David Cameron is off in Australia, surfing with the dudes first then addressing the G20 and outlining another crackpot idea which, like his EU reform plans, might sound good on the face of it, but is ill conceived and impractical on closer examination.
His big idea is to exclude British citizens who have been involved in the Syrian civil war from returning to the UK for a period of 2 years. It ticks all the Cameronian boxes of sounding dynamic, radical and sensible, while being unachievable and ill thought out.
Citizenship is something you own, and British citizenship gives you the right to be in the UK which should also ensure the right to a fair trial before appropriate legal punishment. It’s not something that can or should just be suspended on the whim of the government of the day. If it can be suspended for taking a side in this horrible and far from clear cut civil war, then why not for people who campaign for Tibet? Or Burmese dissenters in a couple of years time when it too is a peaceful democracy? Or any other regime that the government of the day feels it expedient to cosy up to?
Of course like most attacks on civil liberties in recent years it’s being pushed as anti-terrorist, but it’s not too much of a leap to see it being used a lot more widely to exclude anyone the government deems it convenient to have out of the way for a while.
Secondly if the government decides to take a stand now, on this, and essentially deprive British citizens of their citizenship then they are by extension condoning the actions of other British citizens engaged in some political activity abroad, leaving the door wide open for foreign governments to make the accusation that we are complicit in supporting certain causes. What pressure might future British governments come under from Peking, or indeed Washington, not to extend the rights of citizenship to anyone taking an unfashionable view.
Thirdly, this ridiculous idea is a prime example of kicking the can down the road. What does Cameron suppose these Islamic fundamentalists will do for two years in the midst of the Syrian civil war? And what will happen after the two years is up? David Cameron probably doesn’t care. He’s a shrewd enough politician to either blame it on whoever his unlucky coalition partner is at that point or make it a problem for a beleaguered Miliband government. We should care though.
It’s as simple as this: If it can be shown in a British criminal court to the required standards of proof that someone has committed treason or some other significant act that is contrary to British interests then try them for it in court and give them an appropriate punishment. The appropriate punishment for treason was death until relatively recently, which is in a very real sense a revocation of citizenship. Life meaning life in prison would be almost as good.
This won’t happen because it would involve facing up to the problems that the British government has itself created over decades of handing out citizenship freely and “tolerating” the behaviour of people who enriched us with ideas like radical Islam, and brought their “culture” of ignorance and violence with them. Not only are these people British citizens in the legal sense, many of them were made British citizens under the prevailing orthodoxy pedaled by Cameron just as enthusiastically as it was pedaled by Blair before him. They are proto-citizens of modern Britain, not the messy old kind. What is more, all of them were radicalized and inspired to go and fight on behalf of an Islamic caliphate right here in the United Kingdom. These aren’t some alien invaders who happen to have British passports by a bureaucratic slip up, and they’re not a handful of lunatics on the extreme fringe. This is hundreds if not thousands of British citizens who have decided to take up arms. It’s a demographic.
This is just one result of that stupid orthodoxy, and it won’t be fixed by some half cocked temporary plan to grab headlines and act tough.
The “Islamic State” has no special love for the wastelands of the Middle East, Syria, Iraq and so on, – and I can understand why. I have seem the waste lands – and they are rubbish, they might have been interesting before the Islamic conquest, and something might be made of them if the forces of Islam went away, but that is not going to happen.
The “Islamic State” is interested in global (world) Islamic rule – including in Britain. Under a Caliph – and that Caliph would certainly not be Queen Elizabeth II
“British” people who fight for the Islamic State (or other groups devoted to a world Islamic state) are, therefore, traitors to the Queen and should be executed.
If they are executed then the question of whether they should be allowed to live in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is moot.
Yeah but Britain abolished death years ago. Not long after we abolished responsibility and consequences. It’s obvious to most right thinking people how we should deal with this, and you’re right, execution is the natural wage of treason. But it won’t happen.
Alas Alex – and I was so looking forward to feeding them to my Invisible Cat (my constant companion on trips to the Middle East – and to Ulster also).
Don’t mess with citizenship statuses, if they committed a crime send them to prison etc.
Well, the problem is that these ethnic groups should not have been given our citizenship in the first place.
I have no problem with removing the passports of those in Syria – it seems absurd on “faux-libertarian grounds” to argue the state should never remove passports from anyone – but the larger question is (1) why do the ones in England have our passports; and (2) why are we insisting on importing more and more of these groups and giving them our passports?
At the very least, recognize we’re in a hole, and let’s stop digging.
Law is not adequate in dealing with terrorists. Court cases can go on for years and years until no remembers what the Hell the court case was really about, anyway. Remember that we have Omar Khadr in a Canadian lock up and we have given him the right to sue the federal government for millions of dollars over something completely nonsensical.
We have to stop being Mr Nice-Guy with these terrorists no matter if they are the physcial jihadists, mentors, enablers, funders and fund raisers, and the cheerleaders for global conquest. And that about brings us to the whole damned lot of them.
The problem is in dealing sensibly with the political, media and acedemic people who think that terrorism is only about the handful of bombers and murderers. The political ideological idiocy of what constitutes terrorism can be summed up in what president George W. Bush said after 911: “Islam is a religion of peace, the majority of Muslims are peaceful and no American-Muslims were involved in 911.”
These things he said were absolute nonsense. He was told that American-Muslims would be behind any terror attack because you don’t just hop off a boat and attack America without knowing anything about America. Of course American Muslims were behind the attacks because it is well known over here that Al-Hijra mosque in Falls Church, Virginia is a hotbed of Islamic terrorists, not to mention a few dozen other places.
How did the 9-11 attackers get the knives on board the aircraft in multiple cities?
If I have to tell any of you you are pretty damned stupid, not to mention naive about the ideology in the Koran and Sunnah. You have a limited imagination if you go to an airport and not see that the same people who put the knives on board the flights still working at the same airports.
And that really says just about everything about our well educated and extremely dumbed-down Western population. There were 2 1/2 million Muslims in the United States in 2001 and are reaching nearly 10 million Muslims today. That says how stupid we really are.
In 1990, when flying TWA from London to Frankfurt to then get on a connecting flight to Istanbul to then get a little propeller-plane to meet chums in Bodrum, I took a “stanley knife” in my hand-luggage, so as to cut specimens of interesting plants nicely. I was stopped at the boarding gate by three large men who opened my luggage, and having let me through after a confiscation of the item, said: “It’s OK sir – all we were looking for was the knife, sir, you’re now free to board.”
This was August 1990, London.
It seems more naive to me to imagine that these laws will be used to target terrorists in Syria and then left at that.
We have the ability to kill someone who is a present danger at home or abroad, and we have the ability to prosecute someone who is clearly aiding terrorism or planning terrorist acts.
I don’t see the need, or even any real benefit to this strange new power for any purpose other than Cameron being seen to act tough while kicking the problem 2 years down the line for the next government to deal with.
I agree that our habit of dishing out citizenship willy nilly has come back to bite us here but they are British citizens none the less. Devaluing citizenship for everyone won’t solve this problem and will create many more.
It doesn’t devalue citizenship for everyone – we all know that English people are not trooping off to Syria to fight in the civil war there. It acknowledges that there is a large group of people who are “British citizens” who never integrated culturally into this country in the first place. Cancelling their passports revalues – rather than devalues – citizenship for the rest of us.
Why can’t they acknowledge this by actually dealing with them properly in the courts and sentencing them to meaningful prison sentences? This is just going to lead to protracted legal battles which will probably end up going in favour of the terrorists.
Alex, sentencing them to meaningful prisons sentences means allowing them to enter our country again. Why would it lead to protracted legal battles? I have outlined in numerous articles why the judges should be brought into line and punished for judicial perjury, and any attempt by them to turn this into a circus should attract a strong political response.
They are British citizens, for whatever reason, they have the right to return to the UK. Denying them this would effectively make them stateless, and I understand that this goes against treaties we have signed. Not an area I know much about but I can well imagine lots of lawyers rubbing their hands at the prospect of taking it to the ECHR. What is wrong with prosecuting and punishing them in the UK?
Er, Alex – you’re just quoting state ideology there!