing of service personnel who took part in the UK nuclear weapons tests, ensuring that we can be assured that relevant information has been looked at thoroughly.'
The spokesman was unable to confirm whether the minister had personally reviewed the files seen by his team.
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This strategy left public institutions increasingly unable to function by themselves. They made little effort to develop their internal expertise, not least when it came to the new frontier of digital services and databases. Both New Labour's military adventurism and its private finance agenda emanated from a belief that the market-led 'liberal democracy' would conquer the world after the Cold War, replacing backward governments with modern ones, fusty bureaucrats with dynamic entrepreneurs. Authorities in Kabul and Westminster alike would be swept away by this emerging order. Since the arc of history supposedly bent in its direction, the transformation would be mostly spontaneous. Policymakers were encouraged to step back and let it take its course. Their main role was to remove the obstacles to this telos via targeted interventions: overthrowing unfriendly dictators, repealing onerous regulations and waiting for peace and prosperity to follow. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But such progress never arrived. Instead, the Middle East was drenched in blood: cities bombed to oblivion, ancient heritage sites razed and ethnic conflicts inflamed, with a network of torture facilities springing up across the region to deal with popular resistance. The puppet government in Afghanistan hid out in its securitised Green Zone, siphoning off foreign aid while the rest of the country suffered an endless social crisis. Inequality widened, with basic services in short supply. Political opposition was monopolised by the Taliban, who could bide their time until the occupiers exhausted themselves. Nor was New Labour's 'modernising' vision realised on the home front, where opening the state to market competition brought no benefit to anyone apart from the successful competitors. Just as external actors took over what passed for public provision in Afghanistan, private entities assumed many of the traditional functions of government in Britain, creating a culture of kickbacks and corner-cutting, soaring costs and deteriorating services. Blair had assumed that he could remove the constraints on his 'Third Way' model – 'rogue regimes', nationalised utilities – and bask in its success. But in practice the elimination of those fetters led to perpetual crisis, which the government was forced to step in and manage: staying in the Middle East far longer than expected to attend to the aftermath of its invasions, while struggling to limit the blowback from its free-market reforms. This sequence of events unfolded not just in Britain but across the Global North, as governments joined foreign wars and delegated authority to big business. It soon gave rise to a paradoxical situation. New forms of international dependency were created, with impoverished client states becoming completely reliant on the imperial powers. At the same time, those powers themselves became dependent on predatory investors and asset-stripping corporations, with dire results for states and wider societies. So, as elites in Kabul looked to Western governments to stabilise their rule, they realised that the latter were grappling with their own set of instabilities, caused by the forward march of neoliberalism. Politicians in the developed world had forfeited their own sovereignty while trying to assert it over others. This dynamic contributed to the failure of the regime-change doctrine. These weakened states – internally atrophied and externally overstretched – were not up to the task of neocolonial governance. Their operations were often haphazard, their intelligence flawed. They never established hegemony, which requires the maintenance of power through a careful balance of coercion and consent. The mode of rule was based on the first far more than the second: domination pure and simple. Under this system, the original sins of colonialism began to proliferate. According to a BBC investigation, scores of Afghan civilians were executed by British special forces, with one SAS squadron reportedly competing internally to attain the highest body count. One veteran described it as 'routine' for soldiers to handcuff and kill detainees – including children – and then cover up their crimes by removing the restraints and planting weapons on the corpses. Killing, said another former fighter, was 'addictive'. 'On some operations, the troops would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there… They'd go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry.' Countries that are run in this way tend to rebel against their rulers. The abrupt Nato withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, allowing the Taliban to regain control rapidly, was an open acknowledgement of that fact. Two decades of engagement had cost an estimated 243,000 lives without leaving behind any durable power structure. While some clung to the dream of an indefinite occupation, most of the political and military establishment recognised the urgent need to jump ship. Yet the notion that Britain could easily escape this quagmire was no less misguided than the decision to enter it in the first place. Relations of dependency do not disappear overnight. UK officials had to work out what to do about the significant number of Afghans who lent their services to the war effort, and who now have a legitimate claim to asylum. Once again, their response was astoundingly inept: first presiding over a leak-prone MoD that broadcast the collaborators' details on an unencrypted spreadsheet; then failing to notice the mistake for 18 months; then refusing to inform those it endangered; and finally launching a belated resettlement scheme under the cover of a super-injunction. Britain has now abandoned even this fleeting attempt to make up for its reckless activities. The Defence Secretary, John Healey, has announced that no more Afghans whose data was exposed will automatically be offered relocation in the UK, nor will they be given compensation. He assures us there is 'little evidence of intent from the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against former officials' – even though there is already a well-documented record of similar revenge attacks, and Healey admits he is 'unable to say for sure' whether people have been killed as a result of the breach. Naturally, the families of those featured on the spreadsheet are not as sanguine as he is about their possible fate. All this follows Labour's earlier decision to shut down safe routes for Afghan asylum seekers, abolishing both the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme. These were designed for those who had assisted UK forces along with other vulnerable groups, but have now been closed with immediate effect, as part of a broader attempt to outflank the anti-migrant politics of Reform UK. Starmer's intention, it seems, is simply to ignore the inconvenient fallout of the war on terror. The fantasy of building a harmonious Western-orientated Afghanistan has been swapped for the fantasy of evading the consequences of that project. It will not turn out well. The Labour Party's wars of aggression have reshaped 21st-century Britain, not to mention the Middle East, in ways that are impossible to repress. In particular, by promoting the narrative that Muslims are incapable of running their own countries and attempting to modernise them at gunpoint, they have legitimated the kind of Islamophobia Nigel Farage is now wielding against the main Westminster parties: calling for a hard-border regime to keep out those lacking in 'British values'. Farage has used the data breach to further incite such paranoia, claiming with no evidence that sex offenders have been allowed into the UK under the resettlement programme. The only principled and effective antidote to this reactionary tendency is a full rupture with the legacy of New Labour. The first step would be to reckon with the scale of suffering caused by foreign interventions and accept Britain's obligation to alleviate it to the greatest possible extent: by welcoming refugees, easing sanctions that continue to strangle the Afghan economy, and paying reparations. The real test of whether we've learnt from the 2000s, however, is whether we continue to repeat its mistakes. The current Labour government might be more wary of dispatching troops to faraway places. But it still sent RAF spy planes to aid Israeli intelligence operations in Gaza, and has supplied components for Israel's F-35 jets that are being used in air strikes, all in the service of a protracted regime-change campaign against Hamas. It refuses to rule out supporting a US-Israeli assault on Iran, which would inevitably cause mass death and displacement as well as creating many more refugees. If the government's main foreign policy ambition is to act as Washington's henchman, this is in part because its domestic policy is not designed to reclaim the sovereignty that was relinquished during the neoliberal period; it is characterised by the same mix of deregulation and deference to private interests. In this sense, the data leak offers a glimpse of a much wider problem: the ability of Blairism to survive amid the wreckage it has made. [See also: Israel and Gaza: A question of intent] Related
