Shamima Begum

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Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System by Colin Yeo;

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, G4S, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, lump of labour, open immigration, post-war consensus, self-driving car, Shamima Begum, Skype, Socratic dialogue

Data available at: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/commonwealth-migrants-arriving-1971-year-ending-june-2017/ 4 Jolly, Thomas and Stanyer, ‘London’s children and young people who are not British citizens: A profile’. 5 Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 151 and 166. 6 Jolly, Thomas and Stanyer, ‘London’s children and young people who are not British citizens: A profile’. 7 See for example Thom Brooks, Becoming British: UK Citizenship Examined (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016) and ‘The Ties that Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century’, House of Lords Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement, 18 April 2018. 8 ‘Life in the UK Test Pass Rates’, Garuda Publications, 5 March 2017. 9 ‘The Deprivation of Citizenship in the United Kingdom: A Brief History’, Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law (2014), vol. 28.4, no. 326. 10 See for example ‘HM Government Transparency Report 2018: Disruptive and Investigatory Powers’, CM 9609. 11 ‘Shamima Begum: Isis Briton faces move to revoke citizenship’, The Guardian, 19 February 2019. 12 ‘Shamima Begum would face death penalty in Bangladesh, says minister’, The Guardian, 4 May 2019. 13 For example see ‘Thank God, Sajid Javid grasped Shamima Begum is the one person uniting Britain – against her’, Daily Telegraph, 19 February 2019. 14 For example see ‘Britain needs a new treason law to tackle returning jihadis’, Daily Telegraph, 17 February 2019, and ‘The evil of Shamima Begum’, Spiked Online, 11 February 2019. 15 ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain’, CM 5387, Home Office, February 2002. 16 Sajid Javid, speech to Conservative Party conference on 2 October 2018, available at: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/full-text-sajid-javids-conservative-conference-speech/ 17 House of Commons debate, 12 July 1918, quoted in Gibney, The Deprivation of Citizenship in the United Kingdom. 18 Lord Mackay of Clashfern, Hansard, House of Lords debate, 23 July 1981, vol. 423, col. 448. 19 Jacqui Smith, Hansard, House of Commons debate, 4 December 2008, vol. 485, col. 162. 20 Lord West of Spithead, Hansard, House of Lords debate, 9 December 2008, vol. 706, col. 273. 21 David Davies MP on 20 February 2008, Chris Grayling MP on 2 June 2009 and Damian Green MP on 14 July 2009. 22 ‘Immigration Bill Fact Sheet: Deprivation of Citizenship (Clause 60)’, Home Office, January 2014. 23 ‘1 million new British citizens under Blair’, Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2006. 24 ‘The great passport giveaway: Up to 250,000 foreigners to get UK citizenship every year’, Daily Mail, 21 February 2008. 25 ‘We Want to Be Like Eu: Thousands of EU citizens rush to get their hands on a British passport before Brexit, new figures reveal’, The Sun, 9 May 2017. 26 Hansen, ‘The Kenyan Asians Crisis of 1968’, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, pp. 153–78. 27 David Blunkett, Hansard, House of Commons debate, 24 April 2002, vol. 384, col. 354. 28 Lodged in House of Commons Library HDep 2006/336, dated 19 June 2002, available at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldlwa/60503wa1.pdf 29 For recent examples see Goodfellow, Hostile Environment, and Nadine El-Enany, (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 30 Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting, p. 146.

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Commentators have questioned the loyalty of Begum and others to the British state and argued that citizenship deprivation is justified on those grounds.13 Even on the right of the political spectrum, though, some have expressed unease and suggested that a better way of trying and punishing disloyalty would be through treason trials; we will take a look at these arguments in a moment, but the fact is that such trials are currently impossible.14 Although the Treason Act 1351 is technically still in force, the language is so antiquated that it is universally considered defunct. A new Treason Act would be needed. Whether or not Shamima Begum represents a threat to national security, her exile can be seen as opportunistic rather than principled. As a British citizen who was born and radicalised in Britain, she is the responsibility of the British government and should not therefore be foisted on Bangladesh or Syria or any other country. Other British citizens who had acted in the same way could not be treated alike because their parents did not come from abroad. Shamima Begum is a member of a new category of second-class citizens who have family origins abroad, and it cannot be ignored that they are therefore more likely to be from an ethnic minority.

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Still, the power was still seldom used.9 That changed in 2010, though, when the numbers began to creep up. Since then, hundreds of British citizens have been exiled on public good grounds.10 Source: FOI 38734; ‘HM Government Transparency Report 2018: Disruptive and Investigatory Powers’, July 2018. Until the case of Shamima Begum highlighted this trend in 2019, there was little or no public discussion.11 Begum was born in Britain and grew up in Britain, but aged fifteen she left the country and travelled to Syria to join the terrorist group ISIS. The British government, arguing that she had inherited Bangladeshi nationality through her parents, stripped her of her British citizenship in 2019, preventing her return to the UK.

Home Grown by Joan Smith

autism spectrum disorder, Boris Johnson, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Columbine, Donald Trump, drone strike, G4S, ghost gun, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, no-fly zone, operational security, post-materialism, Shamima Begum, Skype

Teenage dreams The image of three teenage girls striding towards the departure gates, captured on a CCTV camera at Gatwick airport in February 2015, has been reproduced many times in discussions of the role of women in the caliphate. On the day they passed the camera there was nothing to ring alarm bells, just three friends who appeared to be heading off for a half-term holiday or a study break to do some revision for their GCSEs. No one suspected that Amira Abase and Shamima Begum, both fifteen, and Khadiza Sultana, who was a year older, were about to give up everything – family, school, careers – to board a flight to Istanbul and make the hazardous journey across a war zone in Syria to join ISIS. All three were outstanding students at their school, Bethnal Green Academy in the east end of London, so the realisation that they were on their way to start new lives in Raqqa caused not just shock but outrage.

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Hussen admitted he had taken his daughter to a couple of protests, including one outside the Saudi embassy which was said to have been organised by the banned Islamist organisation ­al-Muhajiroun, when she was only thirteen. It seems likely, however, that peer pressure played an equally significant role in the girls’ radicalisation; when they went to Syria, they were following in the footsteps of one of their closest friends, fifteen-year-old Sharmeena Begum (who shared the same surname but was no relation to Shamima Begum). Sharmeena was a vulnerable teenager who had suffered a series of tumultuous events in the year before she fled to Syria, from her mother’s death from lung cancer at the age of only thirty-three to her father’s remarriage a few months later. She was just the kind of troubled girl ISIS was looking for and when she bought a plane ticket for Turkey in December 2014, she showed her school friends – who might otherwise have regarded going to Syria as an unattainable dream – that it could be done.

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When she tried to escape, she was beaten to death with a hammer.146 This sequence of events had a traumatic impact on Khadiza Sultana: in December 2015, just ten months after she left London, she had a tearful conversation with her sister in which she estimated her own chances of escape as ‘zero’. Nothing more was heard of her until the following summer, when her family said that they believed she had been killed in a Russian air strike in May 2016. Her death was confirmed early in 2019 when another of the girls, Shamima Begum, was recognised in a refugee camp in Syria by a Times journalist following the collapse of the caliphate. By then aged nineteen and nine months pregnant, Shamima said she had had two previous babies with her husband, a Dutch fighter, but had lost both to illness and malnutrition. She had heard that her two remaining British friends were alive in recent weeks but did not know what had happened to them.

Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Most symbolically, the Houses of Parliament became the scene of clumsy but deadly attacks which involved driving cars into pedestrians from 2017.117 At the same time some of the most famous Britons who made their way to Syria in the second decade of the twenty-first century became radicalized in their London homes, including Mohammed Emwazi (Jihadi John)118 and Shamima Begum.119 REPRESENTATIVES Like their Victorian and Edwardian Marxist predecessors, the Islamists bombing London had global ties, which, in many cases, involved travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan for training.120 Whereas communists aimed at worldwide proletarian revolution, Islamists bombed symbolic targets such as London.

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For interpretations of the causes of the 7 July attacks, and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Britain and beyond, see: Rai, 7/7; and Robert S. Leiken, Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation (Oxford, 2015), pp. 117–216. 117. Guardian, 22 March 2017, 3 June 2017, 15 August 2018. 118. Robert Verkaik, Jihadi John: The Making of a Terrorist (London, 2016). 119. Shamima Begum’s story receives detailed coverage in The Times during February and March 2019. 120. Rai, 7/7; Leiken, Europe’s Angry Muslims; Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London. 121. Donald MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 138–42; John Newsinger, Fenians in Mid-Victorian Britain (London, 1994); Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The Fenians in England, 1865–1872 (London, 1982). 122.

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain by Ed Husain

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Jeremy Corbyn, Khyber Pass, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Shamima Begum

A fuzzy ‘integration’ whose success is judged by Muslims speaking English, baking cakes and playing cricket will not work. Caliphists are only successful in winning followers for their imagined utopia of an ‘Islamic State’ because the majority community is unable to tell a more compelling story of why Muslims should have a stake in maintaining Britain as a pluralistic, tolerant, secular democracy. After all, Shamima Begum and others went to fight for the slave-owning, people-beheading caliphate of ISIS, but when their caliphate collapsed it was telling that they sought to be tried under impartial British justice rather than the sharia-infused laws of the Middle East. What is Britain? The Shipping Forecast, while comforting for an island nation, does not tell us of the storms to come in the battle of ideas.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

It was famously propounded, of course, by our local MP, Enoch Powell, who regularly called for the repatriation of immigrants, but it was also taken up by the far-right groups who were so keen to etch graffiti on to Wolverhampton homes telling us to ‘fuck off home’ and has been spread for decades in press coverage painting brown immigrants as spongers. In the twenty-first century it has continued to be perpetuated in the way public figures of colour are still told to ‘go home’ on a daily basis on social networks, in endless talk of ‘second-generation immigrants’ (how can you be an immigrant if you were born here?), in the fact that Shamima Begum, one of three schoolgirls who left London to join the Islamic State group in Syria in 2015, could have her British citizenship casually removed by politicians and in the recent Windrush scandal which saw British subjects who had arrived before 1973, in particular those of Caribbean origin, refused benefits, legal rights and medical care before facing deportation.