Nationality and Borders Bill

James Daly Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the excellent speech by the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) in proposing new clause 2. I pay tribute to his commitment to this cause, which has been a long-standing one for him and his constituents. I wish to put on record the Opposition’s support for the new clause, which seeks to rectify the long-standing injustice in British nationality law that affects a relatively small number of people—Chagossian people, descendants of the Chagos islanders, who were forcibly removed from the British Indian Ocean Territory in the 1960s. The fact that British citizenship does not automatically pass to second and third generation Chagossians despite some of them migrating to the UK with their British parents as very young children is nothing short of a scandal. I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House will support new clause 2.

Whereas the hon. Member for Crawley is seeking to rectify an injustice, the Nationality and Borders Bill does the opposite and seeks to create chaos and injustice. I will focus my comments on part 1. Clause 9 provides the Government with dangerous and unprecedented powers to deprive UK nationals of citizenship, without warning. We are wholeheartedly opposed to this. Through clause 9, the Government seek to amend the long-standing position under the British Nationality Act 1981 that an individual must be notified if they are to be deprived of their nationality. It exempts the Government from giving notice of a decision to deprive a person of citizenship if authorities do not have the subject’s contact details or if it is not “reasonably practical” to do so. The Government’s proposal also allows such secret deprivations to take place solely on the basis that the Home Office deems it “in the public interest” or in the interest of “foreign relations”. Effectively, this means that the Home Secretary can strip someone of their citizenship without informing them because it would be internationally embarrassing for her to do so. This abhorrent proposal therefore enables the Government to remove basic fairness, on top of an already dangerous power.

Like many measures in the Bill, there is no practical reason for this change. Present rules already allow for citizenship deprivation letters to be delivered to an individual’s last known address. The real purpose of this rule appears to be to introduce measures that remove the right to appeal. These measures make lawful previously unlawful citizenship stripping. They ask Parliament to pretend that an unlawful decision was lawful all along. It is shameful and Orwellian in equal measure.

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman could cast his mind back to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, where, for the first time, people who had acquired British citizenship through birth were made subject to citizenship deprivation powers. So what he has just commented on was brought in and voted through by a Labour Government. Could he address that point?

[Bambos Charalambous]

As I mentioned, any reasons to strip people of citizenship are given on notice, but this deprives people of the right to—

[James Daly]

Do you agree with the principle?

[Bambos Charalambous]

I do not agree with the principle of it: it should be done on notice.

Clause 9 means that individuals will not be able to challenge deprivation of their nationality as they will not be aware or told that they are no longer British citizens, and the time limit for appeal may run out before the individual becomes aware that their rights have been stripped. As Reprieve has pointed out, under these proposals, a person accused of speeding would be afforded more rights than someone at risk of being deprived of their British nationality.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Daly]

It is better to move on from such an appalling speech.

Amendment 12, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), which would remove clause 9, is a quite straightforward legal matter. However, as I have listened to the debate, I have thought on occasion that hon. Members have been debating a clause that does not exist or is not in the Bill. As I said in my intervention on the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous), the Labour Government, through the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002—as well as through further legislation in 2016—codified and ensured that a Home Secretary of whatever political party had the power to exclude or take away somebody’s citizenship in certain circumstances. If there was an objection to that principle, an amendment should have been tabled. Anyone in the House had the opportunity to do that. However, the only amendment tabled on this measure concerns the notice period—that is it. Let us therefore have a debate on the notice period. If the Labour party opposes in principle what the previous Labour Government did in 2002 and 2016, I am certain that its Front-Bench team would have tabled an amendment.

Let us get to the notice period and what we are arguing about, on which important issues were raised. The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) made a point that I hope the Minister will address. If an order is made without notice, does the appeal process start when the order is made or when the order is received, as is currently the norm and the law?

I could read out some of the scaremongering and appalling things said about the Bill, but I do not want to go down into that. My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) gave a magnificent speech on that. I find it surprising, because if this or any other Government wanted to do things of which they are being accused, they could do them now. What does it matter whether people have notice or not? There was the genuinely unbelievable suggestion that the Bill could be used to address climate change activists. The Opposition are genuinely scraping the barrel when it comes down to that level. I am here to tell my constituents that that is scaremongering. There is a requirement for exceptional circumstances in clause 9, which are there to protect them, and no one has anything to fear from the clause at all.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

I am deeply concerned by and opposed to the great majority of the proposals in this inherently authoritarian Bill. Much of it appears to be written to satisfy front-page tabloid headlines rather than to fix the broken asylum system. It amounts to a fundamental rejection of our international obligations under the 1951 UN convention relating to the status of refugees and does nothing to resolve these complex issues at all. Even the Government’s own impact assessment suggests that measures in the Bill could lead to an increase in unsafe journeys across the channel rather than a reduction in them. The Bill originally tried to criminalise not only asylum seekers but those who try to help and rescue them. I cannot recall a more immoral and wicked piece of UK legislation.

I am disturbed by clauses 9 and 10, which enable a Home Secretary to deprive UK nationals of citizenship without notice and restrict stateless children’s access to British citizenship. As a British citizen with dual nationality, I personally feel the ice-cold chill of those proposals. It looks and feels like a ramping up of the hostile environment. I will not support a set of clauses that create a hierarchy of British citizenship. The Government are trying to reframe citizenship as a privilege, not the right that it is. The message this sends is that certain citizens, despite being born and brought up in the UK and having no other home, remain migrants, so that their citizenship and therefore all their rights are permanently insecure.

This Bill clearly disproportionately targets those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or other racial groups, regardless of their country of birth. The racialised nature of this tiered system is obvious: the citizenship of those like myself, many of my constituents and millions of others of minority and migrant heritage is less secure and less important than those who belong to majority ethnic groups in the United Kingdom. It is a shameful piece of legislation that we should all be concerned about. Much of the Bill appears to be written to satisfy the front pages of tabloids, as I have said. It is not in favour of all the communities such as those of our parents, who came here years and years ago and worked hard to rebuild this country, and they are facing this because of this Tory Government.