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If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat.
A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It’s a rightwing agitator’s dream. “The real disinformation,” wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, “is the regime media.” Yes, that Dominic Cummings.
It was hard enough already to counter paranoia about alleged grooming gang cover-ups, policing of immigrant communities or imaginary supposed plots to flood the country with refugees just so they can vote Labour. Now, like stopped clocks fleetingly getting the time right twice a day, the usual suspects will pounce: see, the deep state does lie to you! Meanwhile fantasists of all political stripes and none, whose go-to explanation for why the hated mainstream media mysteriously isn’t covering their pet theory is invariably “there must be a superinjunction”, will have a field day.
But you don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat to find this particular cover-up unnerving. In parliament, the Conservative MP Mark Pritchard asked the defence secretary, John Healey, how anyone could be sure there were no other government superinjunctions active. If there were, he added, presumably Healey couldn’t tell him anyway.
How does anyone know who to trust, in an era when excess naivety and unwarranted suspicion can both have demonstrably terrible consequences? It’s not just a political question.
This week, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon were convicted of the gross negligence manslaughter of their newborn daughter Victoria, who died sleeping in a tent on a freezing January night while her parents were on the run from social workers, their families, and authority in general. The couple, whose first four children were already in care, were probably right to fear her being taken from them. But at least she could have lived, if they’d trusted social services enough to engage.
The week before, it emerged that a child had died in Liverpool of measles, a completely preventable disease of which there have been continuing outbreaks thanks to a complex mix of complex factors, including vaccine scepticism and mistrust of the medical establishment. (Though it’s not known if this poor child was vaccinated – measles can be dangerous for people with compromised immune systems even if they’ve had the jab – the point of keeping vaccine uptake high is to protect the vulnerable, by preventing outbreaks such as the one currently active in the north-west.)
In the US, meanwhile, Donald Trump has enraged his own fanbase by insisting that only “stupid people” believe there was a government cover-up over the death of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – a cherished Maga belief Trump seemed happy to stoke back when the idea of a plot to protect some wicked liberal elite suited him. There would be more schadenfreude in seeing the president hoist by his own post-truth petard, if his followers didn’t have a proven capacity for violence when angered.
What ties these very different stories together is a creeping crisis of faith in institutions from medicine to the law, politics to policing, which has begun to feel actively dangerous. Yet knowing that doesn’t make reversing it any easier.
I’ve been thinking about this on and off for months, since joining a thinktank roundtable on restoring public trust that posed some difficult practical questions. My tuppence worth was on rock-bottom levels of trust in the media. But would a return to believing everything you read or hear be healthy? I can’t in all conscience say so: not when there are so many underregulated new platforms I wouldn’t trust to tell the time of day, and AI fakes are getting so sophisticated. Trusting the media less is logical, maybe even necessary, in the circumstances. Yet rational scepticism can all too quickly spiral into blanket suspicion of everything and everyone, justified or not. No society can function like that.
One answer is that where trust is no longer automatic, powerful institutions can earn it back by submitting to clear checks and balances. And that’s exactly what didn’t happen with the Ministry of Defence superinjunction.
Faced with a catastrophic leak – a soldier emailing a spreadsheet of names that put up to 100,000 Afghans potentially at risk – the then Conservative government had a moral duty to protect those endangered. Though it’s likely many were already identifiable as Taliban targets via other means, it wasn’t unreasonable to seek a brief temporary news blackout while organising an evacuation, followed by full public disclosure at the earliest safe opportunity.
But it should have been brief – nothing like a 600-day injunction – and crucially parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) should have been brought into the loop to ensure it was. Invented to provide democratic oversight in sensitive situations when briefing every last gossipy backbencher is impractical, the ISC could have acted as guarantors of the public’s right to know. Instead, it was left to an incoming Labour defence secretary to question whether spending billions on secretively righting past wrongs was the best use of public money, prompting a review that collapsed the whole house of cards.
Trust in the British state, at home and abroad, will inevitably be the casualty. While about 24,000 of those named in the leak are already in Britain or on the way, the rest are being expected simply to accept the revised view that they’re safe where they are. Amid the chaos, as the former veterans minister Johnny Mercer points out, it’s likely some with frankly tenuous connections to the UK gained sanctuary essentially for being victims of British ineptitude, while some Afghan special forces soldiers who bravely fought the Taliban alongside the British (and were promised they’d be looked after as a result) have been puzzlingly left behind. That is the kind of injustice that echoes down generations.
Back home, meanwhile, ministers must now brace for far-right attempts to exploit this scandal, and for some uncomfortable questions.
Was the superinjunction really about saving lives, sparing political blushes, avoiding inflaming already high tensions over immigration or all of the above? And when exactly would the MoD have voluntarily confessed, if a handful of journalists – the same old legacy media that apparently nobody trusts – hadn’t got wind of what happened?
For that’s the paradox, right there: sometimes the alternatives to putting your faith in an institution which has previously failed you – be it social services, doctors, journalists or conventional politics – are even worse. Trust everybody, and you might get taken for a fool. Trust nobody, and you become the fool. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way round that.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
