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shamima begum

2/27/2021

744 words; 6-minute read

Yesterday, 26th February, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that 21-year-old Shamima Begum would not be allowed to return to Britain from Syria to fight to have her UK citizenship restored.

In 2019 the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid took away her citizenship on the grounds that she was a threat to national security, a stance reaffirmed yesterday by the current Home Secretary, Priti Patel. Patel said, ‘The government will always take the strongest possible action to protect our national security and our priority remains maintaining the safety and security of our citizens’.

Begum fled the UK for Syria at the age of 15 to join Isis. She married a Dutch Isis fighter (as far as we know being held in a different camp) and she has had three children all of whom have died. She was captured by Syrian Kurds in 2019 and is now in the Al-Hol detention camp, along with around 11,000 other foreign nationals and their dependants.

In a June 2019 visit to the camp, Human Rights Watch found ‘overflowing latrines, sewage trickling into tattered tents, and residents drinking wash water from tanks containing worms. Young children with skin rashes, emaciated limbs, and swollen bellies sifted through mounds of stinking garbage under a scorching sun or lay limp on tent floors, their bodies dusted with dirt and flies. Children are dying from acute diarrhea and flu-like infections, aid groups and camp managers said’. In January this year there were twelve murders in the camp.

Begum’s case for returning to the UK to have her plea heard in person was based on the claim that is impossible for her to fight her case from a detention camp where she can’t have proper contact with her legal team.

In refusing to allow her to return the Supreme Court reiterated the belief that she is a threat to national security, and that no court could overrule the Home Secretary’s judgement in that regard.

Reaction to this decision has been predictably polarised. On the one hand there are those who say that no punishment is harsh enough for Begum give her association with Isis.

On the other are those who argue it’s ridiculous to regard a 21 year-old woman in a detention camp as a threat to national security; that she was underage when she left the UK and was likely groomed into doing so; and that in any case it’s illegal to leave someone effectively stateless by taking away their citizenship. (There is some dispute as to whether she has access to Bangladeshi citizenship or not).

Whatever arguments there may be over points of law, one thing is absolutely clear: yesterday’s decision condemns a young woman who has lost three children to unlimited detention in a camp in the conditions described above.

In other words the Supreme Court has in effect sided with those who reckon there’s no punishment harsh enough for Begum.

Who are the people - the actual, individual people - who are able to sleep at night knowing that this is what they’ve done? There are lots of them in the ‘justice’ factory, starting with Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, from whom we should expect absolutely nothing except heartless cruelty (they have form).

But what about Robert Reed, President of the Supreme Court, who got to read out the verdict? Watch him do so and marvel at the equanimity he displays as he bangs one nail after another into the life chances of a damaged young woman. It’s stunning, really, the way he manages to blot out the latrines, the murders, the sewage, the worm-infested water, the skin rashes, the emaciation, the garbage, dirt and flies. It’s hard not to marvel at the capacity he displays to obliterate even the tiniest vestige of compassion.

The Supreme Court’s decison was unanimous, which means that there are ten other people in the highest reaches of the system ready to renounce sympathy, mercy, kindness, grace in the name of … what? Ah yes, of course. Justice! Look at the smiles they take home with them while they condemn a vulnerable young woman, and by implication thousands of other women, men and children, to conditions they wouldn’t condone for their dogs.

Justice is supposed to be blind. How numbing to see that it’s heartless as well.

identity politics and economic inequality

2/13/2021

348 words; 3-minute read

Yesterday I pointed out the coincidence between the rise in acceptance of the equality claims of discriminated identitarian groups and the increase in levels of economic inequality in OECD nations. I didn’t argue for either correlation or causation between these two phenomena. The possibilities range from them being completely unrelated to strict causality.

In a recent London Review of Books article William Davies asks ‘why, in an age when inequality has been rising, have work and wealth ceased to provide the grounds of political identity?’ By way of an answer he’s right to point out the structural obstacles: ‘The relationship between class and voting behaviour grows progressively weaker as society becomes economically, culturally and morally more individualistic’. But maybe there’s more to it than that.

Davies also refers to the classic Marxist distinction between a class ‘in itself’ which has objective interests as a class, and a class ‘for-itself’ where that class becomes self-conscious of these interests and acts to get them realised. The progress from ‘in-itself’ to ‘for-itself’ is rocky and unpredictable and it depends on a combination of (shared) lived experience and intellectual work (‘consciousness-raising’). So another way of putting Davies’ question is why is it proving increasingly difficult for the economically dispossessed to realise its ‘for-itself’ identity?

All politics is identity politics in the sense of collectives coming to be aware of shared interests rooted in a shared identity. But it seems to be easier to mobilise collectives grounded in ethnicity, gender, and religion than those with shared interests as a social class. Members of the former collectives seem to ‘know’ and recognise each other more readily than members of the latter.

Is it fair to say that it’s harder work to ground political identity in economic inequality than in ethnicity, gender and religion? More particularly does it require different work? If so, what is that work and have we forgotten how to do it?

Hate speech, democracy and economic equality

2/12/2021

444 words; 4-minute read

‘One of the principal problems of democratic co-existence is the proliferation of so-called ‘hate speech’”. So begins a recent Serge Champeau and Daniel Innerarity article in El País (7 February 2021), reproduced here.

There’s certainly plenty of hate speech about and social media have made it a lot easier to dispense it. There’s also no doubt that hate speech does real damage to individuals and - this is Champeau’s and Innerarity’s point - it can have a corrosive effect on the ties that bind democracies together.

But there’s more to be said about hate speech and democracy. The clue is here: ‘This debate is less about classic ideological confrontation and more at the level of the personal’. The suggestion is that where we used to argue about issues that divide left and right, issues around poverty and economic equality, now we dish out and - and take - personal offence instead.

Lots of political capital has gone into combating hate speech because it’s not just personal: it’s directed at individuals by virtue of their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. Progress has been made, at least as far as law-making goes, in regard to protecting these identities and the people who wear them.

Whether all this has damped down the centrifugal forces threatening democratic cohesion or exacerbated them by shining the bright light of the law on what separates us, is a matter for conjecture. More to the point here is whether this attention to the personal has crowded out the political in the traditional, ideological, sense of the word.

Three observations on this:

1. At the same time as there’s been huge progress in recognising the equality claims of discriminated identities, income inequality has risen across all OECD countries
2. Right-wing parties (though not all of them) have found it easier to ‘modernise’ and accept LGBT equality claims (for example), than claims for economic equality. The UK Conservative Party is a good example.
3. I have no idea if there is a causal link between the increase in equality for discriminated groups in OECD countries and a decrease in economic equality in the same countries.

However (3) turns out, economic inequality is surely as much a threat to democratic co-existence as hate speech. In fact, if there was less of the former we might see less of the latter, a strategy that seems not to have occurred to the French government as it pursues its laicité agenda while leaving the Muslim banlieues to their economically marginalised fate.

Notes from a cliff-edge

shamima begum

identity politics and economic inequality

Hate speech, democracy and economic equality

Andrew Dobson

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