Civic Responsibility

Alaa Abd El-Fattah should never have been given British citizenship. But he was. That, the subsequent extension of consular support to him in the country of his other nationality, and the priority given by successive governments to his release, all suggest that he is a British intelligence asset. In fact, they do not suggest that. They state it.

Citizenship should be irrevocable, or it is meaningless. Yet without having to give a reason, the Home Secretary can now revoke that of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality, whether or not they were. Bangladesh has consistently and understandably refused to have anything to do with the London-born Shamima Begum, for whose repatriation Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf have called, as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Peter Hitchens still do.

What sort of permanent member of the United Nations Security Council claims that its national security is threatened by Begum? Nothing about her story surprises me, yet it still has the power to shock. 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. The 15-year-old Begum was married almost immediately upon her arrival in that country, and pregnant almost immediately after that. "She wanted it" is not an argument that would normally be admitted under such circumstances.

Begum ought to be tried by a jury that, unless it were unanimously convinced beyond reasonable doubt of her guilt, ought to deliver a verdict of not guilty, which should be an enduring verdict, affording lifelong protection from double jeopardy. In the event of such a conviction, then like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be blameless, but like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be the most to blame.

Keep saying it until in quite sinks in. Even while bombing the IS that it had created in Iraq, NATO was so committed to the victory of IS in Syria, as has now come to pass, that via the NATO member state of Turkey, it trafficked British schoolgirls to Syria to hand over to IS. In at least one case, a 15-year-old was pregnant almost immediately, having been married so soon after her arrival that the arrangements had clearly been made in advance. Her British citizenship has since been revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen, not because she held another nationality, nor even because she would have been eligible for one, but merely because the then Home Secretary, who was herself a proven security risk, thought that she ought to have been.

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 MPs sitting in any of four Unionist interests, then your British citizenship could now be revoked at a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen. 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. How's that for anti-Semitism?