UKIP leader Nigel Farage has called on Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron to take a stand on the Islamic State and strip UK nationals who are fighting abroad of their citizenship and cancel passports using the little-known Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870.
The move would bring the United Kingdom into line with close ally Australia, whose Prime Minister Tony Abbott has sworn “to do our damndest” to ensure “trained killer… returning Jihadists” would never be allowed to return to Australia.
UKIP leader Farage said in a press release today that; “in choosing to quit the UK to fight abroad, [UK National Islamic State Fighters] have rendered themselves effectively stateless by conforming to an ideology of wanting to create a terrifying caliphate. If they choose to leave the UK they simply should not be allowed to return. Where intelligence identifies UK nationals fighting for IS their repatriation absolutely should be blocked.”
The statement said that those fighting abroad should be stripped of their British citizenship, passports of British only citizens should be withdrawn and foreign nationals with a ‘right to reside’ in the UK should have that terminated immediately.
Farage insists Parliament should be reconvened to amend the Foreign Enlistment act 1870, which presently only covers enlistment in the armies of foreign states. As ISIS or the Islamic state is technically considered a non-state actor or transnational terror group, British citizens taking up arms in their name are not covered by the act.
In controlling the movement of British Jihadists, time is absolutely of the essence. Farage’s intervention comes the day after footage of American Journalist James Foley being beheaded by an ISIS fighter who communicated his death sentence with a clear British accent was released. The footage has sparked a debate about Britain’s role in the middle east, and the growing problem of British fighters abroad.
As reported by Breitbart London on Monday, jihadist fighters with considerable combat experience and backgrounds in organised crime is already a growing problem.
The former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service has recently warned that as many as 300 battle-hardened Jihadists may have returned to the UK already and “the scale of the threat is placing an impossible burden on British intelligence”.
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