Britain throws the first punch

Rids itself of issue at our expense

The traditional global reputation of Britain can be summed up in the epithet “perfidious Albion.” Anglo-Canadians have natural trouble comprehending these words, and the version of history we are taught in school is not chosen so as to shed much light on them. Maybe they come to mind when you read about Nelson at Copenhagen, or when you notice the offstage slaughter of POWs in Henry V. And then sometimes the British of today pop their heads up and give you a little reminder.

The cunning and viciousness of the British government in annulling the citizenship of “Jihadi Jack” Letts, an Englishman with a Canadian-born father, were rather exquisite. Canada’s authorities have been caught in a trap from which there is practically no exit. Apparently it was one of the last acts of Theresa May’s government — a trick pulled on the way out the door of 10 Downing Street.

Letts is a confused young man who was born, raised, and converted to Islam in Oxford, England. He has never lived in Canada. He went to Syria through Kuwait in 2014, a circumstance that is obviously suspicious in itself, and somehow ended up in the custody of the Kurdish militia. His desperate father had been denying for some years that Letts was a recruit to ISIL, the “Islamic State.” In October, as part of a quarrel conducted in the media with Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, the senior Letts argued that his son had merely been “just another naive young person who went to Syria hoping to help create a peaceful, utopian Muslim state.” The experienced news consumer will notice that this is exactly how every member of ISIL describes joining ISIL.

Anyway, in a BBC interview taped at around the same time and published in June of this year, Jack admitted (in a rather tony English accent) that he had been part of ISIL, although he claims he had tried to leave the movement in 2017. The interview had to be suppressed for a while because Letts’ parents had tried to send him cash, and were on trial for financing terrorism; only after they were found guilty on one charge could it be broadcast. Letts told reporter Quentin Sommerville that he had been prepared to carry out a suicide attack for ISIL if he had been asked, but would now regard this as contrary to Islam.

The Kurds would like to get rid of Letts, but Canada has now learned that the British Home Office, which had not been keen to repatriate him to his actual patria, has terminated Letts’ British citizenship. This is possible because of post-9/11 developments in the law of British nationality, a notorious maze of categories and weird logic that has evolved so as to tax the strength of all but the strongest inquirers. In 2006 British law was amended to allow dual nationals, even ones born in Britain like Letts, to be deprived of British citizenship by ministerial order. This rule covers only dual nationals because of the closest thing to an axiom that international law has: namely, the principle that no individual can be left altogether without nationality.

Britain has since tested this principle to its very limit by allowing the withdrawal of citizenship even when the person’s other country disavows and refuses to accept him. But the U.K. still observes the obligation on paper. Canada doesn’t have any analogous method of cutting off its inconvenient dual nationals and dumping them on other countries after allowing them to absorb a brain-load of demented radical ideas on its own soil. (One doubts the courts would even let it be done explicitly to an individual by means of statute.)

But even if we did have such a method, we would still be rather stuck since the U.K. has acted first. This notin-any-everyday-sense-Canadian maniac is now Canada’s problem officially, and the Liberal government’s electorally, although he has been warned not to expect in-person consular assistance.

“Britain’s only exercising its sovereign rights by declaring this punk a non-citizen,” I hear you saying: “Why can’t we do the same thing?” The answer is that the laws of every half-civilized country have incorporated the nationality axiom for a long time, which involved a conscious surrender of unlimited sovereignty (assuming there could be such a thing). Both Canada and the U.K. are formal parties to the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which makes the axiom explicit. (“Contracting States shall not deprive people of their nationality so as to render them stateless.”)

But perhaps the perceived importance of preventing statelessness is declining, and Britain’s sinister gamesmanship is a hint at the future. The postwar concern with the problem of statelessness, which followed two global conflicts that flooded the world with vulnerable refugees of nebulous nationality, does not seem to have done much to reduce the actual quantity of refugees. Or, indeed, their vulnerability.