No, Don't Take Away Alaa Abd el-Fattah's Citizenship

by Simon Robinson, 02 Jan 2026

Immigration is in the news again, but this time it’s about one man: Alaa Abd el-Fattah. Abd el-Fattah has spent most of the last ten years, so far as we can tell, as a political prisoner in Egypt on what appear to be largely trumped-up charges.

He has gained British citizenship, not through any special pleading or political favour, but because his mother is British and he was therefore eligible for British citizenship under the law in force at the time. That is hardly an unusual or unreasonable position. If you are British, it is generally expected that your children will also be British.

Those connections with the UK led the British government to take a particular interest in his case, with extensive lobbying for his release from prison including, reportedly, at least three calls by Prime Minister Keir Starmer to Egyptian officials. That pressure was ultimately successful, and Abd el-Fattah arrived in the UK on Boxing Day 2025.

Cue almost immediate controversy when a number of objectionable social-media posts he had written around 10–15 years ago then came to light.

Unsurprisingly, figures from the Conservatives and Reform moved quickly to call for his British citizenship to be revoked. The Labour government has refused to do so, although they appear to be defending that decision not from any moral principles but primarily because the legal threshold for deprivation of citizenship is high, and historic social-media posts from more than a decade ago do not cut it.

But there is a moral principle here: In a decent, liberal, society, you don’t go around ruining peoples’ lives purely on account of them having said something bad 15 years ago which they now regret. I’ve found it dispiriting is how few politicians have been willing to defend that principle.

So what were these objectionable posts? They are not easy to track down, as for obvious reasons, many have been deleted. But according to The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/29/what-did-alaa-abd-el-fattah-say-past-social-media-posts-why-backlash):

“He [Abd el-Fattah] described the killing of Zionists as heroic, adding ‘we need to kill more of them’. In 2011 he is accused of saying police ‘don’t have rights, we should just kill them all’. He also once described British people as dogs and monkeys.

Screenshots posted online appear to show that on 8 August 2011, during the London riots, he posted: ‘Go burn the city or downing street or hunt police u fools.’ A year later he appeared to post: ‘By the way I’m a racist, I don’t like white people so piss off.’”

Let’s be clear: those are truly awful posts. Liberalism does not require us to minimise or excuse speech that is racist or that advocates violence. If someone in the UK were to write those things today, I would expect, and hope, that they would be investigated with a view to charges for incitement to violence or racial hatred. Likewise, if someone were applying today for a visa to enter the UK and had recently written those posts, that would be strong grounds for refusing the application.

But he did not write them today. As far as we can tell, he wrote them nearly fifteen years ago. He has also apologised for them. His apology (https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2005455547110199765?lang=en) includes the following:

“Looking at the tweets now – the ones that were not completely twisted out of their meaning – I do understand how shocking and hurtful they are, and for that I unequivocally apologise. They were mostly expressions of a young man’s anger and frustrations in a time of regional crises (the wars on Iraq, on Lebanon and Gaza), and the rise of police brutality against Egyptian youth. I particularly regret some that were written as part of online insult battles with the total disregard for how they read to other people. I should have known better.”

That looks to me like a full and serious apology. Making such a public apology is not the behaviour of a terrorist or of someone still consumed by hatred. It looks like the behaviour of someone who said deeply wrong things when he was younger, and who has since reflected and recognised his mistakes. And do we not allow people to have made mistakes and learned from them? A liberal society is surely one that believes people can learn, grow, and change.

Set against those historic tweets is the fact that, after years as a political prisoner, Abd el-Fattah is now reunited with his family in the UK. His mother lives here, as does his 14-year-old son and his ex-wife, the child’s mother. Calls to strip his citizenship would mean separating him from his mother and 14-year-old child, despite his lawful citizenship and established family life in the UK, and returning him to a country that persecuted him and continues to imprison and torture people whose only real crime is wanting to live freely.

Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage appear willing to impose life-altering consequences, potentially breaking up a recently-reunited family, over social-media posts written fifteen years ago and since regretted. Would you believe these are the very same parties that claim to champion “the family”! I’d suggest Badenoch and Farage should be answering a simple question: do we really want to live in a society where everything we said in the heat of the moment fifteen years ago, perhaps when we were younger and angrier, can be dredged up and used by politicians to tear our lives apart?

What of the Liberal Democrats’ response? On the whole, it has been muted. Most Lib Dem MPs seem to have avoided commenting publicly on the controversy at all. That restraint is much better than joining a populist bandwagon, but it also feels to me like a missed opportunity. This is precisely the kind of issue where a liberal party should be willing to say something principled, even if it is briefly unpopular.

If liberalism means anything in this context, it is surely that people are judged by who they are now, not frozen forever by their worst moments. It would be nice if Liberal Democrats could say that clearly and proudly.