British state has a shameful record of moral cowardice

The Herald Scotland

18-07-2025

Consider the infected blood scandal, victims of which are only now able to access the Infected Blood Compensation Scheme. From the 1970s to the 1990s, over 30,000 NHS patients were infected with HIV and hepatitis C by infected blood or clotting factor products, killing at least 3,000 people.
The history of this scandal is marked by stubbornness and cover-ups from the outset. In the 1970s, American scientists, including Judith Graham Pool, a pioneer in haematology, were characterising the products infecting patients with hepatitis C as 'dangerous' and 'unethical'. The World Health Organization was warning the UK not to import blood from countries with a high prevalence of hepatitis. They were ignored.
So too were doctors like Spence Galbraith, the founding director of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre in England and Wales, who warned the Government in 1983 that blood products may be transmitting HIV. An NHS pamphlet for blood donors distributed in September 1983 stated that HIV could 'almost certainly' be transmitted by blood products, and the consensus among haemophilia physicians by this point was that blood products were spreading AIDS. Despite that, Ken Clarke, then the Health and Social Care Secretary, made statements to the House of Commons that the evidence was inconclusive and maintained the policy of importing untreated blood products.
In the decades since the Government settled out of court, in 1990, with claimants who had been infected with HIV by untreated blood products, inquiries were repeatedly denied and evidence destroyed. In 2000, Caroline Flint revealed to Parliament that papers had been destroyed related to both the HIV litigation and the litigation over hepatitis C infections.
In 2009, the Archer Report – a privately-funded investigation into the scandal chaired by Lord Archer, a former Solicitor General – reported that 'some of those who gave evidence to us suspected that there was an exercise in suppressing evidence of negligence or misconduct,' and that one witness, Lord Jenkin, Health Secretary from 1979 to 1981, had been 'left with the clear impression […] that all the files bearing upon the issue of contaminated blood products had been destroyed, and that this had been done 'with intent, in order to draw a line under the disaster.''
Read more by Mark McGeoghegan
​The 2015 Scottish Government-commissioned Penrose Inquiry into the scandal north of the Border was branded a whitewash by victims and campaigners, after it concluded that little could have been done differently, which is untrue, looking at the timeline of warnings, and refused to apportion any blame.
Even when a full inquiry was undertaken, it was discovered that hundreds of documents related to the scandal had been removed from archives by Department of Health and Social Care staff and not returned, sparking renewed concerns about a cover-up. As recently as 2023, the Government was still attempting to prevent the implementation of a compensation scheme.
The final inquiry report was published last May, concluding that the scandal could have been avoided, that patients were knowingly exposed to 'unacceptable risks', and that the Government and NHS did indeed attempt a cover-up by 'hiding the truth'.
It would be easy to say that these scandals are relatively rare, if not for the fact that we've just lived through the culmination of the Horizon IT scandal, in which Post Office officials displayed the same stubbornness and aversion to accountability that the NHS did over infected blood products. This sense of entitlement, to a right to avoid scrutiny and accountability, to a prerogative to avoid paying the price for its screw-ups and those of its staff, manifests in other ways, too.
Shamima Begum, stripped of her British citizenship despite having been born and raised in London (Image: BBC/PA Wire)
What, for example, is the case of Shamima Begum, stripped of her British citizenship despite having been born and raised in London, if not an attempt by the British state to wash its hands of a teenage girl, groomed online by terrorists, who was ultimately our responsibility as a society and the UK's responsibility as a government? And what of efforts to protect British soldiers from being held accountable for war crimes, committed in Northern Ireland, Iraq, and now Afghanistan?
Which brings us back to Afghanistan. We know, for example, that in one instance, a UK Special Forces officer who may have been connected to alleged SAS war crimes personally rejected 1,585 resettlement applications from Afghans who may have witnessed those alleged crimes. When Johnny Mercer, then Veterans Minister, raised his concerns with senior officers, one UK Special Forces officer told him that his concerns were offensive – either 'lying to my face', as Mr Mercer put it, or 'so deeply incompetent that he didn't know.'
The super-injunction granted to the Government over the Ministry of Defence data leak of the details of thousands of Afghans is an unprecedented, but logical escalation of the British state's tendency towards avoiding scrutiny of its errors. It prevented MPs from holding the Government accountable for the error or overseeing its spending on the secret relocation scheme for those affected. It meant the victims of that leak had no awareness that their personal information was in the hands of people willing to publish those details online, and potentially to sell them to the Taliban. The argument that the super-injunction was needed to prevent the Taliban finding out about the leak doesn't hold water, given reporting this week showing that it continued long past the point it was clear that the Taliban were aware of it.
As journalists affected by the super-injunction, like Lewis Goodall, have argued this week, such a super-injunction should never have been granted and should never be granted again. It undermined Parliamentary democracy to cover up a scandal. However, there's a wider, deeply ingrained set of practices in the British state that need to be examined and, ultimately, abandoned to secure a government that's transparent and accountable to those it governs.
Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social