This Is Fake Severity

If you thought that it was bad to have the power to revoke citizenship in the hands of Suella Braverman, or even if you thought that that was good, then imagine it in the hands of Yvette Cooper. With Labour at least as enthusiastic as the Conservatives, Peter Hitchens writes:

You may think I am pretty bad now, but you should have seen me when I was 15. I said, did and thought terrible things, which are now hateful to me. The memory of them is pretty much unbearable. I can still shudder at the remembrance of them. But there it is, nasty actions once done cannot be undone, cruel words cannot be cancelled.

Perhaps everyone else is so much better than this, and so pure in heart, that they do not think there is something a bit merciless about the British state’s vindictive treatment of Shamima Begum. I agree with everyone else, especially my colleague Sue Reid, that her behaviour was idiotic and that she said and did things which she will be ashamed of until the end of her life. Meanwhile I would think that the deaths of her three infant children, something none of us would wish on anyone, should be punishment enough for anybody.

I don’t like the look or sound of her. I suspect her basic problem is that she is not very bright. I hope never to meet her. But if anyone has any evidence that she committed a crime, then let them accuse her of it in a court of law, before an impartial jury. And if she is then found guilty I will cheerfully support the punishment she is awarded according to law.

But this cannot happen, as long as she is condemned to spend the rest of her life in some Syrian slum. This is thanks to a cancellation of her citizenship which reminds me of the thuggish old Soviet Union at its worst, a despotic third world measure which this ancient civilisation should be ashamed of wielding. She has, as is all too common these days, been punished without trial.

Maybe Sajid Javid, the politician who first condemned Begum to lifelong exile, has a totally clear conscience about his youth, which he is said to have spent reading the Financial Times and watching Grange Hill on the TV. Maybe he cannot conceive that the lives of any of his children or grandchildren might go so wrong, as life went wrong for ‘Jihadi Jack’ Letts, another of these idiots.

And maybe the members of the Special Appeals Immigration Commission have likewise lived lives of blameless sweetness from their infancy upwards. We must, it seems to me, have some really pure and wonderful people doing these jobs. The same no doubt goes for all the politicians and journalists who have applauded the decision to confirm the revocation of Begum’s citizenship.

But all I see is a nasty sort of mob justice. The British government claims to be so very tough on terror, but in fact is pretty useless at preventing it, and actually helped support an Al Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front, in a cynical operation in Syria.

They claim to be keeping us safe from Begum, who cannot come here again. And yet if she somehow managed to get on one of those dinghies from France, she could walk ashore on a Kentish beach one afternoon and vanish into our unpoliced cities, along with the thousands of others now doing this without let or hindrance from this supposedly tough government. This is fake severity, a hunk of meat flung to the angry crowd by a scared and weak state.

And it is also merciless, the lifelong relentless punishment of a lonely, bereaved woman. Is this a thing to be proud of? Those who have done it should remember the ancient, simple Biblical advice to us all ‘What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God’, and ask if they are obeying it.

And:

Whenever I take part in debates about the Ukraine war (quite a few recently), I find significant numbers of people who do not necessarily share the simple-minded, ‘Gandalf versus the Orcs’ view of this conflict promoted by the BBC. Well, King Charles is their King as well, and so he should refrain from contentious (and in my view incorrect) claims such as the one that the Russian attack was ‘unprovoked’.

This is not the universal view of those who understand the issue, and his advisers should draw to his attention the article in Foreign Affairs last March by the leading anti-Russian neocon thinker in Washington, Robert Kagan. Kagan clearly states that it was provoked. He does not excuse or defend it in any way, any more than I do, but simply recognises the historical fact.