Nationality and Borders Bill

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Henry Smith]

The Chagos islanders have suffered over half a century of consistent injustices. They were forcibly exiled from their homeland, the Chagos islands—Diego Garcia and outer islands such as Peros Banhos—by the Harold Wilson Administration in the late 1960s to make way for a military base, and they were typically relocated against their will in Mauritius, but also in the Seychelles and other locations.

There are many aspects of the injustices suffered by the Chagos islanders on which I and many other hon. and right hon. Members across the House have campaigned, such as a right of resettlement, a right to compensation—a package has still not been fully realised to any extent at all—and a right to self-determination. It is London, Washington, the UN in New York or Port Louis that is seeking to decide their future sovereign status.

However, there is another injustice that has been suffered by descendants of Chagos islanders: the denial of their moral rights to British overseas territory citizenship. It is no fault of the grandchildren and other descendants of the Chagos islanders that their forebears were forcibly removed from their homeland and essentially dumped in other parts of the Indian ocean, but it has meant that they have lost their rights to British overseas territory citizenship. Had those individuals been born in other overseas territories, such as Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands or Bermuda, they would have a right to British overseas territory citizenship. This is causing great hardship for many families, and dividing many communities as a result.

Those who were born on the Chagos islands and the direct children of those born on the Chagos islands do have a right to British overseas territory citizenship and therefore British citizenship. They are able to settle in this country, and are productive members of our wider society. I am grateful that many have decided to live in my Crawley constituency. However, many grandchildren and other descendants of those islanders are technically seen as foreign nationals, and have to go through an expensive and rigorous visa process to be here, and then apply for indefinite leave to remain. That results in families with different nationality status and immigration status, often in the same household. Some are able to work and to access public funds and public services. Others are unable to, which creates issues in terms of housing overcrowding.

As I said, this community has suffered a series of injustices. It is the sort of thing you would expect to read in the history books of colonialism of several hundred years ago. We are not talking about many people either. We have just heard a lot about 20,000 Afghans evacuated from that country with the fall of Kabul. We have heard a lot about over 3 million BNO—British national overseas—citizens in Hong Kong with a potential right to settle in this country as a result of the increasing Chinese erosion of democracy there. With the Chagos Islanders, only numbers in the hundreds to low thousands would be eligible.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: it is not about the numbers; it is about the principle and about living up to our historical obligations. I have seen a number of initiatives of this sort. I will be happy to support this new clause. It remains to be seen what the response will be from the Treasury Bench. Will he join me in putting the message across to the Ministers and officials responsible that this will never just go away? If not today, then sooner or later, these injustices will have to be addressed.

[Henry Smith]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support, and I agree with every word he said.

We have had over half a century of appalling injustice, in many different regards, for this community. It is now time that this House rights the wrongs that they have suffered. In allowing British overseas territories citizenship for the descendants of the Chagos Islanders, we can go a long way towards doing that. Chagos islanders were forcibly removed from their homeland not by this House but by an Order in Council. This issue has never had the proper scrutiny of this elected House, which can now play its part in righting a significant historical injustice. I therefore call on Members from across the House to support new clause 2.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Can I once again urge colleagues to stick to the five minutes that we talked about? We are going to have to impose a time limit shortly if we are going to get everybody in.

[Mr Carmichael]

We have a fair old mixter-maxter of different amendments, new clauses and other provisions, and as I try to find a common theme, I find this: policy decisions that we make as a country and that we make in this place sooner or later have domestic policy implications. It does not matter how hard we try to ignore them, as we have with the rights of the Chagos islanders, or how hard we resist the logic of our decisions, as we have in the case of the Hongkongers until recent years—eventually they all require to be dealt with.

I want first to deal briefly with amendment 2, in my name, which would remove clause 10 from the Bill, and with amendment 12, in the name of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), which would remove clause 9. Clause 10 restricts the rights of children who would be born in this country but who would otherwise be stateless. The point about clause 9, which the right hon. Gentleman made very well, is not only that the removal of citizenship is obnoxious but that removal without notice is supremely dangerous. It is perfectly legitimate for Government Back Benchers to point out that the genesis of removal is to be found in the 2002 Act—[Interruption.] I see them nodding. However, I would gently counsel them that finding a way of making a measure introduced by David Blunkett, as Home Secretary, even more illiberal and draconian is not necessarily something about which anybody should be particularly proud.

It is the removal without notice that is particularly objectionable. As the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) said, one of the things we are dealing with here is the basic British sense of decency. We should not be using citizenship as some sort of tool for further punishment; there are plenty of other ways in which people who have done wrong can be punished. However, we do not use fundamental concepts of domestic and international law, such as citizenship, as a tool to do that.

The hon. Members for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) and for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) have tabled various provisions on the financial barriers that have been put in place. I was happy to sign the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Streatham, and I very much support those tabled by the Scottish National party.

It seems to me from my casework as a constituency Member that the immigration system is already so complex that it is virtually impenetrable to those who are not in some way legally qualified—and, as far as I can see, to many who are. It should not therefore be administered in such a way that it is open to the Government to make a profit from these cases. There are already sufficient financial barriers in place for those who wish to have, and need to have, citizenship, and we should not be putting a further financial barrier in their way.

There is a whole range of different matters before the House this afternoon, which illustrates to me the fact that this Bill is far from properly scrutinised. We are taking it at a canter this afternoon. There may well be reasons for that in the minds of the Government’s business managers, but, as is the case with trying to wish away the consequences of our foreign policy decisions, they will not carry any water when the Bill gets to the other place, and I fear that, even though the Government will probably get their way in virtually everything today, we will not have heard the last of this Bill yet.

[Several hon. Members rose—]