Shamima Begum was born in the United Kingdom. She was a British citizen. That fact ought to have been the beginning and the end of the matter in any country that takes citizenship seriously. Britain, alas, decided to innovate.
Ms Begum’s parents were of Bangladeshi origin. Bangladesh’s constitution provides for citizenship by descent. From this constitutional possibility—note, not an application, not a passport, not recognition by Dhaka—the British Home Secretary of the day, Sajid Javid, executed a neat legal somersault. He revoked her British citizenship while solemnly assuring the world that he had not rendered her stateless, because Bangladesh might consider her a citizen.
It was citizenship by speculation. Nationality by vibes.
Thus, by a stroke of the Home Secretary’s pen, Britain quietly created two classes of British citizens.
The first class: those born in the UK with no plausible entitlement to another nationality. Their citizenship is solid, dependable, and—crucially—irrevocable.
The second class: those also born in the UK, equally British in law and fact, but whose parents came from somewhere with a generous citizenship regime. Their Britishness is provisional, conditional, and revocable at the Home Secretary’s pleasure.
Same birth. Same passport. Radically different security.
This was not some unavoidable consequence of international law. The prohibition on statelessness does not authorise governments to strip citizenship on the basis of hypothetical alternative nationalities. It requires certainty. Bangladesh itself made it abundantly clear that Ms Begum was not a Bangladeshi citizen. Britain shrugged and carried on regardless.
The quiet revolution was complete: British citizenship was no longer a status—it was a licence, subject to recall.
The irony, of course, writes itself.
The Conservative Party under whose watch this constitutional vandalism occurred is now led by Kemi Badenoch. She is British by birth, born in the UK. Her heritage is Nigerian. Nigeria, like Bangladesh, confers citizenship by descent.
Under the logic deployed against Shamima Begum, Ms Badenoch’s British citizenship is revocable. She, too, has an alternative nationality available in theory. She, too, could be pointed towards another constitution and told—by ministerial fiat—that her Britishness has expired.
Should Reform UK Limited ever stumble into power, armed with the same legal precedent and fewer inhibitions, there is nothing in principle preventing them from applying the Begum doctrine politically. Citizenship, after all, has already been reduced to a discretionary privilege. What was done for “national security” can always be done for “public order”, “national interest”, or whatever slogan fits the day.
This is the inevitable consequence of abandoning universality in law. Once citizenship is conditional for some, it is secure for none.
And where were the courts—the supposed last bastion of the ordinary English citizen?
They blinked.
Faced with one of the most far-reaching erosions of citizenship since the Second World War, the judiciary deferred, equivocated, and ultimately allowed executive convenience to trump constitutional principle. The right to belong—to be a citizen without qualification—was left unprotected.
Britain did not merely fail Shamima Begum. It failed itself.
Because a country that can exile its own citizens on the basis of ancestry has not abolished racism; it has bureaucratised it. And a citizenship that can be revoked is not citizenship at all—it is probation.
The tragedy is not that this power may be abused in the future.
The tragedy is that it already has been—and everyone pretended it was normal.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 