Of kneejerks and extremes...

"Oh, so now she appreciates the NHS? Right. Got it. Now she wants to give birth in an NHS hospital after two babies died of disease and malnutrition under IS! Is that what it takes to realise how good we have it with the NHS? I mean, really..."

That tirade was pretty much my initial reaction to Shamima Begum wanting to come back to the UK to give birth and then live quietly with her baby, when the news broke. But after my outburst, I took on a more measured view - just as extreme examples make for bad law, kneejerk reactions are not usually the best ones for informing policy or making decisions in complex situations.

Let me be clear - I do not recognise her messed-up attempt at feminism. To be casual about the sight of severed heads in bins because they may have once been attached to the bodies of people who may have attacked Muslim women, while she herself was part of a murderous cult in which girls and women in forced marriages are expected to breed more murderous cultists who will, in turn, rape and murder girls and women is nauseating. The two young women in the photograph above*, Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar, are the women who should be dominating the news - they are Iraqi Yazidis who escaped the sexual violence of IS and are now activists who speak out for the victims of the death cult - they are true feminists.

When Begum first appeared on our TV screens and in The Times, thanks to the heroic journalism of Anthony Loyd, we saw her at her most unfiltered. This is not a young woman who has been media-trained to within an inch of her life, this is a woman who is ignorant of how her vile words were playing out with the British public, and, crucially, this is a woman who has not really evolved from the absurd 15-year-old who left for Syria with two equally absurd schoolfriends in March 2015. There was plenty of East End bravado in her defiant tone where remorse should have been.

But I respectfully disagree with those who simply say she should never be allowed back in the UK and that Sajid Javid did the right thing by removing her citizenship. I understand that viewpoint but I do not share it.

Firstly, Javid has rendered Begum stateless - she is only "eligible" for Bangladeshi citizenship. She is not a Bangladeshi citizen. The Bangladeshi government has, quite rightly, asserted that she is not a citizen of their country. Begum was born and raised here. She is not Bangladesh's problem.  

"Eligibility" for citizenship is not the same as being a citizen. I am a permanent resident of the UK but I am not a British citizen. I am an Australian citizen. I am eligible for British citizenship but I have not gone through the process of becoming a British citizen. If I went to Australia tomorrow and committed a terrible crime there, everyone would expect me to be tried under the Australian system. There would be an outcry if the Australian government simply said: "She's eligible for British citizenship, put her on QF1 to Heathrow and they can deal with her." 

Javid should be made to publish his legal advice on the Begum case.

It sets a terrible precedent for revoking citizenship. Imagine, for example, if Britain had a government with a leader who was openly anti-Israel, who viewed Israel as a terrorist state. And then imagine if this future leader of the country used Britain's anti-terrorism laws to convict someone of inciting terror because, say, they donated to or publicly supported the IDF. If the convicted person happened to be Jewish, using the same rationale that Javid has applied in the past week to Begum, this hypothetical PM and Home Secretary might strip that person of British citizenship and declare that because every Jewish person is eligible for Israeli citizenship, they could be deported to Israel, even if they had never been there. 

It's a chilling precedent. 

If Begum returns to the UK, nobody reasonable would advocate that she simply be allowed to go back to Bethnal Green with her son and the rest of her family. She should be apprehended on arrival. It is not unreasonable for her innocent son to be fostered with a view to being adopted, or for her to have to meet those who lost loved ones in the Manchester attacks so they can describe the impact of that unjustifiable act of terror on their lives and communities. She should face the might of British justice to determine if she is guilty of terror offences committed in this country and punished accordingly. There is almost no doubt that a guilty verdict would involve a custodial sentence. She cannot be led to expect that life will return to exactly how it used to be. Her life will be one of permanent restrictions and surveillance.

Equally, due process must be applied. If due process is thrown out the window, we become no better than any of the states around the world that play fast and loose with this essential component of any civilised legal system. I say that as someone who was tried for adultery without due process in the United Arab Emirates - I was never properly informed that I had been charged, my passport was confiscated without explanation, I signed a document in Arabic without a translation, I was never given the option of legal representation, I was tried via an interpreter in the office of a judge, I was very lucky to be found not guilty and not risk a maximum of six years in prison.

Britain should be better than that. Due process is for everyone, not just people we like.

The other sticking point is that if Begum is not brought home to face justice, she and her son are prime targets for people smugglers. It does not take a massive leap of imagination to realise that she could find her way back to the UK or Europe via people smugglers, if the price was right and there were enough morally bankrupt people willing to fund such a venture. The upshot of that scenario is that, as well as enabling one of the most disgusting trades in the world, Begum could end up back in Europe or the UK and the authorities would have no idea. No reasonable person should view that as an acceptable possibility.

It is a mess that started in Britain and Britain can and should be the one to deal with it. It's facile to say "It's not my problem, I didn't contribute to her radicalisation!". I don't think I personally led Begum to run off and marry a jihadi either, but investigations need to take place in Britain, in her community, at the mosque she frequented before she left, among her friends and family, in the online communications she received as a girl who was almost certainly targeted as being susceptible to radicalisation. Now she is an adult, she needs to own her shit - and Britain needs to understand how this shit happens over here in the first place and stop it.

___________________________

* Here are some links to articles about Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/06/nadia-murad-isis-sex-slave-nobel-peace-prize

https://multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/en/nadia-murad-and-lamiya-aji-bashar-sakharov-prize-laureates-2016_1501_pk

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-sex-slaves-lamiya-aji-bashar-nadia-murad-sinjar-yazidi-genocide-sexual-violence-rape-sakharov-a7445151.html

Photo credit: European Union. Iraqi Yazidi activists Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar receive 2016 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Dave Reeder: A tribute

The bemused look on Dave Reeder's face as he poses alongside a permanently preening Paris Hilton epitomises the man. Entirely unimpressed by celebrity for its own sake, he was far happier when interviewing chefs, discussing food and wine, and laughing uproariously with friends.

It came as a shock to wake up this morning to the news that Dave had died. And it was not as if he died in the last day or so - in this online age, we tend to learn about the passing of friends and family quickly. But, in a final tragic irony for a man who was a copious communicator and prolific writer, it turns out that he died last November and the news only filtered through to many of us in the past 24 hours.

In the last couple of years of Dave's life, he was struggling with health issues, with having to put aside plans to retire to France and instead live in his late parents' house in Devon, and with trying to rationalise his possessions which had filled every room, but he was still Dave. Facebook is deviously good at making people feel like they are not alone - for Dave, it was a place for him to update everyone on the minutiae of his life, as well as his thoughts on the state of the world and his strong opinions on food, as he lived alone in a cold house, where mountains of unsorted boxes were preventing him from bleeding the radiators.

But in between massive overshares about his assorted medical conditions (some of us are still recovering from his "arse tags" revelation...), the essential Dave was still there online, reporting from the house in Chagford or the village pub, defending his pescatarianism, expressing his sorrow at the terror attacks in Paris, despairing at the hell of ready-meals and people who can't cook, flying the flag for atheism, reporting on cheese and wine combinations, getting involved in spirited online debates.

And that was Dave at his best - the bemused raconteur with plenty to say. This morning, I thought back to meeting him for the first time. We were both working in Dubai and, over much wine, we debated the ethics of eating meat, agreeing to always disagree when I said that I had no moral issue with eating animals. 

Then I remembered when I last saw Dave in person - we met at a pub in London a few years back and I turned up with my dress tucked into my tights - a faux pas I only realised when I took my coat off before going to the bar - and walked across the pub with my bum on display. I can still hear him roaring with laughter. I chose the restaurant for dinner poorly - Maggie Jones is one of my favourite places in all of London but it slipped my mind that it is a terrible restaurant for anyone who doesn't eat meat. He pulled a face similar to the one in the photo with Paris Hilton as he perused the menu for a dish that would not offend his sensibilities, finally ordering the standard option offered by a chef who can't be arsed with vegetarians, a beetroot and goat's cheese tart. I, meanwhile, had the venison and he rolled his eyes and laughed loudly again. It is a restaurant where they charge for fine French wine by the inch from jeroboams - this amused him and all was well with the world again.

And since then, we communicated via Facebook. Quite a few of us became increasingly worried about him as he was slowly swallowed whole by boxes that needed to be unpacked, and by a collection of vintage horror books and magazines that he wanted to catalogue for sale to shore up his retirement fund. Tough love Facebook interventions were held, urging him to make a start, little by little, on the boxes, to accept the local offers of help, sharing links to vintage book dealers in the county who might be able to value his collection and maybe take the tomes off his hands. Dave became a frustrating, frustrated version of himself as he was increasingly overwhelmed by the house, his health issues and his disappointment about not being able to easily retire to his beloved France.

He last posted on Facebook on November 23 and it was a microcosm of his life towards the end - it appears that he had started cooking the formerly derided ready-meals instead of making dishes from scratch and sharing his tips on his page, but he was still dripping with his trademark sardonic tone: "Tesco is really losing the plot. A search for Thai ready-meals throws up ''Tesco Mushroom Stroganoff With Wild Rice' as its top suggestion. Such a well-known Thai dish..."

His birthday was on February 7. We all posted the obligatory Facebook birthday greetings, inquired about his wellbeing and wondered why he had been so uncharacteristically quiet. But it was a birthday he never quite got around to, all of us blissfully unaware that he had not been with us for a while. The sense that you are not alone with Facebook is merely illusory. A friend and I had talked about driving a van down to Chagford, turning up on his doorstep and blitzing the boxes. Maybe we should have set aside a weekend to do just that. Maybe we all could have done more. We will never quite know. 

The loose ends death almost always leave behind remain unbearably frayed, a ragged edge with which we must make peace.

What we do know is that a funny, smart, sometimes infuriating presence has gone from our lives. But he leaves behind a great legacy as a journalist and editor, as a mentor to many a young hack, as a staunch defender of print journalism. He would send me copies of the last magazine he edited before he retired, asking for my opinion on the contents and covers - for all his eagerness to be the first to share his views on everything from Bram Stoker to Brexit, Dave still sought out the honest opinions of people he respected. It was a privilege to be respected by Dave.

Despite living the latter years of his life largely online, Dave was always an entertaining presence in the real world. We should remember him with joy, with wine, and with opinionated but friendly debates, ideally over the dinner table with fine cheese to finish.

Periods are still bloody hard

Metro ran a comment piece on its website about period poverty and the role the government can play in helping end this monthly nightmare, particularly for disadvantaged teenage girls.  It was written by the founders of the excellent Red Box Project, a UK-wide scheme to provide sanitary products in schools. Inevitably, when the story was posted to the newspaper's Facebook page, plenty of people felt the need to say there is no such thing as period poverty, largely because you can buy pads and tampons for a quid at Poundland and every young person has a mobile phone - the usual asinine responses to a complex issue...  

Tragically, one of the commentators on the newspaper's Facebook page said she had to use toilet paper as sanitary protection when she was growing up and therefore couldn't see why poor teenagers today couldn't do the same thing. Race-to-the-bottom comments like this are frustratingly common, where people boast of their suffering and see no reason to prevent others from suffering, even if such suffering could easily cause infection and even if there are solutions to prevent the suffering from continuing.

It is indeed true that sanitary products are available for £1 at Poundland but there are households where every pound spent has to be carefully considered. If there is an alternative to sanitary protection, such as loo paper filched from schools or public toilets or even socks, a poor family may forego buying £1 boxes of pads and tampons for the girls and women and spend that pound on food instead. If you are donating to your local food bank, please consider adding pads or tampons to the pile of tinned food and pot noodles.

And if you have the awful misfortune to be menstruating and homeless, your options for a hygienic and comfortable period are even more limited.

It is not an issue that many people like to discuss but if the hideous realities of periods for the poor are not confronted, girls and women will continue to suffer here in the UK and other developed countries, just as surely as they suffer in cultures where menstruation is seen as unclean and periods mean monthly banishment and disenfranchisement of girls and women as they miss out on educational and employment opportunities. 

Plan UK introduced the period emoji (see at the top of this page) to encourage more open discussion about menstruation - obviously an emoji won't solve everything but it's a start. The mere fact that plenty of ignorant people responded to the simple drop of blood with revulsion illustrated why it's needed in the first place.

Every discussion about period poverty inevitably results in someone, usually well-meaning but privileged, demanding we all use moon-cups. The moon-cup is a great idea - it is an eco-friendly, reusable means of dealing with periods. However, it is still out of reach for many people with a starting price of £21.99. And it needs to be used in hygienic conditions - this is not always possible for poor people and it can be especially impractical for the homeless. We are not yet at a place where girls and women are frequently seen rinsing out their moon-cups in public bathrooms and school toilets - and there are plenty of grotesque public and school conveniences out there where it is not hygienic to rinse a moon-cup properly. And some girls and women just don't like them or have trouble using them - this is not a character defect, it's just the way it is.

Likewise, reusable fabric sanitary pads are a great, eco-friendly idea but they are not practical for anyone who struggles to access good laundry facilities.

So we need to talk about solutions to ensure everyone has a hygienic and comfortable period. After all, periods are the one biological fact of life that affects every girl and woman. We won't all experience pregnancy or childbirth or miscarriage or endometriosis or gynaecological cancer but menstruation cannot be avoided if you have ovaries and a uterus. 

Menstruation is the one biological event that has an impact on our lives across the entire time we are fertile. It comes with emotional challenges and joys as well as physical challenges.

The first period can be a time of excitement for those who can't wait to grow up, it can be terrifying or confusing for those who experience menarche at an early age, it can be a relief when it finally happens to a late bloomer or it can be seen as an inconvenience, something that needs to be dealt with, its impact on everyday life minimised. Indeed, it was only last month that mass outrage erupted when the UK Faculty of Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare of the Royal Collage of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists released guidelines stating that there is no need to have the pretend period you get when you take the sugar pills in your contraceptive pill packet. Cue masses of furious women thinking about the money they have spent on sanitary protection over the years, the holidays ruined, the sexual encounters messed up, the time lost from work or school with cramps, the excuses they had to make for not going swimming and so on, all of which could have been avoided if myths about needing to take the sugar pills hadn't been peddled by everyone from their mothers to their doctors.

As we get older, our periods continue to govern our lives - there is the relief when a period arrives after an unwanted pregnancy scare, the sadness of a period arriving when one is hoping to be pregnant, the realisation when a period arrives in March that one will probably not have a baby that year, the sheer joy when a period doesn't come and a pregnancy, either planned or a happy surprise, is happening, and the relief or sadness when one is perimenopausal and the period years are coming to an end. 

Periods are a big deal and it can be hard to explain this to anyone who has never had a period. Menstruation is something that simultaneously demands that those experiencing it can have privacy and good sanitation - and that those experiencing it can talk about it without being howled down, accused of being hysterical (a word which has its origins in our wombs being the source of ungovernable emotions), or told to simply toughen up because we are no longer in the Tudor era of rags and the belief that periods were a punishment from God because of Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden is no longer widely held in the UK.   

In 2016, 19-year-old Ryan Williams, a self-proclaimed "meninist", embarrassed himself by posting on social media that tampons were a luxury, that taxes on sanitary products should not be abolished and that "if you can't control your bladder then that's not the taxpayers' problem" - when people aren't even aware that period blood and urine orginate from different places and out of different orifices, we really do need to talk. It's not just men who need educating either. I remember telling a female friend at university - we were both 20 at the time - that you don't need to remove a tampon in order to do a wee and this was a revelation for her.  

So, instead of being revulsed by a period emoji or rushing to be the first to say that period poverty is not real, how about being constructive instead? How about we discuss ideas to ensure that hygienic, comfortable periods are a right, not a privilege? How about we make sure it is widely known that skipping periods while on the pill is not harmful? How about every pupil who receives sex education at school knows how periods work so we don't have another generation of people thinking we simply piss out our periods at will? How about we don't rest until this basic dignity and comfort is afforded to every girl and woman on the planet? 

If we fail to do this, we really are no better than those who punish menstruation through banishment. Hiding menstruation away is misogyny.