Porter’s Pensées

What’s the point of blogging? Only a tiny handful of people read the posts of obscure academics like me. To be fair, a large audience was not what I expected, or even wanted, when I began this blog ten years ago. Its purpose was simply self-indulgence; I needed to write, and still enjoy reading what I have written back to myself. (Isn’t that narcissistic?) Admittedly, it would be nice if I could influence opinion on certain historical and political matters; but that tiny and even unlikely degree of influence is more likely to come from my books. Even there, I’ve never written for wealth or for fame, and never bothered much about either; which is probably partly why I’ve accrued neither in the course of my career.

Which must now be nearing its end. Elderly, infirm, tired, world-weary and forgetful, I’ve come to realise that I can no longer contribute significantly to the sum of human knowledge, even in my small corner of the academic wood. I still have the old urge to write, part of the ‘creative’ imperative that I believe is shared by nearly every human being (just look at their gardens), and which may even distinguish us as a species; but no longer the time, energy or enthusiasm to put the effort – the research – into writing anything original or valuable. So my days as a historian are – well – history. I can just about live with that, in my declining years.

To help me live with it, however, I’m presently exploring ways of extending my writing life without involving the preliminary work that has preceded all my previous efforts. I’ve had three specific ideas, and indeed have written short introductions for each of them. Here they are. All of them broke down after about a quarter of a page of E4. You’ll see why.

(1) Autobiography. That would start dramatically (I was born, backwards, in the middle of Hitler’s London Blitz), but would then peter out into a kind of middle-class normality. I doubt whether anyone – not even my children, perhaps – would be interested in the ‘history of a nobody’; which in any case has been done already – by George and Weedon Grossmith in 1887, to be precise – and would be too boring, because I know it all, for me to sustain any enthusiasm for writing it. In any case it seems a rather egotistical thing to do. My memories of school, Cambridge and the other universities I’ve worked in, British, American and Australian, and my experience of living in Sweden, won’t add much to what is already known about those places generally; and certain more personal aspects of my life – like my boyhood, early relationships with girls, marriage and parenting – I’d rather keep quiet about. It’s bad enough having lived an uneventful and unimportant life; to have to write about it – to live it again, in other words – would merely compound the pain and embarrassment.

(2) I then had the idea of writing a ‘history of the British empire’ for children; rather like Lady Callcott’s notorious Little Arthur’s History of England (1835) – in its simplicity, that is, and not of course its chauvinism. Of course I already have the knowledge for that. The problem with it, however, was that I found it impossible to probe deeply enough into the minds of children to be able to translate fairly complex ideas into forms they could relate to. Perhaps I should have tackled this when I was reading bed-time stories to ten year-olds of my own. This is sad; not least because we have an artist neighbour and friend here in Stockholm who could illustrate the book brilliantly. Children’s authors are usually a special breed; and more suited to imaginative literature than to non-fiction.

(3) My third idea, a long-fermenting one, was to use my already detailed knowledge of late Victorian and early Edwardian police, imperial and architectural history, to write a novel; a detective thriller set around that time, referencing real historical figures and events, but with a totally fictional plot. It’s the plot that is still stumping me. (I remember my otherwise inspirational English master at school telling me: ‘The trouble with you, Bernard, is that you have no imagination.’ That’s probably why I read History at university rather than English literature, as he had hoped.) The single idea I’ve had for the novel is based on a Special Branch detective’s report I unearthed on the movements of Karl Marx, dated a couple of years after he was supposedly dead and buried. There’s also a cricket connection here. (The first leader of the first overtly Marxist party in Britain was a Sussex County Cricketer. He’s in Wisden.) Here, then, is the plot. – Marx doesn’t die, but climbs out of his grave in Highgate Cemetery, joins Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, and becomes WG Grace. They both had bushy beards, after all. – No? Anyway, the dates are wrong. And the one thing we historians can’t mess around with is chronology.

Those are my thoughts currently. I may take one or two of them up again. In the meantime, I’m giving up blogging about the events of this mad, mad time; madder even, I feel – but comparable in some ways: dictators, incipient Fascism – to the situation into which I was born. I may return to it in the lead-up to the next British general election. We’ll see.   

Strictly speaking, democracy can be squared with dictatorship if the demos is choosing its dictators for itself. That – for those of us who wouldn’t welcome this outcome – is the great danger of the ‘populism’ which is gripping so many countries today. If every four or five years the people are allowed to elect a leader who thereafter will decide everything for them, then the most simple and basic requirement of democracy is met.

Russia probably fits this pattern today, even allowing for the undoubted electoral chicanery there; China too, and North Korea; and possibly next year’s USA, if Donald Trump gets in again. (That’s judging by some of his recent pronouncements, and the foreign leaders he most admires.) In Britain the political Right is displaying similarly authoritarian tendencies; and in other European countries too. Many people – possibly a majority – don’t really want to have collective ‘control’ over their lives, beyond a certain limit; or even to think deeply about politics. It’s too hard; and easier to treat ‘democratic’ elections  simply as personality contests, or as games. Other sorts of ‘democrat’ – the ‘Social’ kind, for example – need to keep this in mind. The Right does, to its great electoral advantage; and to the detriment of the rest of us.

Sadly, I’ve discovered that we can’t necessarily rely – as I have tended to do until recently – on Social democratic Sweden to keep us more liberal democrats on track. It has an unpleasant Right-wing tendency too, organised as the Sverigedemokraterna, rooted historically in Sweden’s old Nazi party; and although not formally a part of the governing centre-right coalition government clearly exerting influence on it. I’m told the SD is currently debating whether to come out in favour of a ‘Swexit’ of its own; which would put it in the company of Britain’s UKIP, and of UKIP’s toxic successors.

The main factor behind this shift to what is now increasingly being called out as ‘Fascism’ – down there beneath the right-wing propaganda, Britain’s awful popular press, Boris Johnson, desperate late-stage capitalism and all the rest – could simply be a large number of people’s basic desire to be led, rather than to have to take decisions for themselves. In other words, to want daddy – or mummy – back in their lives again. Daddy Putin must be a comfort.

I’ve just finished reading Tom Baldwin’s Keir Starmer, The Biography.  The author insists that it’s not ‘authorised’; but it could well be, relying as it does on sources very close to Starmer, including the man himself, and being overall pretty positive and complimentary. It could almost be an autobiography, painting Starmer as he would like to appear. Readers can probably assume, therefore, that the Keir Starmer described here is roughly what we’ll get when he enters No. 10 Downing Street later this year, as is almost universally predicted. Unless, of course, there’s a demon lurking behind the eyes, as Tory propagandists liked to make out there was behind Blair’s.

He does appear rather dull and ‘lawyerly’, certainly by contrast with one or two of the prime ministers who will have preceded him, a fact he acknowledges. But his – and Baldwin’s – argument is that we’ve had enough of smoother and more glittering premiers in recent years, and could do now with someone rougher, solid, honest, and more cerebral. He could turn out to be the Attlee pour nos jours. (Can there be any disputing that Clement Attlee was the greatest peacetime British prime minister of the 20^th century?)

From an electoral point of view he has a lot going for him. His given name – Keir – links him with the first leader of the Labour Party, which should warm him to the historically-minded Left. His father was a toolmaker and his mother a nurse, which attest to his genuine (aspirant) working-class origins. The ‘Sir’ which is now affixed to his name was awarded for his previous career as Director of Public Prosecutions, and not for party favours or donations, which seems to be the usual passage to a knighthood in these corrupt times. The fact that he had a serious job stands him apart from those – mostly but not exclusively Tories – whose only previous life-experience was in cheap journalism or student politics. And it will good to have a leader whose early world view was not framed at a ‘public’ boarding school. He went to a local (London) grammar school, then to a northern university (Leeds), and managed to avoid Oxford, apart from a year there doing a postgraduate Law degree. His legal expertise was in Criminal and Human Rights Law, rather than fields which might have earned him more money. (But he’s still obviously comfortably off, if not so filthy rich as Sunak.) ‘Human Rights’ distinguishes him usefully from many of today’s Tories. He’s married with teen-aged children, which makes him very normal; and lives in an ordinary terraced house (I think). He’s soccer-mad (Arsenal), and still regularly plays eight-a-side. He enjoys a pint at his local pub, with a bunch of ‘mates’ who are socially varied. He’s serious, sometimes wooden, in public, but apparently loosens up in private, when the ‘real Keir’ is said to shine through. Critics wish that it would shine through more. He presents the image of a man of honesty, integrity, a sense of public service and what in the 18th century was called ‘bottom’, which contrasts strikingly with most of his predecessors, save possibly the unfortunate Theresa May. – Much of this resonates personally with me; as does his defence of the arts – announced in a speech yesterday – which contrasts markedly with Sunak’s and much of the latter’s party’s materialistic Gradgrindism. Whether any of it will attract other voters is yet to be seen.

My own reservations have to do with (a) his caution, although that might be necessary to dampen down expectations, in view of the almost universally acknowledged economic and social mess the Conservatives will have left behind them; and (b) his treatment of those who briefly ran the party before him, many of whom he has very publicly banished. As an old ‘Corbynista’ myself, who resigned from the Party on these grounds, I feel strongly and even bitterly about this, and against the false anti-semitism that was ‘weaponised’ in order to get rid of Corbyn and others when Starmer came along (see https://bernardjporter.com/2024/02/09/anti-semitism/). But I’ve returned to the Party now, realising that this is only one issue among many; and that if giving the impression of having cleansed the Augean stables is necessary for victory, and for warding off the fast approaching ‘neo-fascism’ in our politics, we may all need to hold our noses and jump.

To a scholar, or I would have thought any educated person, the word ‘extremism’ doesn’t signify much. You can have an ‘extreme’ anything; even ‘extreme moderation’, if you’re willing to be pedantic about it (and a bit silly). Extremism is a word that is used rather loosely and vaguely today, generally in order to describe opinions and activities which go further than one’s own in one direction or another; all of which could be easily and more clearly expressed in other ways. Racism is an obvious example; but then maybe anti-racism too, depending on the form it takes? Support for terrorism is another. Fascism comes into this category, so long as it’s carefully defined; and communism, ditto. (There are several different species of both.) Others might include pacifism, noisy demonstrations, veganism, anti-vaccination, anti- or pro-abortion, flat-earthism, UFO-ism, and many dogmatic forms of religion. Beliefs that were considered ‘extreme’ in the past, but no longer are, include atheism, democracy and feminism. That just indicates how the meaning of abstract words can change. I’m faintly puzzled by the fact that ‘neoliberalism’ is rarely categorised as ‘extremist’ today, as I’m pretty sure it will be when history moves on. That’s because it has now come to be ‘normalised’; although in logic that should not make it any less ‘extreme’.

Recently British government ministers, led by Michael Gove, have been working on a plan to outlaw ‘extremism’, based on their own definition of it as ‘the promotion or advancement of any ideology which aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values’. (See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/04/plans-to-redefine-extremism-would-include-undermining-uk-values.) Obviously that is almost as vague and catch-all as the e-word itself – what ‘system’? which ‘institutions? what ‘values’? – but is nonetheless the definition that Gove and his right-wing colleagues are now seeking to pass into law. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/09/revealed-legal-fears-over-michael-gove-definition-extremism.)

With no more detailed guidance being offered as to the particular ideas and groups that are being targeted, all we have to go on is the views and policies of Conservative ministers and MPs in recent months. What they have been concentrating on are pro-Palestinian – or indeed any – demonstrations, especially those that stop traffic; Moslems; the ‘culture wars’; ‘no-platforming’; gender transitioning; lethal attacks on MPs (fair enough, but they have the ordinary law to counter that); and the residue of ‘Corbynism’ (which might include me). It’s the demonstrations, I think, that mainly irritate them, and that they would like to literally outlaw altogether if they could. Suella Braverman calls them ‘hate marches’, which of course they aren’t, but is a good way of blackening them. Already the legislation governing ‘demos’ has been tightened up, in ways that are alarming civil rights advocates. But this is just the sort of thing that our right-wing government thinks the reactionary ‘red wall’ (northern working-class voters) will respond to in the coming general election. And the word ‘extremism’ helps here too.

I don’t know how it can be countered. Perhaps Keir Starmer does. (I’m presently up to page 307 of Tom Baldwin’s recent biography of him: no clue so far.) The conventional wisdom is that the Tories are now reconciled to losing the election, when they’ll regroup on the even further Right of British politics, to resume battle from that ‘extreme’. But of course they won’t call it this. One person’s ‘extremism’ is another’s ‘common sense’, or ‘voice of the people’. It’s just a word, intended to confound.

My doctors’ surgery in Stockholm. I suppose you could say that they shouldn’t be wasting their time with this sort of nonsense; but in Britain they wouldn’t have the time.

The NHS isn’t working. (This is in the UK.) The dental service isn’t working. The Home Office isn’t working (especially with regard to immigration). Local government isn’t working. The Police aren’t working (properly). The Army is grossly undermanned. Now we learn that HMRC (our tax authority) isn’t working either: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/hmrc.

And all because of underfunding; starting with Chancellor Osborne’s ‘austerity’ programme ten years ago – or Thatcher’s privatisations before him – and the unstated purpose behind those measures: which was the dismantling of the welfare state. That the ideals underlying that great institution are also no longer working, is shown by the widening wealth gap that is developing in the country; again, it seems, as a deliberate strategy – or at least a happily tolerated side-effect – on the part of our rulers.

Some of this I can relate to from personal experience. I’ve posted about my problems with the NHS before; hence my current refuge in Sweden. Just now I’m being hounded by whichever computers are currently running HMRC, to pay them the £5000 they’re demanding of me, but which I certainly don’t owe. (No details here – too boring – except to say that I’ve paid the £5000 anyway, just to get HMRC off my back. I’m hoping for a refund if and when a sentient human being comes into their office to check on the robots, and reply to my letters.)

I’m luckier than most – getting along OK on my (half-) pension, with Swedish doctors, and not needing the police or the Army, yet; but I can fully understand the discontent that currently pervades the country, leading our prime minister two days ago to warn, quite dramatically (from a podium hurriedly erected outside No.10 Downing Street, which led everyone to expect a major announcement, like a war or an election), against ‘extremism’, ‘fake news’ and the prospect of what he called ‘mob rule’ in Britain (https://www.politico.eu/article/britain-tipping-into-mob-rule-says-prime-minister-rishi-sunak/). By ‘extremism’ he clearly didn’t mean extreme neo-liberalism; by ‘fake news’ his own government’s lies; and by ‘mob rule’ he seems to have been alluding to the protest demonstrations that are taking place weekly in London in support of the Palestinians. These have been described by ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman as ‘hate marches’; but by all reliable accounts they have been 99% peaceful, disciplined, friendly and good-tempered, (Even Jews are joining in.)

It really is now looking like the beginning of a collapse of the post-war ‘social contract’ in Britain, which this government is planning to meet in traditional right-wing – even quasi-fascist – ways: bearing down on political demonstrations – ‘you’ve made your point’ (that’s the current Home Secretary) – and creating an easily-identified ‘enemy’, in the guise of migrants and ‘Islamism’, to divert blame from the real authors of our woes.

Which are, of course, the present government, which I think my lifetime’s research into modern British history qualifies me to opine is the most clueless and even frankly ridiculous of the past two centuries’; and secondly, the broader and more impersonal factors that this government is facing, which are evidently quite beyond its intelligence and experience to understand, let alone to counter. In the meantime we have to put up with crazy policies (Rwanda!), poor healthcare, a raggle-taggle army, on-going economic decline, overworked and sometimes corrupt police officers, no close allies, no-one to respond to my tax queries; and – to help us all out – a B-list cast of government ministers who wouldn’t look out of place in a ‘Carry-On’ film. Will the expected Labour government be much better? We can only hope.

Rishi Sunak claims that he is ‘living proof that Britain isn’t a racist country’. That’s in connection with the current row over whether or not Lee Anderson MP’s claim that the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, is ‘controlled’ by militant Islamists, was ‘Islamophobic’. Khan of course is a British Moslem; Sunak a Hindu of East Asian heritage. Anderson had the Tory ‘whip’ removed from him as a result of his ‘Islamist’ slur against Khan. (He may be off to join an even more right-wing party now.) A couple of days earlier Suella Braverman MP had claimed much the same as Anderson in a Daily Telegraph article, but without mentioning names; which is the reason given by the prime minister for not sanctioning her in the same way. At around the same time another Tory MP, Paul Scully, had to apologise for claiming that there were ‘no-go-areas’ for non-Moslems in London and Birmingham; which is false. – Islamophobia is of course today’s more acceptable equivalent of anti-semitism. There’s a lot of it about; far more, probably, than of genuine Judenhetze. But that’s only my guess.

Back to Rishi Sunak. – He may be right – I hope he is – to say that there’s less racism in Britain than there used to be, and by comparison with certain other countries of the world. But he’s wrong in thinking that his situation today, as the Asian-origin prime minister of a predominantly ‘white’ Britain, is ‘proof’ of that. The fact is that upper-class and wealthy non-Europeans have always been treated far more kindly in Britain than ordinary black or brown folk, even at their posh schools and universities. (Remember that ex-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is an Old Etonian.) This is undoubtedly true of the British upper classes. David Cannadine’s book, Ornamentalism (2001), illustrates it in the case of the old British Colonial and Indian civil services, showing public school-educated rulers getting along famously, and pretty equally, with African or Indian chiefs and rajas. And remember that the Tories once had a Jewish leader. In all these circumstances, ‘class’ easily trumped ‘race’.

Whether or not this was also true of the more deferential British ‘lower’ classes is hard to say. But in any case it makes Sunak’s experience (Winchester, Stanford, Oxford, rich as Croesus) totally atypical.

[Sources: for Anderson, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13129007/Rishi-Sunak-says-hes-living-proof-Britain-isnt-racist-country-amid-row-suspended-MP-Lee-Andersons-claims-Sadiq-Khan-controlled-Islamists.html; for Braverman, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/26/suella-braverman-condemns-hysterical-row-about-islamophobia/; and for Scully: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68412010.%5D

I think I can understand – and even empathise with – what’s in the minds of people in Europe and America who vote for right-wing, ‘populist’ parties these days. Not necessarily in the minds of their leaders, who may be merely exploiting ‘popular’ views for reasons of their own; but the sorts of folk who phone into radio stations like GB Radio, which I’ve been tuning into quite a lot recently. (I’m sure that other countries have their equivalents – Fox News?)

You can tell a lot about ‘public opinion’ – or a slice of it – from programmes like GB Radio’s. Today for example phoners-in expressed almost universal support for Lee Anderson’s recent islamophobic remarks about the mayor of London – for which he has had the Conservative whip withdrawn from him (for foreign readers: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/24/lee-anderson-stripped-of-tory-whip-over-sadiq-khan-comment); and condemnation of Shamima Begum (see my last post). Other common opinions expressed are against immigration (‘stop the boats’), anti-political demonstrations, anti-‘woke’ (variously but usually very vaguely defined), Islamophobia, anti-civil service, suspicion of ‘intellectuals’, anti-the ‘Westminster bubble’, anti-‘establishment’, (now called the ‘permanent state’), and anti-‘government’ generally; all in the supposed interests of ‘real people’ in the ‘real world’ (that’s Lee Anderson’s words, introducing his weekly slot on GB Radio today).

Sceptical of ‘historical parallels’ as I am, I can’t help being reminded of 1920s Germany; where similar views gave rise to Nazism, against the background of the sort of economic depression that seems to be affecting many people – certainly in Britain – right now. Replace 1920s German Jews by Moslems or ‘Islamists’ as today’s convenient scapegoats, and you have an almost perfect fit. Anderson and our former Home Secretary Suella Braverman are even constructing a full-blown ‘conspiracy theory’ around this, charging Islamists with taking ‘control’ of the country, or at least of its capital (for Braverman, see https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-suella-braverman-says-islamists-now-control-britain); doubtless in league, as ex-PM Liz Truss argued the other day at an extreme-Right American conference, with ‘trans activists’ who had infiltrated the civil service, no less (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/21/liz-truss-deep-state-cpac-far-right). It’s all looking a bit scary, for progressive liberals – whether ‘trans’ or not. (Another speaker at that American conference claimed that ‘progressive’ was simply another word for ‘communist’.)

I recognise a lot of this kind of talk from my very early years, in a lower-middle class family, and at one of those schools that liked to think it was ‘Public’, but really wasn’t. (It was a ‘Direct Grant’ grammar.) One year we had a ‘mock’ election, which I wasn’t allowed to vote in – too young at 14 – but was prevailed upon, as the school artist, to design posters for the ‘RWNP’, or ‘Right-Wing Nationalist Party’ – before I understood what those words meant or implied. (The posters all pictured the dangers of Communism. As an architecture enthusiast, I didn’t want all the churches pulled down either.) There was a communist candidate, who had poor personal hygiene, and had to be accompanied around – at a short distance – by bodyguards. Eventually the election was won by a late entrant, led by the school comedian, calling itself the ‘Intellectual Extremists’: slogan ‘Vote for Daddy’; which annoyed the headmaster no end. He’d instituted the election in order to instil civic responsibility in us boys. But it could be that ‘Daddy’s’ voters were pretty representative of the electorates we have today. It would explain Boris’s (temporary but disastrous) recent success.

Of course my views transitioned when I reached the Sixth form, and came to study History – Mediaeval, as it happens (Modern was for the dumdums, with the really bright doing Ancient), but it made me think; and I then went on to university, which, despite being almost all male and Public school dominated,  also proved to be a new multiracial environment for me to live in. So I could never be a racist. But of course most voters lack most of these advantages; and so cannot be blamed for having narrower views of the world.

Some of which, however, I really can relate to. It’s not hard to lose one’s patience with Parliament, with the voting system we have, its arcane practices, the corruption of various kinds, and in the light of last Wednesday’s shambolic vote on Israel-Gaza (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-68362405). I too get exasperated with various forms of what are called ‘wokishness’ or ‘political correctness’, especially when they give so much ammunition to the right-wing newspapers who delight in misrepresenting or exaggerating them out of all proportion to their real significance. I can sympathise with the resentment expressed by those who feel patronised by ‘intellectuals’, even when I think (some of) the intellectuals may be right. I’m suspicious of most governments, whether ‘permanent’ or not; although my suspicions point in a different direction from those of Liz Truss. I accept, reluctantly, that immigration has to be fairly regulated: although I would have missed my African and Asian friends at college. I suppose I’m Islamophobic, in the sense of deploring all fanatical forms of religion, in which guise Islam often presents itself today. I’m not too happy with demonstrators breaking things, though I wouldn’t accuse most of them of being motivated by ‘hate’ (that’s Suella again). Like those others who are unsettled by the huge societal changes taking place today, I’m often tempted to wrap myself in the warm blanket of nostalgia; although not of the imperial past that so many of today’s populists clearly miss more. (‘We used to rule half the world’.) I’m bored with the ‘trans’ debate, although that’s probably a failing of mine. (I should take more interest in gender.) Ditto the vexed question of ‘identity’, and the ’culture wars’ generally; but partly because I fear they are taking people’s attention away from what is truly ailing both them, and the planet.

This of course may be quite deliberate, on the part of the leaders of these ‘populist’ causes. But that’s another issue. I may come back to it in a later post.

Britain can be a very cruel country. One current example of this is the continued incarceration of Julian Assange, about whom I have blogged at length in the past; based partly on my expertise in secret service history, and partly on my familiarity with Sweden, where one crucial event in his recent career took place. (My last post on this was https://bernardjporter.com/2019/06/05/assanges-extraditions/. Search ‘Assange’ for the others.) A court is still deliberating on whether he should be extradited to the USA on ‘treason’ charges. In the meantime he is still languishing – it’s been five years now – in a British gaol.

A worse cruelty, however, in my view, is the one being meted out to Shamima Begum: originally a British citizen, who at the age of fifteen fled abroad from the East End of London to join ISIS, and was provided with ‘husbands’, to whom she bore at least three babies, all of whom died. Seeing – we presume – the error of her ways, and more immediately and clearly the awful conditions in which she was forced to live in a Syrian refugee camp, she tried to get back to her home; only to be refused entry by the Home Secretary of the day (no, it wasn’t Cruella Braverman, although I’m sure she would have approved), and then to have her British nationality taken from her; which meant that effectively she had no nationality at all. That is forbidden by international law; but the government argued that as her parents had come from Bangladesh, she still had the option of taking on Bangladeshi citizenship. Unfortunately Bangladesh wouldn’t allow her in; so she is still stuck in Syria, while her lawyers continue fighting her case in the UK. Today the last of their appeals was turned down by the Supreme Court; leaving only the European Court of Human Rights left to her. (Yes; that’s the Court that the Brexiters in the Tory party want Britain to withdraw from.) She has made it clear that she would accept a sentence of imprisonment in Britain. I imagine that, unlike Assange, she would love to languish in a British gaol. But there’s no chance of that, as things stand.

Of course we don’t know on what precise grounds the British government bases its case that she would be a danger to the country if she had her nationality restored. MI5/6 might have information we don’t. On the surface, however, it must be unlikely. She was a fifteen year-old girl, for pity’s sake, when she absconded: maybe attracted by the romance which ‘Arabia’ has long held for juveniles ever since TE Lawrence – the flowing robes, pure-white horses, shining scimitars, and all the rest – which must have put the cockney stallholders in rainy Bethnal Green in the shade. Alternatively, she could have been essentially sex-trafficked by unscrupulous Middle Easterners, to service those brave male terrorists, while her mind was barely formed. (You know what fifteen year-old girls are often like.) Or maybe she really did fall for the religion. Whatever it was, it’s clearly uncharitable, to say the least, not to say un-Christian, to visit these sins of adolescence on a grown-up young woman, and leave her little hope of escaping from their repercussions, ever. Or was it simply meant as a warning to other fifteen-year olds? 

It so happens that I know a woman who went through what must have been many of the same experiences as Ms Begum; but was welcomed back into Sweden afterwards, and has been a fine and productive citizen ever since. (She even published a book about it: see https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789113075556/alskade-terrorist-16-ar-med-militanta-islamister/.) That, I think, says more for my adopted country of Sweden, than you could say about Tory Britain just now.