Adam Boulton Diary – stripping citizenship is a convenient and cowardly way of dealing with Shamima Begum

When the Observer newspaper journalist Farzad Bazoft was on death row in Iraq 1990, the Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd accepted that his fate was his responsibility but, “what can we do?” he said to me despairingly. “We can hardly send a gunboat.”

Bazoft was being falsely accused of being a spy and was executed a few days later. The government temporarily withdrew the UK ambassador to Iraq in spite of protests from several Conservative MPs who insisted “Bazoft deserved to be hanged”.

As it turned out Hurd was wrong about the gunboats. In the following decades British forces went along with the Americans in two wars against Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi despot. Yet as a former Home Secretary and diplomat he exposed a more important truth: being British doesn’t afford us much protection abroad anymore.

Whatever the legal technicalities, the treatment of Shamima Begum by the UK government shames this country. She and her two friends from Bethnal Green Academy were foolish and misguided teenage girls when they went off to become Jihadi brides in Syria. They gave succour to the despicable Islamic State. But they are also British. They are our problem.

The forty or so Britons and their children now in prison camps in Syria should be brought back here to face the consequences of their actions. Instead, the British authorities have conveniently washed their hands of them. They have denied or taken away their citizenship when possible and left them to rot.

Being a British Citizen, or rather subject of Her Majesty, isn’t worth much these days. There is no automatic birthright to citizenship, unlike in the United States. You must be born here and have at least one parent who is already a citizen. Official websites stress that “Citizenship is a privilege not a right”. Why? Who says so? I should be British because this is where I’m from, not by the grace of Boris Johnson or Priti Patel.

It is against international law to render someone stateless, otherwise I am sure our domestic authoritarians would have a lot more of us chained up ready for deportation into limbo.

The UK government has found a loophole to take away citizenship from people who might be eligible for dual nationality, even remotely. This might give pause for thought to the thousands of British nationals now taking up dual citizenship with EU nations following Brexit.

Shamima Begum was born and brought up in the UK, although her parents originate from Bangladesh. She has never activated Bangladeshi citizenship and Bangladesh has refused to take responsibility for her. “Jihadi Jack” Letts, who has also had his citizenship revoked by the UK, has a Canadian father, though little else to do with that country.

Disproportionate treatment of dual nationals inevitably inclines to racism. People with browner skin may well have more links to other countries. As the “hostile environment” treatment of the Windrush Generation demonstrated, the Home Office is not squeamish about such things. Theresa May instigated much of the crackdown, but it is notable that the recent deprivations of citizenship have been instigated by Home Secretaries, Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, who are both from immigrant backgrounds.

The British nation’s abnegation of responsibility for its homegrown Jihadis is an exception. The US has repatriated many of its citizens for legal processing. President Biden has said the UK should do the same. Many European nations are also processing and providing consular services to their exiles.

Jihadis are the unpalatable exceptions that prove the rule. The British state does not regard it as a priority to look after its citizens when they run into trouble abroad. If I am working in a dodgy country or run into difficulties, experience tells me not to expect help from the local British Embassy. British diplomats look down on offering consular services to their, admittedly often bothersome, fellow citizens, and give priority to calculating the impact on local politics. At a trivial nuisance level, they have made it harder for people who lose their passports abroad or who need to repatriate dead relatives. More seriously, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe remains wrongly imprisoned as the FCDO – as it is now renamed with the addition of Development responsibilities – privately balances her against other aspects of UK Iranian policy.

The United States of America does things differently. Marie Colvin, who was later killed in Syria, worked for The Sunday Times of London but told me how glad she was to be an American citizen. When she was medi-vacced back to Columbo after being seriously injured while covering the rebel Tamil Tigers the Sri Lankan authorities wanted to arrest her. But there were two US State Department officials waiting on the tarmac who insisted she was coming home with them.

The ability to protect your citizens abroad depends to a certain extent on how much clout a country has. It is also a matter of principle. Douglas Hurd’s reference to gunboats was an echo of the most famous speech delivered by the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston in 1850 at the height of the British Empire. Palmerston persuaded parliament “to think ourselves bound to afford protection to our fellow subjects abroad… as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also, a British subject, in whatever man he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong.”

Palmerston, who is now questionably commemorated by sharing his name with the Foreign Office cat, had dispatched the Royal Navy to blockade Greek ports in support of Don Pacifico, a Gibraltarian of Jewish background, who had demanded British support seeking compensation for damage to his property during anti-Semitic riots in Athens. Palmerston defeated attempts to censure his action by parliamentarians, including William Gladstone.

The British state is content to refresh imperial ties when it suits it, as now with the offer of residence in the UK to holders of British National Overseas passports in Hong Kong. After the Second World War, British justice was anxious to hang the Nazi propagandist William Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, for treason but technically you can only betray what you belong to. By nationality Joyce was Irish and American, not British. The prosecution successfully argued that Joyce had falsely claimed to be British, and he was duly executed.

For wrongdoers the consequences of British justice may be severe and rightly so. But the argument, made by the government and accepted by the Supreme Court, that Begum should be kept out of this country “for security reasons”, for fear that a convicting case can be made against them, is palpably unjust. Our political leaders have opted to make Britain an independent nation free from multilateral entanglements. That should mean that we all have a place in Team GB, the good, the very bad, and the severely misguided.