Afghan asylum scheme: Ben Leo tears into ‘epic’ and ‘deceitful’ cover up

Speaking to the People’s Channel after lifting the Tory superinjunction on the scheme, which cost £850million, Defence Secretary John Healey declared the British people “deserve answers”.

Healey stated: “I find it deeply uncomfortable, and I’m deeply concerned that we have had a superinjunction on this.

“I expect the ministers in the previous Government that took these decisions to be held to account.”

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Ben Leo has launched a scathing attack on the Conservative Government’s ‘epic’ and ‘deceitful’ cover up of the Afghan asylum scheme

Weighing in on the cover up, Ben fumed: “So the story here for me, isn’t the data leak as such. It’s bad, but we’ve kind of become accustomed to that kind of thing.

“The story for me is the fact that the Government was happy to, at one point preparing to have Afghanis and their family members come over to the UK to spend £7billion of your money.

“Secretly airlifting 100,000 Afghan nationals into the country without telling you the electorate. And when the media tried to report on it, they tried covering it up. That, for me, is the story.”

Criticising the Government’s decision to not disclose the scheme to the public, Ben told GB News viewers: “It begs the question now, if the Government can behave like that, spending your money unaccounted for, doing something so drastically epic that would change the very fabric of your communities without even being told about it, what else are they not telling you about?”

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Weighing in on the cover up, cohost Bev Turner highlighted that there are still “many unanswered questions” to be asked of the Conservatives.

Bev said: “I think there are still so many unanswered questions, aren’t there? These questions will have to be answered by various people because of course, this was not under this Labour Government, this all happened under the Conservative Government.

“I’m finding this story very difficult to get my head around. The people on that list, they hadn’t necessarily worked directly with the British Government, they weren’t all translators or intelligence operatives. Who were they?”

Hitting out at the Government further, Ben criticised the attempt by the Tories to “pull the wool over the eyes” of the British public.

Ben said: “It’s the secrecy and it’s the attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the British public.

“Regardless of the figures, whether it’s 7,000 Afghanis, whether it’s 100,000, whether it’s £850million or whether it’s £7billion, it’s the deceit which irks me.”

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Bev Turner said the cover up is something she ‘cannot get her head around’

Bev then added: “Is it that the superinjunction to stop the British public knowing this was happening was because they didn’t think the British public would buy into it and we would be outraged.

“Although frankly, it doesn’t seem to me the British probably get outraged about enough these days.

“Or was it the fact that the Conservative Government would say we still had a duty of care to the people on that list, and therefore we couldn’t have the media exposing what we were doing because that would then double down on the risks to these people for whom the Taliban might go knocking on their door and kill them.”

In response to Bev and Ben, GB News Political Correspondent Katherine Forster concluded: “Well, that is the argument that the Conservative Government gave to get this super injunction, and Ben Wallace, who was Defence Secretary at the time, has issued no apology.

“He said that it was absolutely the right thing to do to safeguard these Afghans.

“John Healey of course, some time has passed now, takes a different view.

“He thinks that the risk is now low and the Labour Government have closed the scheme, and if they hadn’t, they’d be potentially on the hook for yet more money and thousands more people.”