Scumbag Is Not a Legal Category

Watching Reform and assorted Tory outriders demand the deportation of an Egyptian - British dissident over decade old tweets is a masterclass in performative amnesia, laced with legal illiteracy and a great deal of noise.

We are invited to believe that Britain has suddenly discovered an ancient constitutional principle whereby offensive speech, once rediscovered, triggers immediate banishment. No trial. No threshold. No process. Just exile. Preferably announced on the radio, with an air of righteous certainty and a Union Flag somewhere in the studio.

In the real world, deportation does not work like that. British citizens are not parcels with awkward labels that can be returned to sender. Citizenship is a legal status, not a rolling probation scheme subject to ministerial mood swings. You cannot deport a British citizen at all unless you first strip them of citizenship, and that power exists for terrorism, espionage and serious national security threats. Not for angry tweets written during the Arab Spring.

That small inconvenience has not stopped Chris Philp going on the airwaves and calling the man a “scumbag”. Not once, but three times, as if repetition might substitute for statute. This is not policy. It is incantation. If you say it often enough, perhaps the audience will forget to ask awkward questions about law, process or proportionality.

But then Philp gives the game away. In the same breath, he argues that Britain must leave the European Convention on Human Rights so we can deport people like this. That is not a solution. It is an admission. If deportation were already lawful, there would be no need to invoke Strasbourg at all. You only demand to leave a legal framework when that framework is preventing you from doing what you want.

The problem for Philp is that the ECHR is not even the main obstacle here. The primary barrier is domestic law, written by his own party. He is a British citizen, and not by some administrative whim. He acquired citizenship through his British mother, under long-standing nationality law. That makes his status qualitatively different from the caricature being pushed. This is not a guest whose welcome has worn thin. It is a citizen whose connection to the UK runs through parentage.

Leaving the ECHR tomorrow would not change that by one millimetre. To deport him, the government would first have to strip his citizenship under the British Nationality Act, and that power is constrained by statute, precedent and proportionality. If citizenship acquired through a British parent can be revoked because of historic speech, then citizenship itself becomes conditional. Not just for him, but for anyone whose Britishness is not conveniently uncomplicated.

The ECHR only comes into play later, if citizenship were stripped and removal pursued, mainly because of Article 3 and the very obvious problem of deporting someone to a country whose prisons we have spent years condemning. Philp is pointing at the last fence on the course while pretending the earlier walls do not exist.

Once you start handing out the label “scumbag”, logic becomes awkward anyway. If historic antisemitic speech is enough to place someone beyond the pale, then Philp must logically include Nigel Farage in the same category. Farage has faced repeated criticism over remarks widely regarded as flirting with antisemitic tropes. He denies specific allegations, and he is entitled to do so. But denial does not create a separate moral universe. Either offensive speech disqualifies you, or it does not.

And here politics intrudes. Philp cannot apply that logic consistently because he almost certainly does not want to. A man loudly auditioning for the hard right may well have one eye on Reform’s benches. Calling Farage a scumbag would be career limiting. Much safer to reserve the insult for someone without a safe passport, a party machine, or structural immunity from the powers being demanded.

Philp knows all of this. He has been a Home Office minister. He knows perfectly well that citizenship cannot be revoked on the basis of moral disgust, that historic speech is not a present security threat, and that deportation is not a heckler’s veto administered by talk radio. The insult is doing the work because the legal argument will not.

Reform, meanwhile, have joined in with their usual gusto. Deport him, they cry, without ever explaining how, or on what lawful basis. No statute. No threshold. Just a demand for removal, as though exile were an opinion rather than a legal act.

When defenders of this approach reach for comparison, the only one that ever survives contact with reality is Shamima Begum. But that case only underlines how weak the current argument is. Begum travelled to Syria to join ISIS, a proscribed terrorist organisation. Her citizenship was removed on explicit national security grounds. That decision was controversial, but it rested on involvement with terrorism, not speech.

This case does not. It involves historic posts, predating British citizenship, not criminally prosecuted, not linked to any current extremist activity, and now apologised for. None of that makes the content acceptable. But it does make the leap to exile legally absurd. Law deals in present risk and proportion, not retrospective outrage dredged up for political convenience.

We are also told, with a theatrical shake of the head, that this should all have been picked up when citizenship was granted. It was not, for a very simple reason. Citizenship vetting is not a forensic trawl through a decade of social media looking for ideological impurity. It checks identity, criminal records, security databases and fraud. It is risk led. In 2021, the risk assessment was clear. A political prisoner, not a terrorist. That decision was taken by a Conservative government, with eyes open, applying rules that still exist.

Only now, once the optics have shifted, do we hear calls for retroactive purity tests. If citizenship acquired through a British parent can be revoked whenever a journalist finds something unpleasant in an archive, it ceases to be citizenship and becomes a visitor badge with a temperamental bouncer.

Which brings us back to the insult itself. “Scumbag” is not a legal category. It is a rhetorical solvent, used to dissolve due process and make extreme powers sound reasonable. Once someone is reduced to that, why bother with courts, appeals or rights at all.

If antisemitism is the concern, the correct response is condemnation, challenge and, where thresholds are met, prosecution. What Philp and Reform offer instead is abuse as a substitute for law, and “leave the ECHR” as a substitute for thinking.

Three repetitions do not make it truer. They simply make the absence of a serious argument impossible to ignore.