From the Telegraph and the Daily Mail (h/t Geoffrey Clarfield)
Ministers fear riots will break out in Britain after the news that a secret resettlement scheme for Afghans was kept hidden from the public.
After a superinjunction was lifted on Tuesday, it was revealed that the identities of 25,000 Afghans, including soldiers who had worked with UK forces in the country and their families, had been accidentally leaked following a blunder by the British military in February 2022.
The leak prompted ministers to evacuate more than 4,500 Afghan soldiers and their relatives and relocate them in the UK under the Afghanistan Response Route scheme. A further 2,400 are eligible for the scheme, but have yet to travel.
Setting foot in the UK for the first time, Afghan families are welcomed by a British soldier. They have just stepped off an unmarked plane which landed at Stansted Airport. It is part of the Government’s clandestine immigration scheme.
Today after 23 months of being gagged by a ‘superinjunction’, the Mail can reveal the scheme to bring in thousands of Afghans, and how Parliament has been deliberately kept oblivious – or ‘misled’ as a judge heard.
Read “Am I going bonkers?” … the words of a High Court judge as he discovered the full extent of the government cover-up of a secret immigration scheme.
Every couple of weeks or so, without fanfare, plain white charter planes have been landing at Stansted. The Daily Mail is the only media organisation to have discovered and witnessed what is happening.
Packed with hundreds of Afghans, the planes taxi to one of the Essex airport’s private hangers – away from any prying eyes in the usual passenger terminal familiar to millions of British holidaymakers.
There, out of sight, Home Office staff process the men, women and children into the UK. Then they are quietly bussed to military bases and hotels around Britain. The Afghans have been settled in military accommodation and hotels across Britain at a cost of £400 million, with a total of £7 billion earmarked for the plans.
However, the previous Conservative government successfully obtained a superinjunction that blocked news outlets from reporting the story, leaving the public baffled about sudden influxes of migrants to their areas.
But even if we could not publicise them, the injunction did not prevent the Mail’s journalists from chronicling them. At Stansted Airport, from dawn to dusk the Mail has regularly witnessed the planes coming in. Other flights have also been coming into RAF Brize Norton, we can reveal, but this is the military’s biggest airfield and there is not a public viewing gallery inside the Oxfordshire airbase. No, but the fences at one end are low enoug to allow Palestine Action access and genuine plane enthusuasts congregate at one or two places around the perimeter.
The Mail knows the identities of many of those on board the flights. Some of them were military interpreters who had displayed great bravery and loyalty to the British, and are owed a debt of gratitude by this country. And, unlike the boat boys there genuinely are children with them. Not that the presence of his wife and children has seriously restrained a grooming gang rapist or jihadi murderer.
A Whitehall briefing note circulated on July 4, seen by The Telegraph, warned that when the injunction was lifted, the Ministry of Defence would need to “work with colleagues across Government … to mitigate any risk of public disorder following the discharge of the injunction”.
All government departments have been warned that the public could lash out after learning about the scheme.
Documents from earlier this month said the Home Office had advised government departments that “such a risk [of riots] is higher during the summer period”.
It can now be revealed that a briefing paper circulated to Cabinet ministers two months later said the riot hotspots were largely in places where there had been a high number of Afghan arrivals.
In the document, seen by The Telegraph, an official said: “The recent far-Right disorder targeting asylum seekers and Muslim communities was the worst outbreak of racial violence in the UK for decades.
“We know that 15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots are in the top 20 per cent of local authorities with the highest numbers of supported asylum seekers and Afghan resettlement arrivals.”
The statistic has fuelled fears that more civil unrest could now break out. It is understood Downing Street was monitoring the prospect of further riots on Tuesday.
Whitehall sources said decisions about individual towns and cities that could be affected would be left to police forces. It is understood that there has not been a government directive for police to prepare for riots.
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