THERE’S been a lot of talk and bluster lately about the UK’s national security interests. This past week we’ve witnessed the furore over Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to revoke British citizenship from Daesh supporter Shamima Begum.
Then there was the Foreign Affairs Select Committee warning that the UK Government is undermining national security by delaying the introduction of publicly available share ownership registers in Britain’s major tax havens like the British Virgin Islands.
For those readers needing a reminder of why this is significant, it’s that these public registers are seen as critical by campaigners for cracking down on corruption, money laundering and tax evasion.
As if these were not issues enough for concern, a new Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report highlighted how economic uncertainties in a post-Brexit Britain could leave the country vulnerable to Chinese interference, adding yet another security threat to those already highlighted over any departure from the European fold.
READ MORE: Home Office strip Shamima Begum of British citizenship
Why does all this matter? Well to begin with it flies in the face of the UK Government’s tiresome empty political rhetoric of putting the UK’s interests first.
Drill down into each of these aforementioned issues and what you see at work is yet more evidence – if it were needed – that a combination of personal or party political incompetency and shameless opportunism is at work here.
Not for a moment do I buy into Javid’s insistence that his decision over Begum has to do with national security and protecting the public.
Like so many within the Tory government’s ranks, this is about Javid, his naked ambition and desire to be seen as the tough guy in the hope it will ease his passage up the political ladder to the lofty heights he so obviously has set his eyes on.
Nothing new there of course – think of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the pattern is clear.
Why else would Javid’s decision over the Begum case totally fly in the face of indications from secretary of state David Gauke, that making the girl stateless is contrary to international law and couldn’t happen?
Why else too would the Home Secretary’s assessment be so at odds with the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)?
The service’s chief Alex Younger only last week, while attending the Munich Security Conference, made quite clear that Begum had the right to return to the UK.
As Younger also pointed out, Daesh’s threat is likely to “morph and spread” and its threat is “definitely not done”. All the more reason, then, to take the likes of Begum and other UK nationals associated with Daesh in Syria and Iraq out of circulation within the jihadi cause. Who knows – some valuable intelligence might even be gleaned in the process?
But no, not according to Javid, whose idea of keeping our national security interests to the fore is to let Begum and other Daesh members and supporters, including male combatants, remain within the fluid, unpredictable and volatile political landscape of Syria.
Can Javid really not see the risk of them again easily vanishing off the radar back into circulation before coming back to bite us with acts of terrorism?
Such is the dysfunctional nature of Westminster politics right now and those within the Tory government’s ranks, that any claim to be putting national interests first is a sham.
As Matt Kelly, the editor of the New European newspaper, so rightly asked this week: “If it was a matter of principle, why did Javid wait until Begum’s face was splashed all over the front of newspapers? He knew she was out there and what she was doing. He’s known since 2015.”
READ MORE: Here is what the Quran really tells us about return of ‘ISIS bride’ Shamima Begum
It’s much more likely the Home Secretary’s decision was simply aimed at generating the kind of headlines in newspapers whose support he will need in his bid to be Prime Minister.
And when it comes down to the question of national security, whose assessment anyway would most of us believe to be more accurate: a nakedly ambitious political freeloader or those intelligence chiefs at the sharp end of fighting terrorism and keeping the public safe?
Only last month as Theresa May’s government continued to hurtle headlong into the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, two men who served at the very top of the British security establishment were warning that national security would take years to rebuild in the event of Britain leaving the EU.
Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, and Lord Peter Ricketts, the former national security adviser, know a thing or two about trying to keep the country safe from terrorism.
“Any form of Brexit makes our security more difficult to manage ... the harder the Brexit, the greater the damage,” said Sawers. “We’ve been the only country in the world that has been a member of Nato, a member of the EU and a member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance,” he pointed out.
Ricketts, meanwhile, said that a no-deal Brexit would create “a really serious and immediate problem for British national security”.
Even a deal over Brexit like that proposed by May had the old spooks worried, leading another former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, to write to the Conservative Party chairman warning against backing the Prime Minister’s deal.
“The first duty of the state, above trade, is the security of its citizens. The withdrawal agreement abrogates this fundamental contract,” Dearlove stressed in making his case.
In other words, what keeps in check threats to national security and us safe is being a member of things like the EU, a member of Europol and of the European Arrest Warrant and the Schengen Information System.
It’s this kind of collective working and sharing of intelligence that serves the real interests of national security, not revoking the citizenship of some 19-year-old girl no matter how unpalatable her involvement with Daesh might be.
Sajid Javid’s decision is but another sign of a defective UK Government and the circus that is Westminster right now.
His move has nothing to do with keeping us safe. It has, however, everything to do with yet another self-serving Tory politician’s climb up the greasy pole.
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