There is something profoundly un-British about the current political and legal sojourn being embarked upon by sections of the UK right. Britain, the land of habeas corpus, the rule of law, and stiff-upper-lip proceduralism, is now flirting with the idea that international law is an optional extra—like heated seats in a base-model Ford Fiesta. Nice …
If America’s Founding Fathers could rise from their graves today, they’d probably look around, see Project 2025, and immediately beg to be reinterred. After all, this is exactly why they built a divided government — not to frustrate progress, but to keep one man’s ambitions from becoming a national weather event. Unfortunately, those constitutional levees …
Continue reading "Project 25: The Flood Trump Promised and the Founders Feared"
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it? I have conquered fear and I will do whatever I wish to do as I have death in my back pocket (Aníkúlápo in Yoruba)
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 …
Continue reading "Shamima Begum and the Invention of Conditional Britishness by Lawson Akhigbe"
Political history is often shaped not by titans of ideology, but by opportunists waiting in the wings for their moment. Nigel Farage is the starkest British example of this in a generation. To understand the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, one must first look past the bombastic rhetoric of the “Brexit election” and trace the infection …
Centre for Nigeria Progress 