UK strips citizenship from teenager who joined Islamic State in Syria

Staff reporter(wp/reuters):::
Britain stripped a teenager who travelled to join Islamic State of her citizenship on security grounds, triggering a row over the ramifications of leaving a 19-year-old mother with a jihadist fighter’s child to fend for herself in a war zone.

The fate of Shamima Begum, who was found in a detention camp in Syria last week, has illustrated the ethical, legal and security conundrum that governments face when dealing with the families of militants who swore to destroy the West.

With Islamic State depleted and Kurdish-led militia poised to seize the group’s last holdout in eastern Syria, Western capitals are trying to work out what to do with battle-hardened foreign jihadist fighters, and their wives and children.

Begum, who gave birth to a son at the weekend, prompted a public backlash in Britain by appearing unrepentant about seeing severed heads and even claiming the 2017 Manchester suicide attack - that killed 22 people - was justified.

She had pleaded to be repatriated back to her family in London and said that she was not a threat.

But ITV News published a Feb. 19 letter from the interior ministry to her mother that said Home Secretary Sajid Javid had taken the decision to deprive Begum of her British citizenship.

“In light of the circumstances of your daughter, the notice of the Home Secretary’s decision has been served of file today, and the order removing her British citizenship has subsequently been made,” the letter said.

The letter asked Begum’s mother to inform her daughter of the decision and set out the appeal process.

When asked about the decision, a spokesman said Javid’s priority was “the safety and security of Britain and the people who live here”.

Begum was one of three outwardly studious schoolgirls who slipped away from their lives in London’s Bethnal Green area in February 2015 to fly to Turkey and then over the border into the cauldron of the Syrian civil war.

LONDON TO SYRIA

Islamic State propaganda videos enticed her to swap London for Raqqa, a step she still says she does not regret. She fled the self-styled caliphate because she wanted to give birth away from the fighting.

“When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam,” she told The Times which first discovered her in the camp in Syria.

She was equally harsh when describing the videos she had seen of the beheaded Western hostages, The Times said.

Begum has named her newborn, Jerah, in accordance with the wishes of her jihadist husband, Yago Riedijk, a Dutch convert from Arnhem. He was tortured on suspicion of spying by Islamic State but later released.

Another son, also called Jerah, died at eight months old. A daughter, Sarayah, also died aged one year and nine months, The Times said.

Her family’s lawyer said he could seek to challenge the British government’s decision to deprive her of citizenship.

“We are considering all legal avenues to challenge this decision,” said lawyer, Tasnime Akunjee.

British law does allow the interior minister to deprive a person of British citizenship when conducive to the public good, though such decisions should not render the person stateless if they were born as British citizens.

Police in Bangladesh said they were checking whether Begum was a Bangladeshi citizen, and Britain’s opposition Labour Party said the government’s decision was wrong.

“If the government is proposing to make Shamima Begum stateless it is not just a breach of international human rights law but is a failure to meet our security obligations to the international community,” Diane Abbott, Labour spokeswoman on home issues.

Ken Clarke, a former Conservative minister, said he was surprised that Javid’s lawyers had given him such advice.

“What you can’t do is leave them in a camp in Syria being even more radicalised... until they disperse themselves through the world and make their way back here,” he said.

“I think the Germans, the French and ourselves have got to work out how to deal with this difficult and, I accept, dangerous problem,” he said.

Lloyds Bank brushes off Brexit fears with £4 billion investor payout

Banking&Finance reporter(wp/reuters):::

Britain’s biggest mortgage lender posted a 24 percent rise in net profits to 4.4 billion pounds, below expectations of 4.6 billion pounds, according to a company-provided average of analyst forecasts.

It pledged to pay a 3.21 pence per share total dividend, up 5 percent, and unveiled a 1.75 billion pound share buyback. That would still leave the bank’s core capital ratio — a key measure of financial strength — at 13.9 percent.

The bank’s bumper payout and confident tone on the economy struck a contrast with rivals Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, which in the last week both reported taking provisions against Brexit amid concerns bad loans could rise.

Lloyds shares rose 2.7 percent, outperforming a 1 percent rise in the FTSE 350 banks index.

Britain’s largest domestic bank resisted any suggestion of complacency in its outlook for the economy, saying it recognised uncertainties existed.

Chief Executive António Horta Osório said he was betting on a last minute accord between British Prime Minister Theresa May and the EU on the future trading relationship between Britain and the bloc.

“We are planning for a deal and a smooth Brexit transition that should lead the economy to grow at around the same pace you have now of about 1-1.5 percent,” the Portuguese CEO told reporters.

“Of course other scenarios can play out ... Irrespective of that our business model is the right one and it is true that we face the future with confidence, otherwise we would not be ramping up our investment in this business.”

EXPANSION PLANS

The bank said it had spent 1 billion pounds on digitising its business and bulking up its wealth management operations, as it seeks to expand into the financial planning and retirement market via a joint venture with Schroders.

Lloyds is seen as hugely exposed to any downturn through its billions of pounds of lending to British consumers and businesses.

In recent weeks the Bank of England has warned Britain faces its weakest economic growth in a decade, with a one in four chance of a recession this year.

Despite Lloyds’ bullish tone on the economy, impairments for the year increased by 18 percent to 937 million pounds as the bank integrated the MBNA credit card portfolio it bought from Bank of America in 2017.

Lloyds also set aside a further 200 million pounds to compensate customers missold payment protection insurance, taking its total provision to 750 million pounds in 2018.

Horta-Osorio’s total pay package for the year slipped to 6.3 million pounds from 6.4 million pounds the previous year, but remains significantly higher than his counterparts at RBS and HSBC.

The bank’s shares remain at a similar level to when he took over the reins in January 2011, despite its profits rising steadily each year since, a factor which analysts attributed to investors concerns about Britain’s uncertain outlook.

Graphic: Lloyds shares under CEO Horta-Osorio - tmsnrt.rs/2U0FxvO

“Lloyds is indelibly plugged into the UK economy, and the shadow cast by Brexit means the bank’s shares are left out in the cold. If there’s a positive resolution to the current political uncertainty, we would expect the shares to rally,” said Laith Khalaf, senior analyst at investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown.

Three Conservatives quit party in protest at "disastrous Brexit"

political reporter(wp/reuters):::
Three lawmakers from Britain’s governing Conservatives quit over the government’s “disastrous handling of Brexit” on Wednesday, in a blow to Prime Minister Theresa May’s attempts to unite her party around plans to leave the European Union.

The lawmakers, who support a second EU referendum and have long said May’s Brexit strategy is being led by Conservative eurosceptics, said they would join a new independent group in parliament set up by seven former opposition Labour politicians.

The resignations put May in an even weaker position in parliament, where her Brexit deal was crushed by lawmakers last month when both eurosceptics and EU supporters voted against an agreement they say offers the worst of all worlds.

While the three were almost certain to vote against any deal, the hardening of their positions undermines May’s negotiating position in Brussels, where she heads later to try to secure an opening for further work on revising the agreement.

With only 37 days until Britain leaves the EU, its biggest foreign and trade policy shift in more than 40 years, divisions over Brexit are redrawing the political landscape. The resignations threaten a decades-old two-party system.

“The final straw for us has been this government’s disastrous handling of Brexit,” the three lawmakers, Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston, said in a letter to May.

Soubry later told a news conference that the Conservative Party had been taken over by right-wing, pro-Brexit lawmakers.

“The truth is, the battle is over and the other side has won. The right-wing, the hard-line anti-EU awkward squad that have destroyed every (Conservative) leader for the last 40 years are now running the ... party from top to toe,” she said.

May said she was saddened by the decision and that Britain’s membership of the EU “has been a source of disagreement both in our party and in our country for a long time”.

“But by ... implementing the decision of the British people we are doing the right thing for our country,” she said, referring to the 2016 referendum in which Britons voted by a margin of 52-48 percent in favour of leaving the EU.

Asked what May would say to others considering resigning, her spokesman said: “She would, as she always has, ask for the support of her colleagues in delivering (Brexit)”.

INDEPENDENT GROUP

The three sat in parliament on Wednesday with a new grouping which broke away from the Labour Party earlier this week over increasing frustration with their leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit strategy and a row over anti-Semitism.

Another former Labour lawmaker joined their ranks late on Tuesday, and several politicians from both the main opposition party and Conservatives said they expected more to follow from both sides of parliament.

What unites most of the group of 11 is a desire to see a second referendum on any deal May comes back with, now that the terms of Brexit are known in detail - something the prime minister has ruled out.

For May’s Brexit plan, the resignations are yet another knock to more than two years of talks to leave the EU, which have been punctuated by defeats in parliament, rows over policy and a confidence vote, which she ultimately won.

Britain’s 2016 EU referendum has split not only British towns and villages but also parliament, with both Conservative and Labour leaders struggling to keep their parties united.

May has faced a difficult balancing act. Eurosceptic members of her party want a clean break with the bloc, pro-EU lawmakers argue for the closest possible ties, while many in the middle are increasing frustrated over the lack of movement.

Those who have resigned have long accused May of leaning too far towards Brexit supporters, sticking to red lines which they, and many in Labour, say have made a comprehensive deal all but impossible to negotiate.

But May will head to Brussels hoping that her team will get the green light to start more technical negotiations on how to satisfy the concerns of mostly Brexit supporters over the so-called Northern Irish backstop arrangement.

The “backstop”, an insurance policy to avoid a hard border between the British province of Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland if London and Brussels fail to agree a deal on future ties, is the main point of contention in talks with Brussels.

British officials are hoping they can secure the kind of legal assurances that the backstop cannot trap Britain in the EU’s sphere to persuade lawmakers to back a revised deal.

But May’s argument she can command a majority in parliament if the EU hands her such assurances is getting weaker. A government defeat last week showed the eurosceptics’ muscle.

One pro-Brexit Conservative lawmaker, Andrew Bridgen, said: “I would find it very difficult to accept a legal document from the same (party) lawyer whose definitive advice four weeks ago was that we could be trapped in the backstop in perpetuity.”