Calls to remove el-Fattah’s UK citizenship are dictatorial

Egypt extended el-Fattah’s sentence on flimsy and arbitrary grounds. His detention had nothing to do with justice, and everything to do with capriciousness – it sent a signal to the world that “this is what you get when you mess with us”. 

El-Fattah’s status as a prisoner of conscience is ironclad. His courage as a human rights defender is impossible to dispute, certainly by any of us who have not gone through the same. But at the same time, he has – as has been widely reported – displayed some truly appalling views, wishing violence and death upon Jews and Zionists. 

His apologies, both those years ago and more recently, read to many as hollow – still heavily caveated and qualified, insisting somehow that missing context will somehow mitigate against the abhorrent views contained within.

How, then, do we appraise someone like el-Fattah, other than by saying people are complex and contain multitudes? Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage certainly seem to know: both say that el-Fattah, a British citizen with a wife and child living in Brighton, should have his citizenship status urgently reviewed, and presumably revoked.

Farage, Badenoch and the right-wing media pack have, essentially, substituted physical torture at the hands of Egyptian politicians with psychological torture in Britain instead.

Almost everyone on the British right is currently engaged in a fervent battle to present themselves as the supposed champion of free speech. Nigel Farage invited Lucy Connolly – who posted that asylum hotels should be burned down even as rioters took to the streets – on stage at his party conference. 

He ran off to Washington DC to testify about the war on free speech in the UK, even as he banned journalists he disliked – including those from this magazine – from his own party conference. Just last week, Matthew Goodwin – who now chairs Reform’s student wing – condemned the jailing of Luke Yarwood for posting “anti-immigration tweets”. 

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Yarwood had said British people needed to “gang together and start the slaughter”, before suggesting MPs’ homes and parliament should be targeted by violent mobs, in addition to asylum hotels.

Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party similarly suggested that Lucy Connolly should not have been jailed for inciting violence, but now appears to suggest that decade-old tweets of a similar nature from el-Fattah should see him not just punished by the law, but stripped of his citizenship entirely. 

Farage and Badenoch are free to offer up an explanation as to why Connolly should be able to incite violence without consequence, while el-Fattah should face extrajudicial punishment for it. Until they do so, there is an all too obvious one: the leaders of the Conservative and Reform parties are openly pandering to racists, creating a double standard they surely know is indefensible under the law.

Successive governments campaigned for el-Fattah to be freed from Egyptian jail, including several in which Badenoch was a cabinet minister. Is it now her position that the UK government should only try to stop its citizens being tortured when all of their opinions are agreeable to whoever is in government?

Beyond that, we have laws against hate crimes – we know this, thanks to Farage and Badenoch complaining about them all the time. How can it be the case that these laws are simultaneously so draconian that no-one dares speak out, yet apparently so inadequate that criminal justice should be bypassed and a man stripped of his citizenship?

One danger of all of this is, of course, creating a two-tier citizenship structure in the UK, where white Britons enjoy the full range of human rights on offer, and everyone else enjoys them only at the sufferance of ministers and public opinion. If someone was born overseas, or has access to foreign citizenship – every Jew, for example, has a right to Israeli citizenship – then they are permanently on probation.

That is a real risk, and it is abhorrent. But it is only the start of it. Badenoch and Farage are pandering to the perverted justice of the mob, casually throwing out the rule of law as they do. It is a short path from stripping el-Fattah’s citizenship to enabling the thuggish street raids of ICE, which are leaving US citizens with the “wrong” skin colour afraid to leave their homes for fear of being disappeared by men in unmarked vans. It is a short jump from there to fates even darker still.

Labour ministers were politically stupid to celebrate el-Fattah’s release on social media without doing some basic research, not least for the awful situation in which they have now landed him and his family. But they were right to fight for the freedom of a British citizen: none of us would expect any less if one of our relatives, however flawed, was in the same situation.

El-Fattah’s social media posts were repellent. They may even be criminal – though that is for police, prosecutors, and then a jury to decide; not politicians, or journalists. But his treatment at the hands of Farage and Badenoch is worse than anything he has done.

To call for someone to be stripped of their citizenship, just to get a good headline, is to throw out justice and replace it with exactly the kind of arbitrary dictatorship el-Fattah just escaped in Egypt, and yet that is exactly what Farage and Badenoch have done. There surely can be nothing more against British values than that.