“IN the world according to @Keir_Starmer if I grew up in, say, Somalia, I could credibly claim to be Somalian,” wrote journalist turned Reform activist Isabel Oakeshott on September 30, reacting to the prime minister’s Labour conference speech.
“Could I? Really? I think that would be laughable.”
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Leaving aside the fact that Oakeshott is now resident in the United Arab Emirates – a nation in which it is impossible for foreigners to become citizens, even if they grew up there – Oakeshott’s argument has unfortunate, and no doubt unintended, parallels with the 1970s and 1980s, when National Front types refused to celebrate John Barnes’s goal against Brazil at the Maracanã as he “wasn’t English”.
It also appears to suggest that the most successful British track athlete in Olympic Games history, Mo Farah, is not British, having been trafficked to the UK from Somalia at the age of nine. And it similarly rescinds British nationality from the likes of Nadhim Zahawi (who fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with his family at the age of 11), Sir Cliff Richard (born and raised in India), Freddie Mercury (modern-day Tanzania), Linford Christie (who moved from Jamaica aged seven) and, er, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who spent her formative years in Nigeria.
Still, perhaps Oakeshott would prefer her preferred example of Somalia be addressed. In which case it might be worth noting that, of all the players called up for Somalia’s men’s national football team in the past 12 months, Abel Gigli was born in Italy, Mohamud Ali, Mukhtar Suleiman, Sak Hassan and Abdulsamed Abdullahi in the Netherlands, Yonis Farah and Ali Omar in England, Fahad Mohamed in Finland, Abdi Salim, Handwalla Bwana and Ibrahim Ilyas in Kenya, Ismail Liban in Australia, Mohamed Omar in Canada and Mohamed Awad was born in New Zealand. All credibly claim to be Somalian.
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