Nationality and Borders Bill

Baroness Warsi Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi (Con)]

My Lords, in my limited time I will speak today only to Clause 9, which seeks to strip British citizens of their citizenship without notice. I want to focus on the real-life impact of this proposed legislation and the consequences for communities, and to unpick the notion that citizenship is a privilege, not a right.

Modern nationality law starts in 1981. For all its shortcomings, it was an attempt to bring into the system through formal paperwork those who were British—I repeat: those who were by right British. The state was formalising a right that already existed, something expressly stated by the then Home Secretary William Whitelaw during the passage of the Bill. However, what followed, with subsequent changes to nationality law and an increasingly hostile approach taken by successive Governments of all colours, was the appalling circumstances in which the Windrush generation and others—people who by right were British—were treated like outsiders, foreigners and aliens. Our hostility to immigration and immigrants was the climate in which we abandoned our own who were by right British, even if they had not formally exercised that right.

I lay out this background because this notion of citizenship being a privilege seems to be a popular, but sadly ignorant, mantra. Of course, immigration is not a right, but immigration and immigration controls are very distinct from nationality rights. Those who mix them do so because their flawed understanding does not see beyond the colour of someone’s skin.

Let me personalise it. My family, as many of yours, were a century ago citizens of the UK and colonies. They had rights; all those in the Empire and the Commonwealth did. When my grandfathers fought for the British Indian Army as British subjects, they did so as citizens. When the Windrush generation answered the call for workers and came to this country, they did so as citizens. When South Asians took up gruelling jobs in the mills and foundries of Yorkshire, as my family did, they did so as citizens, as equal members of this country in a continuation of a bond that had started decades earlier. It was not a conditional or temporary right, or a right that we would try to take away from them and their children or grandchildren in ever more cunningly creative ways, and it certainly was not a privilege. It was a right, one established through our colonial history, through strife, blood, sweat and those who even gave their lives. By formally taking a British passport, they were merely formalising a right, not having a privilege bestowed upon them.

The othering of our fellow citizens—which has happened over the years under Conservative Governments; was made worse, I would argue, by Labour Governments, with some of the most dramatically expanded powers of deprivation; and was extended by the coalition Government—this chipping away at the basic right of citizenship, must now stop. That starts with striking Clause 9 from this Bill. We across this House, whichever party we belong to, have been part of the problem. Our respective parties have, over time, torn down the basic belief that all citizens in this country are and should be equal and that, as a citizen, you are a permanent member. It is a fundamental right recognised in case law, including by the High Court in the case of D4, the case that led to Clause 9. This problem did not start with Clause 9, but it must start to end with Clause 9.

This is government sleight of hand, this last-minute addition to override the decision of Mr Justice Chamberlain. It is an attempt at another incremental change with the hope that, once again, no one will notice, but which has huge real-life consequences. This power grab by the Home Secretary is deeply dangerous, one that seeks to deprive someone of their right to citizenship without even giving the person being deprived the right to know, depriving them even of the right to check whether the Secretary of State had the legal basis or accurate facts to exercise that power. These proposals would mean that I would have greater protections when being deprived of my driving licence than of my nationality.

And so a piece of legislation introduced but never used by the late Lady Thatcher’s Government during the Cold War to deal with treason has morphed, mainly during the Blair years as an attempt to remove one man, Abu Hamza—my noble friend Lord Moylan is absolutely right that Labour sowed the seeds of what we now reap—into a catch-all law that covers around 40% of our ethnic minority communities. This clause is not a debate about immigration, it is a debate about our fellow citizens. These laws have the potential to include members of Parliament and their families. They include our loved ones, friends and colleagues; they include some of us. This is not scaremongering, this is fact. This is why families across our country are campaigning to push back against the real-life consequences they are today experiencing as a result of years of incremental legislation.

In conclusion, my parents’ generation, now in their 80s, always feared that their future generations would be outsiders, second-class citizens who would be told to “go back home” or to leave. My generation always dismissed these fears as unfounded, but Windrush proved they were not baseless. Clause 9 and the Government’s exponential use of deprivation powers compound these fears and so I urge my noble friend, who is thoughtful and informed on these issues, to ask the Government to think again and row back.