He should be treated as such.
He was, without a doubt, an antisemite. Might still be one. He seems to understand economics as well as any semiliterate leftist. And for all his anti-authoritarian instincts, he doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact that liberalism is classically English. Still, he’s a citizen of the United Kingdom, an heir to the British tradition, whether he or anybody else likes it or not.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah was an on-and-off political prisoner in Egypt for roughly the past 15 years. In a way, this is quite British of him, or at least Anglo or Western, considering that the governments of Mubarak, Morsi, and Sisi haven’t been especially accommodating of such liberties as public protest and private opinion. Really, it might be the only British thing about him — other than the fact that he gained British citizenship in 2021, while he was in jail. He arrived in the U.K. on the day after Christmas; as far as I can tell, for the first time.
How? British citizenship can be inherited. Since Abd el-Fattah’s mother was born in London, he had a claim to citizenship all along, regardless of his having been raised in Cairo. But what good is an unrecognized and unenforced right? (“Covenants, without the sword, are but words,” says Thomas Hobbes.) Once Abd el-Fattah was imprisoned and spent a while in solitary confinement, for his part in the 2019 protests against Sisi’s government, it became expedient to have his status officially documented. It took years of effort, by Conservative as well as Labour administrations, to have him released. And only after succeeding did British leaders discover that Abd el-Fattah might be a bit racist.
“I am a racist,” he had tweeted in 2012. That settles it. “I don’t like white people.” He had also meditated on the virtues of killing Zionists and about the resemblance the British might bear to dogs and monkeys. A couple of days ago, Nigel Farage wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood that the state shouldn’t permit into the country those who despise the British people. Makes perfect sense. But what happens after they’ve been made members of the British people?
This week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch asked the Labour government to look into whether Abd el-Fattah’s citizenship can be revoked. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp seems confident that it can. Even Keir Starmer’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, now admits to “serious information failures” related to Abd el-Fattah’s case. (Novelist Arundhati Roy said “his voice is as beautiful as it is dangerous” when she named Abd el-Fattah a “Writer of Courage” and shared the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize with him. Serious information failures.)
U.K. law allows for the revocation of citizenship if it has been obtained by fraud, or if doing so would be “conducive to the public good” and national security, so long as it wouldn’t render the subject stateless: the threat of a Hobbesian state of nature would be too cruel, too unusual. And yet the British government should do no such thing.
Citizenship has a moral as well as a legal quality, especially when consented to in adulthood. It binds the individual and the state in mutual responsibilities. The U.K. has plenty of laws — too many — against the sort of nasty drivel Abd el-Fattah has drooled and now supposedly regrets. “Good moral character” isn’t always a requirement for naturalization, either, in the way it is defined in the United States. At any rate, British officials of both major parties had plenty of time to look into Abd el-Fattah’s colorful history. None registered any concerns, it seems. Serious, serious information failures. If he is found now to have failed in his responsibility to follow British common law, the state should prosecute Abd el-Fattah as it might any other citizen. His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is probably nicer than Wadi el-Natrun.
Citizens of free societies, however they came to be so, may be held to account by the state, but they may not be disowned or exiled. Otherwise, citizenship is tiered and citizens are unequal. The Tories, under whose government Abd el-Fattah’s status was made official, ought to know better than to talk unseriously now about takesies-backsies. If she would like to avoid something like buyer’s remorse over her new subjects, Britannia should consider being more deliberate and selective when acquiring them.