How The British Government Silenced the “Free” Press, Made Truth Illegal

There are cover-ups, and then there’s whatever the British Government just pulled.

Imagine torching £7 ($9.4) billion of public money, risking 100,000 lives, creating an immigration scandal, and then, when the inevitable outrage starts to bubble, slapping a gag order on the entire country and pretending it never happened.

This is banana-republic behavior with better tailoring.

Because for nearly two years, a superinjunction, the kind usually deployed when a Premier League footballer’s pants have wandered off again, was used to silence journalists and the free press, gag Parliament, and stop the public from learning that the Ministry of Defence had done something catastrophically inept.

It began in August 2023 when journalist David Williams discovered that the Ministry of Defence had managed to leak the identities of 18,800 Afghans who had worked with British forces; drivers, and translators. Their families included, we’re talking about 100,000 people now, allegedly, squarely in the Taliban’s crosshairs. All because some bright spark couldn’t handle a spreadsheet.

Someone in Whitehall realized that explaining to the public how a government that wants to introduce digital IDs, biometric databases, and centralized health records, can’t even keep the data of war-zone informants safe might, just might, be a tough sell.

Now, in a functioning democracy, this is the point where the Government admits the error, apologizes profusely, and gets on with fixing the mess. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, the Conservative Government went nuclear. It reached for a superinjunction. A legal instrument so secretive, that you can’t even mention that it exists. It’s the Voldemort of British law: he who must not be named, and also must not be reported on, discussed in Parliament, or even acknowledged in polite company.

Ever since the data hit the fan, ministers, hidden behind a wall of censorship so thick it could double as a North Korean border post, have been quietly orchestrating one of the largest peacetime migration missions in British history.

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