The State deleting journalist access to 1.6m secret court transcripts shows they are running scared, but of what?
Labour want millions of secret transcripts deleted from the Courtsdesk system. They say for GDPR but with The Rape Gang Inquiry hearings and more Labour sex offenders exposed we don't believe it.
The timing is not just suspicious. We believe it’s a calculated affront to the principles of Open Justice. This week starts the privately crowdfunded investigation into the UK’s horrific rape gang epidemic by Rupert Lowe, Sammy Woodhouse and Restore Britain team. The evidence is horrific and for anyone who isn’t on the MSM news blackout road, those who know, hear survivor testimonies that shake us to the core.
Even in the last 24 hours we have the latest string of offences including ex-London Labour councillor and Hope Not Hate member Liron Velleman admitting child sex offences after being caught in Met Police sting and Starmers ex communications chief Matthew Doyle suspended from Labour over links to another sex offender. Maybe Lord Glasman was right after all….
Seeing these results of what is being revealed to the public for the first time from Lowe and the continual drip feed of allegations and convictions from Labour related figures, this must be the reason why now of all times the Ministry of Justice has moved to drop veil of secrecy and withdraw access for journalists to access the judicial system.
The MoJ and HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) have issued a final order for the destruction of the Courtsdesk digital archive. This platform was the single most powerful tool available to the British press for monitoring the opaque world of magistrate courts. Before this purge was ordered, Courtsdesk revealed a terrifying reality that 1.6 million criminal hearings had been conducted with absolutely no advance notification to the press. By ordering the deletion of this archive, the state isn’t just protecting data from being seen, it is effectively implementing a system of shadow justice where the public has no way to track how many predators and criminals are walking free.
Horrific evidence and the Pakistani Pipeline
While the government prepares to wipe the records, Lowe has been presenting utterly brutal and horrifying evidence from the Restore Britain inquiry. In one testimony, a victim described being raped by between 600 and 700 men, estimating that 98% of her abusers were Pakistani Muslims. Its not racist to say that or Islamphobic, it’s just the facts of what has happened to these victims.
Lowe has further exposed what he calls the Pakistani Pipeline. A transnational trafficking route where victims are removed from the UK to prevent them from cooperating with police. He has tabled motions in Parliament demanding an investigation into these reports of girls being trafficked to Pakistan to be silenced. Yet, in response to his request for a ‘copper-bottomed guarantee’ that court transcripts will not be destroyed, the government said they stand on the side of women and girls but then only offered bureaucratic platitudes about GDPR.
A culture of secrecy and coverup
Shadow Home Office Minister Katie Lam has correctly identified this as the instantiation of a ‘culture of secrecy.’ She warns that the public must have access to court records at every level to understand how previous scandals were allowed to happen. But the message from the dictatorial state is clear; they want you to look at the official, sanitised version of justice, while they delete the database that proved official records are only 4.2% accurate.
Even the Courtdesk Chief Exec said that ‘We built the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts’ and after notice from the government they wrote back 16 times to government requesting dialogue before getting a formal notice to delete everything. There was no dialogue, just a panic measure from the government to, in our opinion, undertake another mass coverup.
This culture of concealment isn’t limited to the courts. It mirrors the Home Office disclosure crisis, where a whistleblower recently revealed that 736 foreign criminals including rapists and murderers have absconded into our communities while awaiting deportation. When asked for this data, the Home Office simply claimed it was not centrally collected. It took a whistleblower to show that the state was, in fact, gaslighting Parliament and the public (otherwise known as lying).
Why this matters
We are witnessing a systematic effort to sever the link between judicial outcomes and public oversight. Following on from the changes trying to be pushed through by David Lammy.
Transcript Paywalls: The MoJ continues to resist calls for free transcripts, keeping the record of the courts behind a paywall that costs journalists thousands of pounds to access records. Barrister Daniel ShenSmith has a petition here if you wish to sign; https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/756036
Data Destruction: By destroying the Courtsdesk archive, the state removes the only indexed trail of 1.6 million secret hearings.
Institutional Blindness: As Baroness Casey’s audit warned, prejudice and misdirected intentions to protect community cohesion have historically led authorities to look the other way.
As Rupert Lowe noted, ‘the British people are not stupid, they can see their communities radically changing.’ They can see the state hollowing out its own accountability mechanisms while predators are trafficked overseas or allowed to abscond at home.
We cannot allow the Ministry of Justice to bury the evidence of institutional failure. If the transcripts disappear and the archives are wiped, the victims of these vast evils will be silenced three times; once by their abusers, again by those in authority and again by the state who all failed to protect them.
It is time to stop the archive purge. Transparency is the foundation of the rule of law.