Strayside Sunday is our weekly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party.

One of the many things that propelled Tony Blair to Number 10 Downing Street in 1997 was his assertion that the relationship between the individual and their state is one in which the rights citizens receive come at a cost. This is financial (in the form of taxes) and behavioural, (in the form of individual responsibilities). The then Prime Minister’s thinking was much influenced by the American sociologist Amitai Etzioni and his writings on communitarianism. Communitarianism promotes the roll of community and communal good in social and political life and institutions. It serves as a welcome antidote to the liberty and individual rights obsessed purveyors of modern liberalism.

This week, the United Kingdom Supreme Court unanimously voted to uphold a ban that stops Islamc State of Iraq and Levant bride Shamima Begum from returning to the country. Now 21 years old, Begum left the country six years ago to join ISIL (Daesh) in order to join the violent struggle against the tyranny of you, me and our government. It is reported that she was inspired to join ISIL by, among other things, watching videos of the beheading of western hostages by Jihadis. Along the way she met a fellow recruit, a young and radicalised Dutchman, fell in love and, on arrival in Syria, got married. The couple had three children, all of whom have died in the terrible conditions of the Syrian ISIL camp where Begum is interred.

In 2019, then Home Secretary Sajid Javid stripped Begum of her UK citizenship. Howls of predictable dissent followed; mostly from those on the left. The poor girl was impressionable, just a child when she fled for Syria. How could we be so heartless as to cast her adrift in the world, stateless? Sure, Begum made mistakes, but don’t we all when we’re young? Of course, in our youthful exuberance we all cock-up. But, and this is where clear headed thinking and perspective matters, not too many of us act out our adolescent neuroses by joining a gang who want to kill our fellow citizens and violently overturn our very way of life. Our right to British citizenship comes with a set of responsibilities. Citizenship should be an active condition. We are born into it but have to live up to it. The right comes with clear responsibilities, or it is next to meaningless.

On March 16th we will have been locked down, in one form or other, for a full calendar year. Throughout, we have been asked to assent to a reduction in the rights we hold close; freedom of association, freedom to meet up, freedom to work where we want, freedom to travel, the freedom to be free from home schooling our children. The novelty and collectivist British bulldog spirit of the first lockdown has, for me at least, given way to ennui, to a rising tide of frustration and the desire to howl at the moon. I’m tired of being stuck inside and told what to do.

Yet I’m willing to put up with it for a while longer. Why? Because my government, in all its flawed glory, has not only found a way to keep the NHS running during the pandemic, and is delivering a world-beating (with the exception of Israel) vaccination programme. Like millions of Britons I’ve benefitted from my vaccination first dose and I am thankful. I didn’t have to pay for my vaccination, the government provided it as my right. In return it has asked me, as it has asked you, to dig in for what we hope will be just another four months and do as we are asked along the way. That feels like a good deal to me.

The Culture Wars were in the news this week. However, following a YouGov opinion poll it turns out not too many of us know what that means. A full 76% of us had either not heard the term or could define it. Just 4% of us “correctly” identified that the culture war is a disagreement about how we preserve and view culture, history and our national identity. In other words the much reported and chattering class social media battlefields of this war - elements of cancel culture, no platforming, de-naming and statue tumbling for example – are generating, it seems, a great deal more heat than light.

I don’t partake of much social media. I believe it to be one of the great ills of modern life. An anti-social environment in which people feel it is their individual right to give vent to their spleens, who use the medium as payback, no doubt, for being on the receiving end of a physical ‘pile-on’ back in their school days, who use the ‘safe space’ of the medium to substitute ill-informed dogma for reason and nuance, who accept no real responsibility for what they write as their right.

My editor tells me that following last week’s column there was a minor Twitter squall because I referred in it to Ulster and the troubles. The troubles in Ulster were unambiguously awful, of course; a point I made in the piece but which was conveniently missed by some of the local Twitterati. My working title for last week’s piece was “A perspective on perspective.” My beloved Grandma Bell was in the same class at school in Milnsbridge as Harold Wilson and, whenever I asked about him she always said he was “too clever by half.” I fear that my last week’s attempt at a ‘meta’ piece might well have received her same sideswipe. To avoid any confusion this week let me be direct. As we emerge from lockdown our society needs a great deal more communitarianism and a great deal less liberalism. Twitter would be as good a place as any to start.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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