Do we think the Home Secretary was right to strip 19-year-old Islamic State bride Shamima Begum of her British citizenship? My guess is that most people will reckon Sajid Javid is absolutely spot on.
Begum is a traitor to her country and very possibly a psychopath. In various recent interviews, she has demonstrated her continued allegiance to the warped values of ISIS, which is mounting a last-ditch stand in Syria.
Of course we don’t want her back here! Let her rot in Syria, or in whichever godforsaken place she ends up, as a punishment for turning her back on this country and consorting with its brutal enemies.
Shamima Begum interview with ITV news
And yet I’m sorry to say that Mr Javid’s treatment of this wretched woman is probably not lawful and it is certainly not right. She should be brought back to this country, and held to account for whatever crimes she may have committed.
Let’s first examine why it’s very likely that the Home Secretary is acting unlawfully. Begum is British. I regret this, in view of her behaviour, but it happens to be the case. She is as British as I am. Mr Javid can’t change that.
He has hit on the idea of claiming she had — until deprived of her British passport — dual Bangladeshi citizenship. This is a necessary fiction, so far as Mr Javid is concerned, because he is legally not entitled to render her stateless. She has theoretically to belong to one country.
But why is she Bangladeshi? Because, says Mr Javid, her mother holds a Bangladeshi passport. But that does not make the daughter a subject of that country.
Some critics of Mr Javid’s action say that Begum has never been to Bangladesh. That’s not the point. After all, she appears to have fitted in very happily in Syria, which she had never visited until she travelled there with two friends in 2015.
No, the question that should concern us is not how alien Bangladesh might seem to her, though the authorities there yesterday kiboshed the idea that she would ever be allowed to visit the country. All that matters is that — most unfortunately, as I say — she is British.
Why can’t the Home Secretary grasp this? Because he wants to teach her, and others like her, a lesson. It’s also practically guaranteed that this ambitious man hopes to endear himself to members of Tory constituency associations, whose support he will need if he is going to become leader of his party.
ITV News of Shamima Begum, 19, in a Syrian refugee camp, being shown a copy of the Home Office letter which stripped her of her British citizenship
That’s how politicians behave. I don’t say he is acting cynically. He genuinely wants to punish Shamima Begum, and it’s to his credit that, coming as he does from a Muslim background, he is prepared to be draconian towards an aberrant member of the same faith.
My main objection is that by doing so he is introducing a dangerous concept of two classes of British citizenship, which could be disquieting to hundreds of thousands of people born in this country as the children of immigrants. In effect, he is saying that Begum is not entirely British because her mother was born in Bangladesh. But that must be wrong. She is entirely British because she was born here.
If I were the British-born son of, say, Jamaican immigrants, I might well feel that Mr Javid’s line of reasoning could potentially be used in other circumstances to question my
