The Duran Podcast - UK Afghanistan scandal and cover-up

Episode Date: July 20, 2025

UK Afghanistan scandal and cover-up

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the UK, and then in the second half of the video, we will also talk a bit about what is going on in Germany. Two countries that have scandals brewing. So let's start off with the UK and this scandal revolving around Afghanistan. And you'll fill us in on this scandal revolving around Afghanistan, which is an interesting development. I wasn't thinking something like this would be troubling the Stammer administration, but here we are. So what's going on with this Afghanistan scandal? This is an extraordinary story, and it is one that involves the entire British political class,

and in every section of it, conservative and labor and people who go beyond the political elite as well, the immediate political people in Westminster. So let's just explain what's happened because there's been some reports about this. I don't think people outside Britain have fully understood its significance and what the real scandal is, which is that some time ago, I think it was back in 2023, a British official within the Ministry of Defence accidentally leaked to the media a document which identified around 30,000 Afghans who had cooperated with the British military during the time when the British military were there before the Taliban

came to power. Now, obviously, this is a terrible leak. It exposed the identities of these people, or it could have done. And it could have alerted, or in fact, probably did alert the Taliban to a lot of who these people were. So that was already very, very bad. And the British government took action to prevent the names of these people being disclosed in order to try to get them, or as many of them as they could, brought to Britain. Now, that already is a bad. story, but it relates to an administrative bungle in the Defence Ministry at that time, headed by the way by Ben Wallace. I'm sure we all remember him. He was the Secretary of Defense under Boris Johnson and for a long time afterwards. And he was the fervid advocates of support

for Ukraine, which he still is, by the way. Anyway, the real scandal, the big scandal, isn't that the big scandal is that when this happened, the British government, Ben Wallace, in fact, but with the support of the government, applied to the High Court in London for what is called a super injunction. A super injunction is a court order which prevents disclosure of the information on this document. that would not have been in itself controversial. But then goes further, prevents any disclosure of the fact that there is such a document and prevents disclosure of the fact that a court order has been made. So it is complete secrecy.

It is an imposition of total secrecy about the fact that this legal secrecy about the fact that this leak had taken place. And one effect was that ministers in many ministers in both the conservative government and the Labor government didn't know about this. They didn't know about this whole scandal. People throughout the political system didn't know about it. Lawyers who were bringing refugee applications on behalf of Afghans, didn't know that these Afghans were on these lists, and suddenly noticed that their asylum applications were being processed and accepted without even going through the motions. And everybody was left wondering what was going on.

Anyway, the judge who granted this application was then replaced by a different judge, the different A different judge seems to have had more doubts about the wisdom of this so-called super injunction. And eventually he took the decision a few weeks ago to lift it. And now we have the whole story. And of course, what it reveals is not just mismanagement within the defense ministry, which there has been, but also a massive cover-up because, of course, the Taliban knew about the leak. That's the important thing to understand. they apparently knew the identities of many of these people.

The true purpose of the super injunction was to keep this story from the British people. The reaction from the British people on this? Well, I think... I haven't seen much media coverage in the West. No. Outside of Britain, I haven't seen much media coverage. Well, I think outside of Britain, people don't understand it. Because the whole concept of a super injunction is such a strange one.

and people can quite understand what it means. First of all, I mean, super injunctions are very controversial. I wonder whether they have any legal basis at all, but the courts do grant them. But anyway, they did. So it's a complicated story. It's not one that makes a huge amount of sense outside Britain. The media in Britain has tended overall to slow,

because every part of the political class is involved. And, of course, the media itself ultimately are implicated too, because they didn't really object, apparently, to the grant of this super injunction. So what the British people make of it all is very difficult to say, but I suspect that as the full implications of this start to work their way through, they will start to get more and more angry because it's absolutely clear that again the British political class blundered in an epic way

and concealed the fact from the British people and at a time when immigration has been an extremely sensitive issue altogether in Britain one effect of all of this is that thousands of people are being brought to Britain by the British government itself and their cases have been rushed through the courts, and it's all been done in secrecy, and nobody has been told. How does this affect Stammer, the prime minister, like his position?

Does this hit him hard? Yes, it does. His support is obviously. Yes, it does. I don't think he get any lower. Well, it can. Well, it can. Okay.

So will this, yeah. It can and it probably will. Yes, it will. And I tell you why. Because, first of all, I mean, let's start, first of all, with the mechanics of this, because this super injunction was obtained under a conservative government, but it was continued by Stama. Stama, I mean, he could have at any point in time asked for it to be lifted,

and he didn't. He continued to support the super injunction. And bear in mind that he's a lawyer himself, a King's Council. So he went along with this whole operation. So already it looks bad, but this has come at a moment when the situation in Britain is already in crisis. The economy contracted in May and June. We discussed recently in a program how there was a massive rebellion within Starma's own parliamentary party and he was forced to back down. he's now taken steps against the ringleaders.

He's basically booted them out of the parliamentary Labor Party. So the government's parliamentary majorities, in fact, if anything, shrinking. In fact, people haven't noticed, but it's true. It's huge still, but it's still shrinking. And there is likely to be increases in taxation in the autumn because the whole situation looks very pretty, precarious. And now we've just had, economic situation looks very precarious. And now we've had this, this thing happened where Stama himself covered up for something that happened under the

conservatives. He looks again a member of the British political class, protecting the entire political class. And he looks, well, I get to say, shifting. And that's, I'm sure, long of people will come up with a much stronger word. I increasingly think that we are coming to the end of this time of Starme. He's probably got a few more months. There will be this budget in the autumn. There's wide expectations in Britain that we're going to have a financial crisis at some point over the next year or so. If so, I suspect he will leave. So Stamer and Mertz are joining forces.

They're going to be, they have deals in place, mostly focused on the military, on the military production, joint production, ventures of military equipment and the likes. And even Politico put out an article saying that Stammer and Mertz, and this is the words that, They used. Stahmer and Mertz have found their happy place and it's war. That's what they said. They're happy place and it's war. They use the word war. So let's talk about Germany then. Germany, it seems to be joining forces with the UK, but Mertz is also in a bit of trouble.

What's going on in Germany? I think he's getting into more and more trouble. I mean, he's got a political problem in the sense that he put together a coalition. He refused obviously all cooperation with the IFDA. That was inevitable. He therefore inevitably found himself in coalition with the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats are the party of Olaf Schultz. Olaf Schultz lost the election back in February.

It was the worst result that the Social Democrats have had in their very, very long history. and yet they're back in government. And a lot of people in the CDU, the ruling party, are very, very unhappy with that. They're saying, why are we in coalition with the people we fought against in the election and who we won against and who lost? And they're also increasingly unhappy that because the SPD can bring down the government, bring down the coalition, it is turning out to be increasing. the dominant force within the coalition on domestic policy, because maths coming back to his meeting

with Stama, is overwhelmingly focused, as that article in Politico said, on war. He is all about war about fighting Russia. Just as Stama is, of course, all about war, about fighting Russia. This is the single theme that these two people trot out all the time. I mean, they're kindred spirits on this, without any doubt. So there are no increasing rumbles within the CDU. And it all boiled over about a week ago when certain vacancies had to be filled in the German Constitutional Court. Mertz agreed to back a candidate, a law professor proposed by the Social Democrats. She is apparently somebody with a good legal background and a strong academic, but very, very liberal views, very left-wing views on a host of issues, and of course, particularly on abortion, where her views on abortion are very similar to

some people in the United States, just to say. Now, remember, the CDU is the Christian Democrat Party. Many of the people who are in the CDU are Christians, or at least, I mean, they all supposedly are Christians. Many of them are Catholics. Supposedly they don't like abortion. And they've been asked to accept a candidate for constitutional court judge who is, as they would say, very, very strong, unqualified, unconditional supporter of abortion. Now, that was already bad enough, but that it's widely accepted that when the parliamentary debate happened on this, and Mertz was again confronted by Alice Vidal of the IFDA, and she asked him, you know, don't you see some of the problems with this candidate that you're putting forward, that Mertz botched the response. and that then provoked a rebellion within the CDU. The bishops and the clergy and the Catholic Church in Germany started to push back.

This whole thing had to be put off, this decision to appoint this judge was put off. That has in turn infuriated the SPD. So you could see the cracks within the coalition are starting to grow. And everybody blames Mertz and everybody basically basically. agrees that he's mishandled this affair. And the other thing is, this has come on top of a sense within the CDU that the SPD is basically running domestic policy and that he's making far too many of the decisions in terms of domestic policy, that the right-wing turn, which Merth's promised, the bringing of the SD-CDU back to its conservative routes, is.

is not happening. And that's creating a very strong sense of restlessness. And of course, again, just as with Stama, people are complaining that he's, you know, never there, not here, Kier and all that. They're starting to worry in Germany that Metz's real obsession is Ukraine, Russia, rearmament, foreign policy, all of that, and that he's not really addressing the problems that are mounting in Germany instead. And so these tensions are starting to increase. I'm going to say something else. And this is the deal that Mertz did with Trump on the 4th of July,

where the United States sells weapons to Ukraine and Europe, NATO buys them, is also going to create tensions because apparently it was very much Mertz's idea. It seems that he didn't consult widely about it, even within Germany itself. Most of the European states didn't know. It's looking increasingly as if it'll be Germany that will have to pick up the tab. So this is another cost on top of all of the others at a time when Germany is spending in a way that it has not done before and borrowing in ways that it has not done before. And of course, Mertz has been selling a story of German rearmament and of re-industrialization

through that rearmament, the German industry is going to be converted to buying, to producing weapons for Germany to hold back the Russians. And it's starting to look that instead of that happening, and Burtz is actually buying the weapons from the United States. is starting by buying them for Ukraine, but eventually he's going to buy them for Germany too. And I believe that, by the way. That is my own view. All right.

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