July 17, 2025 - 1:00pm
Almost half of Britons believe that the previous Conservative government was right to keep the Afghan data leak a secret from the public.
According to a YouGov poll, 49% of respondents agreed with the statement “The government were [sic] right to try to keep the breach a secret — it was more important to evacuate the Afghan nationals who had worked with British forces, even if this meant covering up the leak”. Conversely, only 20% agreed with the statement “The government were [sic] wrong to keep the breach a secret for this long – it was more important that the public be told, even if that meant more danger for those Afghan nationals who had worked with British forces.”
On Tuesday, the Times revealed that it and several other media organizations had been fighting a Government-imposed super-injunction on a data leak within the Ministry of Defence, which made public the details of Afghans who had helped the British army. An unnamed official sent the names and details of 18,714 Afghan nationals who were applying for a British Government relocation scheme in 2022 to unintended recipients in Afghanistan, who then went on to share it. Fearing that this would amount to a “kill list” for the Taliban, the British Government secretly relocated over 20,000 Afghans — including family members — at a cost of £7 billion. In August 2023, outgoing defense secretary Ben Wallace applied for an injunction; a month later, his successor Grant Shapps succeeded in gaining a super-injunction, meaning that the injunction itself could not be spoken about. Those relocated have not been included in the UK’s official immigration statistics.
Defense Secretary John Healey this week said that he was “deeply uncomfortable” with the use of the super-injunction. It had been lifted because an independent review he launched said that it is now “highly unlikely that being a name on this data set that was lost three and a half years ago increases the risk of being targeted”.
YouGov also asked the public another question: “Do you think the UK does or does not have a moral obligation to bring Afghan nationals who had worked with British forces to the UK if there is a credible risk that they might face reprisals from the Taliban?” Some 63% of respondents said Britain does have a moral obligation, while only 17% said it didn’t.
“If there are any [other] super-injunctions in place, I just have to tell you — I don’t know about them,” Healey said this week. “The important thing here now is that we’ve closed the scheme.”
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