The Truth Is Sub Judice

Suppression is Confession

There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of weapons? Not opinion. Not spin. A number. The government collects it, sits on it, and refuses to publish it.

The CMC took the case to the Information Commissioner and won. The ICO ruled that the MoJ must publish the data for 2018 to 2024. And what did our Labour government do, faced with a lawful ruling that the public should be told the truth? It lawyered up. It is going to court, at your expense, to prevent you from knowing what it already knows. It is meanwhile withholding the 2025 figures too, presumably on the basis that if a cover-up is worth doing it is worth doing thoroughly.

Think about that. The Ministry of Justice, whose entire purpose is the administration of justice, is spending public money on lawyers to hide crime statistics from the public that paid for their collection. Kafka would have rejected it as too on the nose.

Other countries manage this without the sky falling in. Denmark publishes conviction rates by country of origin every year, as routinely as it publishes rainfall. The Netherlands does it. Norway does it. Nobody in Copenhagen has to crowdfund a legal battle to discover what their own government knows about crime in their own streets. Only in Britain is the truth treated as a controlled substance, available on prescription to ministers and denied to the patient.

Why? Because the answer is embarrassing. If the numbers were reassuring, they would be on a billboard by Friday, narrated by Gary Lineker and Carole Vorderman. The suppression is the confession.

And do not imagine for a moment that the new management will change any of this. Andy Burnham walks into Downing Street today promising hope, honesty and a new politics, and I will make a prediction you can hold me to. The MoJ’s lawyers will not be stood down. The 2025 data will not appear. Burnham’s Labour will maintain this cover-up with exactly the diligence Starmer’s Labour brought to it, because it rests on the one belief that survives every Labour regeneration, the belief that the public cannot be trusted with the truth.

They will tell you the data might be “misused”. They will tell you it lacks “context”. What they mean is that you might read it, understand it perfectly well, and draw the obvious conclusion. You might, heaven forbid, vote Reform. That is the fear that stalks the MoJ’s legal strategy. Not that the figures will be misunderstood, but that they will be understood.

A government that trusted its people would publish and argue its case. A government that respected them would treat them as adults capable of reading a table. This government treats the electorate as a jury it must nobble, and Burnham’s “change starts with honesty” will last precisely as long as honesty remains convenient, which on current form gives it until about Wednesday.

The CMC is trying to raise £35,000 to fight this in court. It is a scandal that they must. It should not require a whip-round to force the British state to tell the British people the truth. But here we are. Chip in. Make them say it under oath.