Defence Secretary Healey told in April that news blackout on Afghans was probably unjustified
The judge has expressed 'concern' over the MoD's sluggish pace in bringing its review to court.
The Mail fought for two years in secret courts to reveal the Government's covert airlift of thousands of Afghans after it put 100,000 'at risk of death' by leaking a database of those who had applied for UK sanctuary.
During the news blackout, last October ministers signed off a £7billion plan while parliamentary scrutiny was 'in the deep freeze'.
After the draconian court order was finally lifted last Tuesday, Mr Healey told the Commons: 'I have felt deeply concerned about the lack of transparency to Parliament and the public.'
He said he had commissioned an internal review by civil servant Paul Rimmer at the beginning of the year, to test whether the threat to Afghans was still as bad. The review was handed to Mr Justice Chamberlain at the end of June.
But The Mail on Sunday understands from informed sources that Mr Rimmer was giving the Defence Secretary regular updates and that, by April, Mr Healey was aware of his report's likely conclusions – that the threat assessment had changed meaning there was no longer any justification for keeping everything a secret.
After he finally got his copy, Mr Justice Chamberlain told the court: 'There are things which will have to be investigated out of the report.
'Further steps are going to have to be taken to discover why some of the details contained in that report were not made known before now.'
In his final ruling at the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday, the judge said Mr Rimmer's assessments were 'very different from those on which the super-injunction was sought and granted'.
Journalists, including from the Mail, warned in private court hearings that Parliament's summer recess was fast approaching, and the judge brought forward the lifting of the injunction.
When he first tried to lift the super-injunction, in May last year, Mr Justice Chamberlain ruled that the 'continued stifling of public debate' was not justified.
The MoD – then run by Grant Shapps – responded by hiring one of Britain's most expensive KCs, Sir James Eadie, to overturn the judge's decision.
After the scandal was made public, Mr Healey was asked on Sky News why everything was kept secret for so long.
He replied: 'The super-injunction was a matter for the court.'
Last week, Downing Street defended Mr Healey. No 10 said his statement to the Commons on Tuesday, in which he said that 'to the best of my knowledge' no serving Armed Forces personnel were put at risk by the breach, was 'accurate'.
But it was reported days later that MI6 spies and members of the SAS were among those named.
The MoD was asked to comment on Mr Healey finding out about the likely conclusions of the report.
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The Independent
13 minutes ago
- The Independent
‘Anger doesn't get you anywhere' says minister after latest anti-migrant protests
A Home Office minister has hit back at those taking part in anti- migration protests across the UK, warning 'anger doesn't get you anywhere'. While Dame Angela Eagle said that those are worried about migration have an 'absolute right' to demonstrate peacefully, she warned: 'People don't have a right to then have a pop at the police, which has been happening in some isolated cases outside hotels.' It comes amid escalating protests across the UK opposing the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, with a number of people arrested after a protest outside a hotel in Canary Wharf in London on Sunday. Protesters jeered at people going in and out of the hotel, and officers were forced to step in after flares were let off in the crowd, the Metropolitan Police said. A group of people outside the Britannia International Hotel in Canary Wharf were 'harassing occupants and staff', trying to prevent people make deliveries, as well as trying to 'breach the fencing and access the hotel', a statement said. Speaking to Sky News, Dame Angela warned: 'One mustn't mix up people's genuine concerns and worries peacefully expressed with those who are trying to turn it into violence'. She said ministers are 'doing the detailed work' to bring down the asylum backlog, adding: 'We've taken 35,000 people off our streets who have no right to be in our country and sent them back to their countries of origin within a year.' 'We are doing all we can to deal with the challenges that the police are facing on the streets to make sure that women and girls are safe, and in fact, that everybody is safe on our streets.' But asked about people who are expressing their anger over migration, she said: 'Anger doesn't get you anywhere. 'What we have to do is recognise the values we have in this country, the rule of law we have in this country, the work we're doing with the police to protect people. We will close asylum hotels by the end of the Parliament. We'll do it faster if we can.' Robert Jenrick, Tory shadow justice secretary and former immigration minister said he "understands why people are so angry", telling BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'The basic problem with illegal migration is we simply know nothing about these people. They're undocumented, mostly men, who are coming across the Channel in flagrant abuse of our laws and being dumped in communities. I completely understand why people are so angry." Mr Jenrick said he thinks the 'public's patience has snapped'. 'This is issue is beyond party politics - it is causing immense harm to communities, people's lives are being wrecked as a result of it, and we simply have to fix it. 'I respect people who are peacefully protesting outside hotels this weekend. I understand why they feel so concerned. They're seeing their communities damaged', he added. Labour has put a pledge to crack down on the number of people coming to the UK on small boats at the centre of its plan for government. But with boat crossings at a record high, and the asylum backlog still above 75,000, there is mounting pressure on ministers to take more drastic action - pressure which is exacerbated by the success of Reform UK in the polls. Last week figures showed that the number of migrants arriving in the UK after crossing the English Channel topped 25,000 – the earliest point in a calendar year at which the 25,000 mark has been passed since data on Channel crossings was first reported in 2018 On Monday it was announced that the government will pour an extra £100m into efforts to tackle migration as pressure piles on ministers to crack down on small boat crossings. The money will support the pilot of the new "one in, one out" returns agreement between the UK and France, paying for up to 300 more National Crime Agency (NCA) officers and new technology and equipment to step up intelligence-gathering on smuggling gangs. It comes after a number of other measures to deter migrants from coming to the UK, with a "one in, one out" deal with France agreed last month meaning the UK will for the first time be able to send migrants back to France in exchange for asylum seekers with links to Britain. Meanwhile, anyone who advertises small boat crossings or fake passports on social media could be face up to five years in prison under a new offence to be introduced under the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. Dame Angela said any social media creators who advertise illegal routes into the UK, whether from overseas or within the UK, will be targeted under the new law. 'This is a crime that, when it goes in the Border Security Bill, will apply to anyone who arrives if they've done that, whether they're abroad or not', she told Times Radio. The minister also promised to tighten legal routes for entering the UK if there is evidence they are being misused, such as charity visas. 'It there's any evidence that legal routes to visas are being misused, then we will tighten up the rules to stop that abuse happening', Dame Angela said.
The Guardian
14 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Truss accuses Badenoch of not telling truth about Tory failures
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The Guardian
14 minutes ago
- The Guardian
UK politics live: minister pushes back at Tory claims linking small boat arrivals to sexual crime
Update: Date: 2025-08-04T08:53:20.000Z Title: Chris Philp Content: Good morning. During August, when parliament is not sitting and the tap of domestic news is running dry, opposition parties often like to run campaigns. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is following this model with gusto and today, for the third week in a row, he is holding a press conference on the subject of crime. Reform's success in the polls is almost entirely down to the fact it advocates hardline policies to cut immigration, and small boat crossings, and Farage is trying explicitly to link this issue to crime, arguing that asylum seekers are disproportionately likely to be criminal. The Conservative party don't have a single theme for their summer campaigning. (Yesterday Kemi Badenoch was campaigning about the uselesness of the Liz Truss mini-budget, a topic where the nation largely agrees.) But in response to an overnight announcement from the government about new measures to crack down on small boat crossings, they have also depicting these migrants (whose numbers, of course, increased dramatically while they were in office) as a threat to public safety. In a statement released overnight , the shadow home secretary, said: 'This weak Labour government has lost control of our borders, and we now see rapes and sexual assaults by illegal immigrants reported on a near daily basis.' And, in an interview on the Today programme this morning, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, doubled down on this claim. He said: I am afraid there is increasing evidence of a serious link between illegal migration, migration generally, and crime, particularly sexual crime against women and girls. In London, 40% last year of all of the sexual crimes were committed by foreign nationals, despite the fact that they only make up 25% of the population. And some of the data that – we're seeing we don't have good data at the moment – some of the data we're seeing is very striking. Afghans and Eritrean nationals are 20 times more likely to be convicted of a sexual crime than a British national. These are very shocking statistics. Farage recently told the New Statesman, for an interesting, lenghty profile written by Harry Lambert, that he thought Jenrick would 'almost certainly' end up to the right of him on migration by the next election. 'I suspect he will probably go further – that's just my instinct for someone who wants to make noise,' Farage said. Angela Eagle, the minister for border security and asylum, has been giving interviews this morning, and on the Today programme she suggested that there was not firm data to back up the claims that Jenrick was making. She said: [Jenrick] did actually say that we don't have good data at the moment, and yet he's asserting with great certainty data points, and I don't know where he's got them from. So it's difficult for me to criticise from a data point of view. But he's admitted in that interview that we don't have good data. Asked if she thought that the Tories were 'playing with fire' by linking asylum seekers with sexual crime, Eagle replied: I think that we need to deal with all crimes, all sexual crimes, regardless of who has perpetrated them in the same way. And we need to crack down on violence against women and girls, which is why we've actually got Jess Phillips, a minister, whose entire job is about doing that. Asked if she was open to discussing possible links between immigration and crime, Eagle replied: I don't mind having debates about anything, but I think we haven't got good data on this, and I think that we've got to look at the principle. And that is that we've got to deal with all sexual criminality, whoever perpetrates it in that way, in an almost colour blind way. If a girl has been abused by somebody or has been subjected to a vile sexual crime, it doesn't really matter what the colour of the skin of the perpetrator is. As Eagle said, it is hard to assess the truth about the link between immigration and crime because the data is complicated, and in some respects limited. But one person who has tried recently is the researcher and scientist Emma Monk, who on her Substack blog recently published an analysis of the claim that some people arriving in the UK on small boats are 20 times more likely than Britain to be criminal. This is a claim that Jenrick referenced, describing it as 'shocking'. Monk argues that it is shockingly inaccurate. Her whole post is worth reading, but here is her conclusion. As you can see, the claim that migrants arriving on small boats are 24x more likely to end up in prison was an easy manipulation of available statistics. It wasn't entirely fabricated - they can point to 'official statistics' to claim credibility - but it's clearly misinformation all the same. A Tory MP briefed it to a right-wing newspaper, which published it unquestioningly. That was picked up by the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem, and now the 24x figure is firmly in the minds of those who want to believe it, and is being repeated all over the internet, and across dinner tables and garden fences. There are only two items in the diary for today. 11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a press conference. 11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing. (For readers who keep asking why we feature the Reform UK press conferences, but not the Lib Dem ones, or the Green party ones, the answer is simple; they are not holding any.) If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can't read all the messages BTL, but if you put 'Andrew' in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word. If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @ The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary. I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can't promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
