Javid halts cooperation with US on jihadists

Home Secretary suspends intelligence sharing after legal action by mother of one of the Isil ‘Beatles’

SAJID JAVID has been forced to suspend Britain’s intelligence sharing with the US over two alleged jihadists after the mother of one of the men began legal action against the Home Office.

The Home Secretary agreed to a temporary pause in mutual assistance in the case of Alexanda Kotey and Shafee El-sheikh after he was threatened with an injunction by lawyers acting for El-sheikh’s mother.

Mr Javid has been put on notice that El-sheikh’s mother intends to apply for a judicial review of his decision to waive Britain’s usual demand for socalled death penalty assurances.

Sources have suggested to The Daily Telegraph that an initial court hearing could happen as early as today.

The Telegraph disclosed this week that Mr Javid had agreed to assist the United States in its attempts to prosecute the two men, who were allegedly part of the British-born Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) death squad nicknamed the “Beatles”.

Unusually, he told the US he would not seek assurances that the suspects would be spared the death penalty if they were tried and convicted in a US court.

Lawyers acting for El-sheikh’s mother last night described Mr Javid’s decision as “a clear and dramatic departure from the UK’S long standing international and domestic commitment to oppose the continuing exercise of the death penalty”. The Home Office made clear it will fight any legal case and remains committed to helping the US bring the men to justice.

Mr Javid took the decision in June together with Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, and was given Theresa May’s blessing, but the Cabinet was not consulted.

Gareth Peirce, the veteran human rights lawyer who is representing Elsheikh’s mother, believes Mr Javid’s decision was unlawful, and intends to seek a judicial review, meaning a judge would rule on whether Mr Javid had broken the law. On Wednesday, after Ms Peirce wrote to the Home Office, she was given an assurance that no “further” assistance would be provided to the US in building a case against the two men, who are being held by nonstate powers in Syria.

Yesterday Home Office lawyers said the pause in mutual assistance was “only a very short-term promise” pending a judicial review.

Ms Peirce has now sent a so-called letter before action to the Home Office, setting out an “urgent” timetable for the case to be brought to court. It is now up to the Home Office to respond to that letter before Ms Peirce can apply to a judge for a judicial review.

The Home Office said it was confident Mr Javid had acted within the law and remained determined to ensure Kotey and El-sheikh face justice.

“The Government remains committed to bringing these people to justice and we are confident we have acted in full accordance of the law,” a spokesman said.

Sajid Javid is in danger of giving three widely disparaged minorities a good name. Let’s face it. The trifecta of financial crisis, the midden of Brexit, and child abuse in northern towns hang round the necks of bankers, Tory ministers and Pakistani Muslims much like the rotting albatross clung to Coleridge’s ancient mariner. Yet, the Home Secretary, a former Deustche Bank executive born into a Pakistani Muslim family in Rochdale, far from being marooned in the drifting wreck called Cabinet, is emerging as the most effective leader in a government dismayingly short on stars.

Disappointingly for Labour supporters (like me), his ministerial shadow is yet to place a glove on him. Westminster is starting to scent the aroma of a winner. Within a week of his appointment as Home Secretary, he blunted the edges of two disastrous affairs that had evoked the Tory “nasty party”, tackling the Windrush and Grenfell scandals with empathy for the victims and brisk impatience with Whitehall bureaucracy. He marginalised the PM’S pledge to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands. Where Theresa May would have agonised, he handled potential elephant traps – jihadis captured in Syria, the provision of cannabis-based medicines for suffering children – with dexterity and decisiveness.

He has now taken a daring step towards doing something that his predecessors conspicuously failed to do, no doubt constrained by their fear of being called racist. In a letter to the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, he has called for an investigation into the ethnicity of the street grooming gangs that have abused hundreds of white children in British cities. Given that Ms Champion was forced by her party’s leadership to recant her observation that the gangs had raped and exploited white children, he must have known that this intervention would provoke accusations of Islamophobia, and of being an Uncle Tom.

But far from betraying minorities, he may be making the case for ethnic diversity in leadership more effectively than 40 years of race relations machinery. It is precisely because of his background that Javid can make such an assault on political correctness and liberal guilt. Behind the grooming scandal lies an even worse suspicion: that the crimes were committed with the full knowledge of many in the local communities, and that those who should have spoken out stayed silent. Perhaps that explains the vituperation of some prominent Pakistani Muslims, including leading Tories, towards those who refuse to turn a blind eye to the ethnicity of the gangs. The last thing they want is for the community’s dirty washing to be hung out for all to see; and worse, to be called out on their own silent complicity in abuse.

Javid is one of a handful of minority politicians to achieve high office in Europe. I am sure that many of his supporters will snort that his colour and faith (he is a non-practising Muslim) have no bearing on his success. He himself, until recently, has made little of either factor. But it is unlikely that he would have been able to navigate the Windrush scandal with the ease he did had he not been able to show that his empathy with the victims’ hurt was born of his own family’s experience.

Liberal guilt about race and ethnicity is an increasingly significant obstacle to good government; and the cowardice shown by our political classes is costing lives. Nowhere is this plainer than in the pathetic evasions around knife crime. Yesterday, we learnt that London had experienced its 90th fatality in the wave of stabbings that have scarred the city this year. Yet neither the BBC nor most major newspapers had the courage to point out that this is a slaughter almost exclusively executed by black or Asian young men against other black or Asian young men. And without question, because we will not admit that this is a racial crime we will not solve it. To those who mouth antiracist slogans, black lives never matter enough to allow the truth to be told.

Javid won’t be my choice of prime minister. But he has laid down a series of challenges to politics as usual, and not least to his Labour opponents. While they prevaricate and allow anti-semites to run the Labour Party, Javid puts jihadis on death row. Labour’s minority leaders, faced with a massacre of black teenagers, mumble feebly about police shortages as though the odd extra cop might miraculously have been on the scene in time to prevent any of the three murders that have taken place within 10 minutes of my doorstep this year; Javid responds to the call from minority residents to restore intelligence-led use of stop and search.

Javid is making an inescapable case for the value of ethnic diversity in government – but showing that it only works if the minority leader is authentic and courageous, not just there to parrot party lines. What a shame it is only the Tories who seem ready to encourage true diversity – of thought, experience and opinion, rather than parading a front bench of multi-coloured Corbynite glove puppets.

Trevor Phillips is co-author of Windrush: The Irresistible Rise Of Multi-racial Britain