THE GOVERNMENT this week have admitted to losing thousands of historical documentations from the National Archives, these documents includes Britain's activity during the Northern Ireland conflict, the conflict with Argentina of the Falklands and the famous Zinoviev letter, a forged letter published by the Daily Mail perpetrating to be sent from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of Communist International in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine, tests on polio vaccines and long-running territorial disputes between the UK and Argentina.
This is not the first time the British government has 'lost' historical documents on British activity abroad
The history of 'losing' historical documents
In 2013, the foreign office was discovered to be hoarding 1.2 million historical documents and files at a high-security compound near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. One of the most famous cover ups was Operation Legacy, a program to destroy or hide files, to prevent them being inherited by its ex-colonies. It ran from the 1950s until the 1970s, when the decolonisation of the British Empire was at its height.
The British government sent telegrams to the officials of the colonies advising them the best method of retrieving and destroying the documents.
These included details of the racial and religious bias shown against the indigenous peoples of the colonised nations, furthermore information on the violent methods used by the British against opponents of colonisation as well as tortured methods used in circumstances such as the Mau Mau Uprising.
This latest incident isn't the first, as Whitehall regularly loan documents from the National Archives but have no set period on how long they are allowed to keep them.
This has meant that thousands of files have gone missing. But this highlights the British government’s desire to suppress information from the public, they are looking to control the population by continuing to spread false rhetoric about how 'great' Britain has been throughout history, when the opposite is in fact true
