Democracy? What Democracy?

Gabriel Levine, Lead Political Commentator

This Afghan migrant scandal should not shock you. Failure in the MoD – one of the worst-run departments in Whitehall – should not be a cause of surprise. It is a symptom of our theoretical democracy that fails everyone and serves only the functionaries at the top.

A seven billion pound cost to the taxpayer to complete the returns of tens of thousands of Afghans to the UK, I am sceptical of it. When the maximum deployment of British service personnel in Afghanistan was around 9,500, 30,000 ‘interpreters’ seems to stretch plausibility.

Oh, and that number increases when the majority of these people have multiple children and spouses (all of which are not included in the totals or cost). Many are unvetted, we have no idea who they are, and we won’t do it because the state does not care, as long as we are on the right side of ‘international law’. In so doing, in many cases, we are actively importing foreign criminals who were in Afghan prisons when Kabul fell, in a bid to keep these people safe from a Taliban that already knew who they were.

This is the biggest covert movement of people in peacetime, and the entire state apparatus has been dedicated to its secrecy. The blame for this is easy because successive governments and successive ministers continued to uphold the superinjunction, but I find Ben Wallace’s recent written defence of it in The Telegraph weak.

On the 76th anniversary of D Day, Wallace said that our ancestors died so that "Black lives would matter". Soldiers’ families have been moved out of their homes to make way, not for those who helped us while we were in Afghanistan, but for those whom we have no record of, whom we are guilted by the courts to accept. I wonder if Ben Wallace believes that is right and if he thinks those at Normandy died for any other existential ECHR-given concept. I look forward to the army of lawyers that will no doubt battle to take on the compensation cases for the Afghans, for the trauma and no doubt mental health issues caused as they bravely take on a brave new world in Britain.

The fact that this scandal has been protected from the media for three years, from Parliament, is a symptom of our theoretical democracy. No scrutiny, no judgement, no appeal, no common sense. Nobody has once stuck up for our own service people, and nobody has been held accountable for the leak.

Starmer came to power on the winds of his self-described ‘change’, but those winds have changed direction now. Our democracy is doubted because we are increasingly at the behest of the court itself, not the law it is meant to uphold.

We are shaped by legal clients, by the overarching scope of human rights that act backwardly to ensure paedophile illegals remain in the UK. We are determined by foreign courts that share little power with us, yet they tell us to dissolve the little agency we already seem to have. Our courts decree, and our MPs accept.

How can it be right to prioritise the villain over the veteran? We have a state that is, in places, gaffer-taped with the secrecy that it accuses other countries of having; we have a Prime Minister happier with clerks in court rather than constituents.

Through all of this, I doubt if we even have a system anymore that can decipher what should be the simplest thing: right or wrong. Perhaps this is because our system is, as Dominic Cummings frequently cites, "working as intended".

Though ‘Starmerism’ (if we can even call it that) may not live through this Parliament, the lanyard-adoring, groupthink, nation-hating Westminster class will continue to reign. Their prominence exists through the guise of ‘change’ and ‘progress’, of endorsing ‘young expertise’ at the heart of government. Their importance is only through marrying the failures of the civil service with the failures of court culture into one blob that repeatedly misrepresents the appetite of the electorate. In this, our democracy seems to be theoretical.

Though I don’t know what we will be if we fail in a challenge to retake our democracy – an island of strangers; associations of enclaves – I do know that we will continue to be at the behest of the barrister and lawyer, not the ballot box.

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