Why thousands of Afghans were secretly relocated to the UK
They were advised not to take phone calls or respond to messages or emails from unknown contacts, to limit access to their social media, to consider closing their accounts, and to only go online via a private connection. Understandably, they were terrified.
Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian's defence and security editor, tells Helen Pidd how 24 hours later, John Healey, the defence secretary, apologised for probably the biggest – and most expensive — data leak in British government history. And the former Afghan judge Marzia Babakarkhail tells Helen about how Afghans fear the data list could could endanger their lives.
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BBC News
6 minutes ago
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The National
14 minutes ago
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The bottom line here is that independence can only be achieved through mobilising the grassroots and creating a mass popular movement. You cannot 'manager' your way to independence by issuing instructions from on high. The fatal flaws in John Swinney's plan are twofold. Firstly, you cannot create a mass movement from the top down, and the SNP leadership has failed to engage with the wider independence movement in the development of this plan. That lack shows very clearly and has much to do with the resounding 'meh' with which this plan has been received. The grassroots movement feels no ownership of it. The other flaw is that hoary old problem: What does the [[SNP]] propose to do when the people give it yet another Holyrood mandate for an independence referendum and [[Westminster]] says no? This plan does not address that key point. No British Prime Minister is ever going to agree to facilitate another Scottish independence referendum. 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John Swinney's plan speaks of reasoned arguments as to why there should be another independence referendum, correctly pointing out that with a million new voters on the electoral register since 2014 and another 600,000 who voted in 2014 having passed away, a generation has effectively passed already. But this rests upon the misconception that we are dealing with principled opponents who are sincere in their arguments. The 'once in a generation line' was never more than a convenient excuse. Once a generation has passed, the Westminster parties will simply shift the goalposts again as they did in 2021 when we learned that winning a pro-independence majority in Holyrood was not, after all, sufficient to bring about another independence referendum. The real question here is: How does Scotland bring about a referendum in the face of a persistent veto from Westminster? 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