THE EXPATRIATION OF SHAMIMA BEGUM by Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley

The Home Secretary has stripped Shamima Begum of her British citizenship on the basis of the fact that, although she was born and brought up in the EastEnd, her parents were born in another country. Hundreds of thousands of young and not so young British citizens, including the Home Secretary himself, are in exactly the same situation: born here of parents who weren’t.

Quite apart from the rights and wrongs of the specific circumstances in Shamima’s case – her departure for Syria as a fifteen-year-old girl, her life in Raqqa under ISIL, the recent statements she, as a traumatised young mother, has been induced to make in Interviews conducted by very experienced journalists in search of a sensational story – the most worrying factor in this situation is the apparently extremely fragile legal nature of British nationality. This has also been highlighted in very recent times by the disgraceful Windrush fiasco and the revoking of the citizenship of a number of dual nationals on account of crimes they have committed.

The deep malaise affecting many of the immigrant communities in Britain today stems from a feeling of not really belonging here. This comes partly from a first generation, many of whom initially intended to return to their homelands and were consequently very reluctant to relinquish the linguistic and cultural norms of their countries of origin, and partly from strong antipathy towards them expressed in many different ways by the people among whom they had come to live. It is probable that this played a large part in what made Shamima and her two companions leave for Syria in the first place. They thought that they would feel more at home there than here. But for the future cohesion of the unequivocally multi-ethnic population, which is the ineluctable reality of 21st Century Britain, it is vital that all possible measures are taken to make every single section of our heterogeneous society feel an integrated part of the whole.

What, however, could be more destabilising and disengaging for people who already have a tendency towards alienation than to have the threat hanging over them that their status as British nationals – of having the unalienable legal right to live the only place they have ever known as home – can be removed just like that, on the basis of a crime they may or may not have committed or on account of a perceived hostility towards the British state? It might be argued that this action is only being taken in extreme circumstances but it creates a definitive legal precedent and, once that door has been opened, what is to prevent the legal goalposts from being moved further and further forward until eventually minor crimes are all that will be needed to achieve the same result.

By all means subject Shamima Begum to a rigorous debriefing process to make sure she poses no threat to British security and let her undergo any penalty the law of the land decides, after a fair trial, that she deserves. But for goodness sake let her retain the British nationality she has by right had all her life. Sajid Javed might think that his very public repudiation of his own traditional background has been sufficient to distance him from his own ethnic and religious roots but he may well find that the sword he has unsheathed to sever Shamima Begum from her British identity will in future be wielded against many of his fellow second generation immigrants and even, in the course of time, against himself.