I see the finger pulling at your collar, your adam’s apple now impossibly huge in your gulping throat. I see the single bead of sweat running down your forehead, your eyes flickering nervously across the headlines, desperate from some words of encouragement to justify your recent decisions. You’ll get them, Sajid Javid. If there’s one thing we can rely on it’s the ability of the newspapers to strip all nuance from a story, flaying away the empathy until there’s nothing left but the hysterical bones. Whether or not you deserve the relief is another matter entirely.
It’s been a riot for you, this new job, hasn’t it? You’ve grabbed the opportunity by the balls. You’ve proven once and for all and beyond any shadow of a doubt that a person of colour (see Amber? It’s not that hard) is just as capable of being a wilfully callous monstrosity when helming the Home Office on behalf of the Tories. The Windrush scandal is now nothing but a distant memory unless you’re one of the black people it continues to affect, but you’re Home Secretary so they don’t count. As a story, it’s been deported quietly under the cover of the enormous shitstorm blowing out of a refugee camp in Syria.
It was a tough call, Sajid Javid, and you didn’t hesitate for one second before taking the coward’s way out.
Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately, before the comments section storms into my china shop bellowing its furious confusion like a bull with a sledgehammer lodged halfway in its anus. ISIS are a set of monstrous, backwards fucking lunatics who have demonstrated a willingness to commit savagery that goes beyond comprehension. I don’t think we should be hosting cake sales and ticker-tape parades for the fucking idiots who rushed over there for the rape and murder buffet. They have no love for the rule of law, basic decency or human rights. There’s just the tricky little conundrum that all three of those things are supposed to mean something to us.
Make no mistake, Shamima Begum is not blameless and she won’t be welcomed back and winning Dancing on Ice anytime soon. She is now an adult and has clearly learned even less from her several gap years than the son of an investment banker from St Albans who ‘finds himself’ in Thailand ever does. What she is not, however, is a cartoon villain so transparently and irredeemably evil that her life is beyond any shade of grey. She was fifteen when she left the UK, a child inevitably groomed and radicalised by Islamists who exploited her vulnerability. She is a victim of child sex trafficking and abuse, her adult mind now shaped in part by several years living under the direct consequences of that victimhood. Victims are rarely neat and tidy sob stories; she’s also apparently unrepentant and still supportive of the caliphate. How a kid living in Britain can end up embracing such horrific and violent hatred is a question we should be desperate to ask her.
There are loads of questions worth asking. Instead of asking them, though? Instead we reacted exactly how ISIS have always tried to make us react – out of terror, caving in to our baser instincts. The strength of public feeling against those who would see us all murdered in the street is understandably pretty fucking extreme. But when our leaders choose to be cowards and bow to populist sentiment, our rights and freedoms go out of the window, and they set us on a greasy slope that leads us nowhere good. A child born out of the country is now a second-class citizen. An innocent baby dies in squalor and pain and our response becomes “we have no sympathy,” as consumed as we are by fury that our own decency withers in its furnace.
What does it make us when we refuse all accountability for one of our own when they commit atrocities? ISIS have killed more Syrians and Iraqis than anyone else, and we have no right to dump our terrorists, if that’s what they are proven to be, on the countries they’ve ravaged. What does it make of our due process, our democracy, based as it is on our supposedly inalienable rights, if we strip those rights from our own just because we deem it politically convenient? And what do we lose if we choose to walk away, rather than investigate, learn from and punish those who turn against us so completely?
It makes us cowards, Sajid Javid. If we choose to lead with fear we have been effectively terrorised, which is what ISIS always wanted. In our terror, we do nothing, and as we lay paralysed by fear a baby dies. A baby that we have decided – through our inaction and our refusal to follow our own laws – is not one of our own, is not our problem, is not our responsibility.
Shamima Begum should face the consequences of her own terrible decisions. That’s an indisputable fact and one that should not be shied away from.
But if we choose to celebrate the death of a child, to wash our hands of it, to throw the rights he shared with all of us down with him in his shallow grave?
Then we’ll face the consequences of yours, Sajid Javid.
I see you, Sajid Javid. I fucking see you.
