Chris Bertram

The criminal shitshow that is British politics continues, with a Tory leaderships contest, ultimately to be decided by a handful of elderly misanthropes, following Theresa May’s resignation. Currently, the bookie’s favourite is serial liar and buffoon Boris Johnson, a man who makes Donald Trump look like a model of virtue and who is now holding out the prospect renegotiation with the European Union, in violation of the agreed terms of the recent extension, followed by the no-deal exit which the Tory undead wish to foist on the country’s youth. In between we have the prospect of European Parliament results, where the largest share of the vote will probably go to Nigel Farage’s alliance between the right-wing Christian evangelism of Anne Widdecome and the paedophile-excusing ex-Revolutionary Communist Party.

Still, as an hors d’oeuvre, Theresa May’s resignation speech wasn’t bad. She appealed to the spirit of Nicholas Winton, who saved thousands of children from the Nazis just before the Second World War by organizing the Kinderstransport, which necessitated, among other things, the falsification of papers. Under Theresa May’s regime, Winton would have faced prosecution and a lengthy stretch inside for people smuggling and those he saved would have been left to their fate. As Home Secretary and Prime Minister she has presided over the most refugee-hostile government of recent times, with child refugees stranded and separated from their families and those refugees who make it to the UK forced to subsist on £5 a day. Many other migrants have had their lives destroyed under May’s “hostile environment” regime that has split families, increased racial discrimination in housing, and has seen foreign students falsely accused of cheating and removed in their thousands with the loss of all their money and reputations. And the system of indefinite detention for thousands of migrants continues. These are, of course, just the charges that come to mind, there are many others. But she cried from self-pity and tried to wrap herself in the mantle of a modern saint.

I’ve been rooting through my archives, reprocessing some files, and this one comes from a decade ago.

In Harry’s thread on teaching applied ethics, one commenter expressed the view that teachers should not say which side they support in a debate and should think of themselves as acting as lawyers for both sides. I think Harry sort of agreed with the first point. However, this isn’t always possible and sometimes isn’t even desirable. It won’t be possible when you have expressed yourself publicly and in-print on the issue at hand. When you have, then students will know what you think. Sure, you can present the best counter-arguments to your view in their best light, and you should, and you should encourage disagreement (and discourage unwarranted praise). But they’ll still know.

Some cases, though, are more resistant to impartiality. Take the ethics of migration, for example. I don’t find it hard to present arguments for restriction as put by people like David Miller or Christopher Heath Wellmann. So to that extent, even where the students know where I stand, they also know that I think there are philosophically respectable people whose arguments need addressing and that if they agree with, say, Miller, rather than me, that’s OK. Much more difficult, I find, is when we get onto state enforcement of immigration policy. The problem here is that even the restrictionists hedge their support for restriction with an acknowledgement that states must respect human rights and the values embodied in the rule of law.
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One from back in 2013

A shot from yesterday’s People’s Vote march to stop Brexit. (There are some other pictures on my Flickrstream of the same event.) We’ve reached a crunch moment when those of us who want the UK to remain in the European Union could win or where we end up with a disorderly exit (followed by a humiliating agreement from a position of weakness).

The UK Home Secretary, Sayid Javid, has decided to revoke the citizenship of Shamima Begum, who notoriously travelled to Syria at the age of fifteen with two companions and married an ISIS fighter. She is now in a Syrian refugee camp, has now given birth to a child and was reportedly keen on returning to the UK. Begum has given interviews saying that she regrets nothing and that she wasn’t “fazed” by seen the severed heads of those murdered by Daesh. Not an appealing character, but, given that she was groomed as a child by a criminal gang, one who might have been seen as a victim in other circumstances.

The UK government has given itself the power to deprive people of citizenship where this is “conducive to the public good” but the law up to now had been that they had to be satisfied that the person would not be rendered stateless. After all, as we know, if citizenship is the right to have right, statelessness is a condition of near rightlessness. In the present case, they seem to be claiming that a person born in the UK who acquired British nationality at birth can be deprived of citizenship because she is entitled to Bangladeshi nationality through her mother. Shamima Begum has never been to Bangladesh and has no connection to the country. Though her case involves terrorism the UK has also begun to use citizenship deprivation in cases involving “serious criminality”, a vague category that is capable of being defined downwards (as it was when Javid spoke about a group of people recently deported to Jamaica).

Millions of people born in the UK and holding British nationality currently have “access to” another citizenship. It may be Irish citizenship (the entire nationalist population of Northern Ireland!). It may be Israeli citizenship through the law of return. It may be the citizenship of some country in Britain’s former empire, such as Bangladesh. The new expansions of citizenship deprivation theoretically expose all of them to the possibility of exile and banishment to another country should they be convicted of serious crime. The immigration regime has long been one where the rule of law is muted, where due process is little more than what the government says it is, and where means of appeal and assertion of rights are limited. By bringing millions of people into the ambit of such a regime, you render them exposed to a system of arbitrary punishment decided upon by a minister. There are two ways to look at this: either millions of ordinary people are subject to tyranny, or they would never do that to ordinary white people, only to those with a “funny tinge”. Either way lies an appalling vista.

Update: I’ve written [a longer blog](https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/february/who-s-next) (and with improved legal information) at the London Review of Books blog.