THERE was never a reasonable case for jihadi bride Shamima Begum to return to the UK.
From her refugee camp, Begum tried to rehabilitate herself as a victim with a series of polished TV interviews which were nothing more than shallow makeovers.
Her liberal Left cheerleaders fell over themselves to paint her as a naive 15-year-old who was trafficked for sex.
But the simple truth is that she was a fanatic and remained an ongoing security risk to our country.
She meticulously planned her escape from Bethnal Green to Syria.
While there, she cheered Islamic State’s reign of terror while its gunmen went on orgies of rape and torture.
This country gave Begum opportunities and freedoms that women in some parts of the world could only dream of.
She turned her back on all of it.
In yesterday refusing to hear yet another appeal, the Supreme Court has brought to an end a British legal circus that has cost as much as £7million — including £250,000 of legal aid.
But — and there is almost always a but when it comes to Begum’s use of the legal system — she will now try to lodge a fresh case at the European Court of Human Rights.
Surely even the Euro judges must understand that overturning the will of our own courts, and forcing us to let her back in, would be an outrage from which their reputation would never recover?
BRITAIN simply cannot afford to allow millions of people to sit idle at home.
Yet more than nine million people in this country are jobless.
As a result our welfare bill has ballooned from £187billion to £306billion in just over a decade — some of it down to Covid which fostered a culture of worklessness.
So Chancellor Rachel Reeves is right to tackle this bloated system, starting with slashing the eye-watering £10billion lost in fraud and computer error.
But that loss is just a fraction of our total welfare spending.
The Government must also find ways to persuade Covid’s lost generation — many claiming mental health benefits — that they can and should return to work.
OFCOM says it will next year have the power to impose significant fines on social media giants who promote or incite hate content of the type fuelling the riots.
But it urges the likes of Facebook and X to act now, rather than wait for the law to be enforced in January.
It’s a fine idea.
But, given their long track record of irresponsibility, who really expects the big tech firms to listen?
