LABOUR must stand up to the Tory-Reform pile-on seeking to strip a man of his British citizenship for offensive social media posts more than a decade old.

The bid to see Alaa Abd El-Fattah, recently released after spending most of the last 12 years in an Egyptian prison because of a social media post about torture in Egyptian prisons, forced out of Britain is dangerous — and racist.

Dangerous because his posts, while in some cases offensive (one apparently claiming he doesn’t like “white people,” another saying he considers killing “colonialists, especially zionists” heroic) simply consist of mouthing off online — there is no suggestion they were linked to any criminal intent.

Fattah is hardly alone in having said idiotic things on social media when angry. Nobody who values free speech should dredge up 13-year-old social media posts as a “gotcha.”

Nigel Farage, who has spent recent weeks insisting it is inappropriate to question him about offensive comments he may have made in the past, is as hypocritical as he is unfeeling in demanding that a man reunited just three days ago with his teenage son after years behind bars be returned to the country that jailed him (for sharing a tweet, ironically).

The same refrain is taken up by Tories Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and Chris Philp, all howling that Fattah has no place in this country.

Badenoch demands that citizenship decisions “must take account of social media activity, public statements, and patterns of belief.”

Yet — as Emily Thornberry, a rare voice of reason in this case, points out — Fattah was granted citizenship because, having a British mother, he was entitled to it. The last thing we want is ideological purity tests for would-be citizens — set, we should remember, by a Westminster elite whose outlook is demonstrably at odds with the majority of British people across a wide range of social and political issues.

Thornberry notes that “the bottom and top of it is that he is a British citizen.” This is why the government lobbied for his release from prison, after a mockery of a trial (something Farage says it should not have done).

It is why, after a high-profile campaign for his release including a hunger strike by his mother, Keir Starmer tweeted congratulations on his arrival in this country — which Farage calls “an extraordinary error of judgement” and Badenoch says “elevates [him]… into a moral hero.”

Few newspapers have less time for Starmer than this one, but the attack on the congratulatory tweet is a minor but ominous part of the whole saga: the suggestion that we should exhaustively review someone’s online history before expressing opposition to their wrongful imprisonment or joy at their release is, like Badenoch’s purity tests, a means of deterring all acts of public solidarity against injustice. That is hardly coincidental, amid the cross-party campaign to criminalise a widening array of actions and even phrases associated with the Palestine solidarity movement.

But to return to Thornberry’s point, since it is important: he is a British citizen, and the demands of the increasingly indistinguishable Tory-Reform right have no basis in law.

Stripping him of his citizenship because of his social media history is only conceivable if we consider him a second-class citizen, whose citizenship is contingent on good behaviour. It is racist.

It has chilling implications for every foreign-born and many British-born citizens — that they will always be here on sufferance. In that, it forms part of the wider Tory-Reform campaign to make non-white communities feel unwelcome in their own homes.

People who break the law can be pursued through the judicial system. If they have not broken the law they should be left alone. The “revoke their citizenship” brigade need putting back in their box.