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The first duty of a government is to protect its citizens. All its citizens — not just the ones that vote for the government of the day or those that share whatever its values happen to be.
If a citizen is in a foreign jail for reasons that wouldn’t have put them behind bars in their country, it is among the most important tasks facing that country’s diplomatic service to get them back out again. It’s not the job of politicians to conduct an audit of that citizen’s values or opinions. It’s to get them out.
There might be times where the appropriate remedy is for the citizen to be returned to their home country and be thrown in prison for other reasons — but the fact that they are a citizen does not change, and nor do our obligations to them. That is true whether they are a British teenager who has had sex with a 17-year-old in Dubai, like Marcus Fakana, or a British-Iranian dual national detained by Iran, like Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, or a British-Egyptian dual national democracy activist, like Alaa Abdel Fattah. (Yes, when a British citizen is a dual national with another democracy, we generally leave the other state to it. But the distinction between “a democracy” and “not a democracy” is not some quibbling difference. It is everything.)
And it is true even when that citizen has appeared to call for the killing of “Zionists”, as Abdel Fattah has done — which led some politicians to demand his deportation. It is true even if you are, as I am, sceptical that his disavowal of these views is sincere.
I didn’t think any of this needed saying, but one of the more disturbing revelations, in addition to the government’s apparent ignorance about those remarks prior to his release, is that, in the words of the government’s now departed head of strategy, efforts to free him were mentioned so often by the diplomatic service that it became “a running joke” in Downing Street.
Forgive me, but I struggle to see the funny side. At the time, all that Labour officials and ministers knew about Abdel Fattah was that he was a British citizen languishing in a prison in Egypt for criticising the government there. Why is it amusing that the diplomatic service was spending a lot of time and energy trying to get him out? I accept that “protecting British citizens abroad” does not have any obvious synergies either with this Labour government’s proclaimed priority of boosting economic growth or its revealed preference for throwing as much sand in the wheels of the British economy as it possibly can. But I am at a loss as to what, exactly, is amusing about it.
Labour’s inability to understand, let alone articulate, why exactly it was important to get Abdel Fattah out of prison are revealing. It illuminates the government’s inability to identify what really matters, to tell barnacle from boat, and that it regards detention as a source of humour suggests a callous indifference that is worrying from any government.
Abdel Fattah’s claim to British citizenship is simple: his mother is a British citizen. His views as expressed on Twitter are ones I wish weren’t present in the UK. But that is also true of the Canadian academic David Betz, who has claimed that the UK is five years away from a civil war between “three sides”: a Muslim population in our cities, a white British one that regards the government as illegitimate and captured by “elites”, and what remains of the British state. (What he thinks will happen to those of us who are neither Muslim nor white British is unclear, but I am willing to bet that it is not good.)
But I do not think that Betz should be deported back to Canada, a democracy. Nor if he were to end up in a dictator’s prison would it be a laughing matter. The reason given for not taking away Abdel Fattah’s citizenship should not be that he is not a national security threat, as Labour has claimed. It is that the importance and protection of citizenship, legally and fairly granted, is a cornerstone of liberal democracy. What protects Abdel Fattah is what protects not just Betz, but Keir Starmer or Robert Jenrick (both eligible for dual citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return, and therefore under the UK’s current system, vulnerable to the removal of citizenship), or Kemi Badenoch (who had a Nigerian passport, now lapsed). No view, no matter how repugnant, is a reason to lose your citizenship.
That the government does not understand this is emblematic of an administration that has lost its way, that fails to understand that it is heartless and one that is meeting the challenge of an era in which liberal democracy is under threat by returning to old obsessions.
It’s not funny, it’s just sad. The only “running joke” here is the Labour party.