Traffic Light

Nothing about the Shamima Begum story surprises me. Undoubtedly with the full cooperation of its British counterparts, Canadian intelligence was trafficking British girls to Syria to join the side that we were aiding and abetting there while bombing it across the Sykes-Picot Line in Iraq, where our intervention had created it in the first place.

Via NATO Turkey, IS jihadis have been entering Ukraine for months, causing Russia to bring in Assadists against them. IS is now part of the side that we are backing in Ukraine, while, yet again, everyone who knows anything at all about the subject is pointing out that our position is suicidally insane. Our rulers never learn.

And do we know that our girls are not being smuggled into Ukraine, which is itself a global centre of sex trafficking, in order to be handed over to IS? Or our boys, come to that, to be sent to the front line? If you are brown and working-class, then at 15 you can be trafficked to IS. If you are black and working-class, then at 15 you can be strip-searched at school. If you are white and working-class, then at 15 you can very possibly be trafficked to something like the Azov Battalion. But if you are posh, and probably white although that is not quite the point, then at 15 you can vote on who the Prime Minister should be.

It is still British Government policy that IS should have won in Syria, yet under Shamima's Law, if you would merely qualify for another nationality, whether or not you held it or wanted it, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. If you are one of the huge proportion of the population of Great Britain with an ancestral connection to Ireland, or if you are almost any of the current inhabitants of Northern Ireland, including all of the DUP's MPs, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. 

Saint Helena will never become independent, so I am all right this side of Scottish independence. But beyond the fair South Atlantic, most of Britain's former colonies in the Caribbean are independent now. And 50 per cent of people in Britain with an Afro-Caribbean parent also have a white parent. If you are in that position, even if your other ancestors have been Anglo-Saxon for as long as there have been any Anglo-Saxons, or even if Julius Caesar heard them speaking the language that was now Welsh, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. And if you would qualify under Israel's Law of Return, which is considerably looser than the Rabbinical definition of who is Jewish, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen.