To think that Kier Starmer shouldn't be welcoming extremists into Britain?

[Twiglets1]

Reported in The Telegraph today that Sir Keir Starmer has welcomed an alleged Islamist extremist, who labelled British people “dogs and monkeys” and called for Zionists to be killed, into the UK.

The Prime Minister said he was “delighted” that Alaa Abd el-Fattah had arrived from Egypt on Friday evening after a travel ban imposed by Cairo was lifted following lobbying by ministers.

Mr Abd el-Fattah, an activist with dual British-Egyptian citizenship, previously said that it was heroic to kill Zionists “including civilians”. He urged Londoners to burn Downing Street, told his supporters to kill police and said he hated white people.

Ministers are facing calls to revoke his British citizenship, which he was granted in 2021 while imprisoned in Egypt, where campaigners described him as a “prisoner of conscience”.

Sir Keir’s tweet yesterday said how “delighted” he was that Alaa Abd El-Fattah is back in this country. Does that seem a reasonable stance to take for someone who has claimed at the same time to be committed to "eradicating antisemitism in the UK"?

That would be the sensible and safest thing to do, so it's something that won't be done.

Tell me more.

It's the rise of graduate hierarchy that's politicising the police.
Apparently the same goes for the Civil Service (according to a friend who has recently retired from the CS)

Yaxley Lennon is a British citizen. We can’t deport him. We can deport this man.

HTH

Alaa Abd el-Fattah is also a British citizen. We can’t deport him either. HTH.

More's the pity.

The accelerated graduate promotion schemes encourage applications from graduates instead of grass roots rank and file. These are normally the ambitious recruits, whose main interest is to serve their own careers not the public. Sprinkle that with some woke style management and we get less of the Regan and Carter policing and more of a namby party police service instead of force. Put these idealists in high ranking positions and you get the two tier policing effect, which does exist, no matter how hard it's denied.

Who are Regan and Carter?

I don't see any implications of the cases on each other. Notwithstanding the current appeal to the ECHR, the Begum case appears to be a perfectly ordinary one of citizenship being removed because the security services have evidence (which the courts have seen but which has not been made publicly available) that she is a continuing threat to national security, contrary to the protestations of her supporters.

I believe el-Fattah still has Egyptian citizenship so the Home Secretary (Shabana Mahmood) can remove his UK citizenship if she is satisfied that it is conducive to the public good. It is not clear that he is a threat to the UK's national security, but the views he expressed are repugnant. I am not qualified to judge whether they are sufficient to justify removing his UK citizenship. I am, however, of the view that it should not have been granted in the first place. From the information we have, it seems likely that civil servants were aware of his social media activity and chose not to alert politicians.

The Sweeney.

Where did you read / see that last line @prh47bridge?

So put together the Home Office, Civil Service and the Police Service putting wokeism at the top of their agenda and this is the result. Led by successive governments who have their own reasons for allowing situations such as this one to exist.

@Blossomtoes Regan and Carter are from the Sweeney. The type of policing that many long since retired coppers could relate to. Those said retirees are amongst the critics of Graduate promotion schemes.

From the information we have, it seems likely that civil servants were aware of his social media activity and chose not to alert politicians

No, that is the narrative Badenoch is pushing, for obvious reasons.

The Sweeney? A TV series that hasn’t been made for 59 years? Someone’s having a laugh, surely?

Yes I thought you were being disingenuous. No laughs from me. Crime is still crime.

I wasn’t being disingenuous. It was an entirely genuine question. I had to google it once I’d been told what the reference was. My first thought was previous US presidents!

😆 🤣 I apologise Blossom.

We have both Labour and Conservative politicians saying they were not aware of his social media posts. It appears that the Home Office and Foreign Office were aware, so either all these politicians are lying or the civil service chose to keep the information from ministers. Given that the Foreign Office was working to secure his release as a political prisoner, this is exactly the kind of inconvenient information the civil service tends to hide from ministers.

I found this in Hansard from 2023. It is really hard to believe that the UK government offered all this assistance but never once bothered to do any background checks.

There is the possibility that civil servants did inform successive Home Secretaries who for reasons of their own disregarded the info. In any case as a political activist he must have been on the MI5/MI6 radar. So WHY was this all hidden until now?

You have to wonder if it's the tail wagging the dog. I've often wondered just how much political influence the civil service has.

The Foreign Office has historically been pro Arab since the days of Lawrence of Arabia, I believe.

It's going to be a blame game. In the meantime, this extremist will carry on his plotting. Just who actually is looking after the interests of the British public?

Surely it's got nothing to do with all that lucrative money the Arabs bring?

Why would civil servants hide information from Ministers? You think that Ministers and their PSs and Spads just blithely accept everything they're told and never ask for more information or clarification? Because that is not the way Whitehall works. Ministers and their teams can be as annoying as hell with their endless bloody questions.