Deprivation of Citizenship Orders (Effect during Appeal) Bill

Josh Simons Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 30th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

On this island, citizenship is an idea still in its infancy. When Great Britain was forged in the Acts of Union in 1707, British people were not citizens, but subjects, equals by virtue of their relationship to the monarch. Only with the British Nationality Act 1948 was the concept of citizenship introduced into our laws. I say that because, to my mind, we live in an age when political imagination is needed more than ever. The recent experiment with politics as bureaucratic management is over, and we are now returning to a politics with a longer history in this country, forging the future through imagination and creativity, and exercising the collective power to change the values and systems by which we are ruled.

At a moment like this, the relative infancy of citizenship in Britain should encourage us to pause to examine an idea we too often glide over; and I hope that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, will forgive me for doing just that. Citizenship, like the motivation behind this Bill, is connected to one of the great challenges of our time: controlling our borders and establishing systems of legal migration and asylum that are orderly, managed, humane and in our national interest.

Let me start with what my constituents in Makerfield tell me. They want to feel that they and their family belong in the community they live in, and they want their neighbours to feel that they belong there, too. That is why high streets full of vape shops, dog muck and smashed glass matter so much—they are a visible and constant reminder that others seem not to feel that they belong. When people treat their community with respect and love, they show that they feel that they belong.

Citizenship is belonging on a bigger scale—a larger us. It is the unchosen love we feel for our family, and even our town, projected on to the story of a country and its people—the monarch; the flag; the mountains, hills and seas; the industrial skyline of my home towns in northern England, and the cobbled streets of Cornwall. Citizenship is a feeling, and, like any feeling, it carries responsibilities. It is about not only what we are owed, but what we owe—responsibility, contribution, duty.

We live in uncertain times, with Europe at war, the middle east in crisis and the world order being remade at breakneck speed. In such times, I believe we should celebrate and nurture citizenship far more than we do. Now, we hide it away. We bury citizenship ceremonies in dingy, bureaucratic corners of town halls, making the test for those who obtain it their capacity to pay thousands of pounds for the privilege, not their commitment to our country and our values. For me, that is what citizenship should be about. I believe that citizens of this country should speak our language, know our history and share our commitment to fairness, tolerance, creativity and freedom. Those who wish to become citizens must, in the end, be willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with their fellow citizens to defend that freedom in a world where it really is threatened.

That brings me to the Bill. While I voted to remain, I did so after much thought. It was always true that the European Union changes the capacity of elected representatives to control borders, and places clear constitutional constraints on what Parliament can do. However, I am always suspicious of those who blame forces beyond Parliament for their failure to use its immense powers. My constituents understand a simple truth about this country’s constitution, which is that our politicians can enact almost any law they please, and Governments with strong majorities can do almost whatever they want. If they choose not to use those powers, rarely is it because of some external force, whether that be Strasbourg or an arm’s length body. Instead, it is because they are frightened to use their own power, or lack the imagination to use it well.

That is why I strongly support the measures in the Bill. It is not about making people stateless or subverting judges. Instead, it is about doing what this place is supposed to do, which is to assert the view of Parliament on what citizenship means and how it should be enacted. Valuing citizenship requires being clear about when and under what circumstances it should be taken away. Being an equal, full part of our society means sharing our values. British citizenship affirms a person’s part in our country, and there must be a way to remove those who threaten it, where they have dual citizenship.

If the Home Secretary has decided in narrow and prescribed circumstances that it is in the public interest to remove a person’s citizenship because they threaten our security, in my view, that is what should happen. Of course, we must have an appeals process—no one must ever be above the law in this land. However, an appeal should not mean that the will of elected officials is thwarted. This is part of a broader agenda of this Government that I strongly support: changing the process of judicial review to ensure that the few cannot hold up investment and infrastructure that benefits the many, and reforming the European convention on human rights to update human rights for the 21st century, strengthen national security and enhance control over our borders.

The British people are fed up with politicians passing the buck and blaming someone else for their own failure to act. If we do not create a modern citizenship regime, reform the ECHR and judicial review, establish digital ID or, for that matter, radically reform the British state, it is nobody’s fault but our own—us, the British political class. I, for one, am sick of politicians throwing up their hands and blaming others for their own failures. I will always support a Government who take responsibility for using Parliament to deliver the radical change that this country needs, and that is why I support this Bill tonight.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

The hon. Lady makes the point powerfully. I do not know, but she does. This legislation leaves people from minority backgrounds, second or third-generation immigrants, and those like my children who are of two parents of different nationalities, with a lingering sense of doubt about how secure they are in this nation.

[Josh Simons]

The right hon. Member is portraying the United Kingdom as an exception to a global rule in which citizenship is a straightforward binary and a right. I am of Jewish ancestry and have a right to claim citizenship in Israel, though I have not. My wife is American and our children are dual citizens, so this very much pertains to me. I gently point out that the United States has a similar regime. If a naturalised citizen in America breaks certain laws and is demonstrated to be a national security threat to the United States, they too can have their naturalised citizenship revoked. It is not accurate to paint the United Kingdom as a complete exception to a rule in which citizenship, whether by birth or by naturalisation, is treated differently by the state, by the court and by the legislature.

[Kit Malthouse]

I understand the hon. Member’s point, but I am afraid that I am not interested in comparisons with the United States. I would hold us to a higher bar. We are a more ancient country that should have, as he rightly pointed out, a better developed sense of how we build a cohesive society.

I would challenge whether the United States can be held up as a paragon of virtue on societal cohesion or whether actually it is a divided country, with part of that division coming from a sense that there are first, second and maybe even third-class citizens there. At the moment, it is going through a period of challenge as to what it means to be a United States citizen. We have seen litigation under—it has slipped from my mind. It starts, “We the people”. [Hon. Members: “The constitution.”] That is the word—forgive me; a senior moment. The United States is seeing legal challenge under its constitution on precisely those grounds of what it means to be a citizen.

I do not want to detain the House for much longer, but we need to think carefully about the impact that this regime has beyond the people whom it targets. We may say of cases like Shamima Begum that what she did was completely appalling and she deserves to be punished. Obviously, the decision was taken to revoke her citizenship. I am not sure whether that was the right thing to do. I do think she needs to be punished. In many ways, I would rather she had been brought to this country, and punished and jailed here. She is nobody else’s problem but ours. As I say, by promoting this regime I think we undermine the value of what it means to be a British citizen because, once acquired, citizenship should be a right. Civis Romanus sum. It should mean something. It is not the keys to the executive lavatory, to be removed when you lose the privilege and rights of your position; it is something that you acquire that is fundamentally in you once you are in the club, and we should be wary of the wider impact if we decide to remove it.

I have one final suggestion for the Minister. I realise that I am in a minority, and the House is not going to comply; he is going to get his legislation. However, I ask him to think carefully about the value of the judiciary in this process. Would it be possible to amend the process such that, when an appeal is won by an individual and the Government wish to continue to deprive that person of citizenship, the permission of the judge should be sought for that, pending a further appeal? The Government will have to seek permission to appeal in all circumstances; I ask the Minister to consider whether they should have to seek also permission to maintain the condition of a deprivation of citizenship, as part of that permission to appeal.

Crime and Policing Bill

Josh Simons Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

In Ashton, Orrell, Platt Bridge, Hindley and Hindley Green, one issue dominates life for so many: antisocial behaviour. For months, I have been promising my constituents the measures in the Bill, and I thank the Home Office team for the hard work required to bring it to the House so quickly. To my mind, the Bill is one of the strongest examples of this Labour Government delivering for working people on the issues they care about.

The Bill takes tough action against serious crime—drugs, knife crime and terrorism—but I want to talk about a different, more everyday type of crime. These are the crimes that make life demoralising and sometimes frightening for many people, and that shape how people feel about their town centre, community and security. It is the fly-tipping in Bickershaw that makes parents stop their kids playing outside. It is teenagers throwing mud at cars in Hindley, and groups intimidating people by the shops in Winstanley.

Some of the toughest calls I have received in this job have been people ringing to tell me that thugs have destroyed a local sports club: Ashton Town—an arson attack—Hindley FC, and Wigan Cosmos, as well as St Jude’s pitches being destroyed in minutes by vandals on dirt bikes. Those clubs are great community assets where kids that I represent learn to become Wigan Warriors, or the elderly play walking football—places where people feel pride in their communities. I have supported fundraisers to help those clubs, working with local councillors and Warriors players to help St Jude’s build a fence to keep the bikes out, but local residents should not have to reach into their already stretched pockets. Our streets should not feel so unsafe that people resort to self-protection. We are one of the world’s largest economies and greatest democracies. That is why I welcome the measures in the Bill, such as new powers to seize bikes that wake people up at night, as they did to me this Saturday. Every time one of those bikes tears past me in the town centre, I hold on to my kids that bit tighter.

The Bill matters because it is about standing up for the good, hard-working people who love their towns and want to feel pride in them again. It is about what it means to feel respect for those who we stand by and live near, and it shows that the Labour Government will not tolerate those who make others’ lives a misery.

The respect orders, for example, are wisely named, because vandalism, thuggery and mindless destruction are about a lack of respect for our public spaces and for each other. The Bill empowers groups in society—police, councils, housing associations—with restoring that respect, asking them to say, “Enough is enough” and to take control of their communities.

I want to make a wider point about respect in our society. Often when I am travelling on the bus or train, someone is playing videos loudly on their phone without headphones. That is not illegal, but it is off-putting, because it forces whatever that person is doing on to everyone else, as if they somehow own our shared public space. It demonstrates a lack of respect for our public realm and for those around us.

In the end, the strength of our communities and our country depends on the respect, and even the love, we have for one other. That is what resilience is in a community. Over the last 14 years, the Conservative Government have allowed that respect to erode. Too many no longer trust that the law will be upheld and applied equally and fairly to everyone, and that erodes people’s trust in one another. That is why antisocial behaviour is significant: it is about treating one another with a lack of respect, as if we do not care about the things we have in common. Only by rebuilding and reinvesting in our public realm, and restoring the strength and integrity of institutions such as the police, will we rebuild that respect and trust.

The Bill takes a vital step. It shows that we stand with law-abiding, hard-working people. It sends a strong message to those who fail to recognise their responsibility. Respect must return to our streets, and this Bill will start to make that happen.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Josh Simons Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

As others have spoken about the specific measures in this Bill, I will take a step back and talk about the ideas that underpin it. There have been grumblings tonight that we are aping Conservative Members and that we are being asked to pretend, to delude ourselves and to dupe the public somehow into thinking that we support strong and controlled borders as a precondition for managed migration. I support this Bill, but I am doing no such thing.

For one thing, we have no need to ape Conservative Members. Their continued smug self-satisfaction smacks of their refusal to reckon with the magnitude of their failure, including to secure our borders. We also have no need to emulate the tub-thumping, NHS-destroying five musketeers who seem to be enjoying flying around the world, raking in cash and occasionally representing their constituents. Only one of them has bothered to show up tonight.

We should worry less about those people and more about the force of our own arguments—the arguments of those who believe in progress and fairness, and who seek to represent the interests of working people in this country. So often I have been told by people who live in wealthier, educated, cosmopolitan cities that support for strong borders and for the right of a public to choose who joins its ranks is an unenviable moral compromise. They say that open borders are the natural state of things, and the use of force to control them is a regrettable, if sometimes necessary, feature of the modern world. Those who think that do not understand the history of our democracy.

I hope the House will forgive a short detour. In the first great democracy in history—ancient Athens—about half the residents were migrants, or metics. Metics were subject to different rules; who joined the city was controlled and the bar was set high for who could become a citizen and vote. If metics broke Athenian laws, they were expelled from the city, and sometimes thrust into the blazing Greek sun. It is a fundamental principle of democracy that people who govern themselves control who they are and who becomes a member of the demos, but in recent decades, some in this country seem to have forgotten that principle. For instance, I was enormously frustrated by the remain campaign’s failure to acknowledge that the EU alters that fundamental principle. We might argue that control is worth giving up for some other reason, such as economic growth or reducing red tape, but without acknowledging that it is given up, we lack the credibility to make the argument.

This is something that my constituents understood perfectly well: control over who joins our self-governing nation is not a moral compromise; it is the heart of what makes us a free people and a strong democracy. The upshot is simple: control over the borders of this country is a precondition for a serious moral debate about who we should allow to join, on what terms and for what reasons. Unless elected Governments can demonstrate to their people that they have control over admission, we cannot seriously debate the trade-offs in who we admit and why.

The public rightly judged my party to have lost credibility on this issue in recent decades. In 2004, we chose not to put the brakes on and opened our labour markets to new EU members. At times, we openly mocked those concerned about migration, but we are not that party any more. I was not elected to this Chamber to espouse those views; in fact, I promised hundreds of my constituents that I would not rest until we gripped our borders, restored control, and yes, as the Home Secretary said, brought down the number of legal migrants entering this country each year—and I meant it. For me, this is not a regrettable moral compromise—a pact with the devil in which we hold our noses and ape Conservative Members to win votes—it is about a deep belief in what it means for our country to be strong, and our democracy respected.

Elected politicians do not just follow the polls; they explain and defend their convictions, and ours are these: the Labour party exists to represent working people. We seek to win power and use it to represent people outside the establishment who do not usually sit in the rooms where decisions are made. At the heart of that is the simple idea that elected people like me should take responsibility for deciding who gets to join our country. Parliament controls our borders, not Brussels or, after this Bill, smuggler gangs. We in the Labour party believe in control and order. The Opposition do not.

I welcome the Bill unequivocally. Those who abuse vulnerable people to threaten the order of our borders should be treated like terrorists, and I am glad that under this Government they will be. In doing so, we are not aping anyone; we are doing what Labour exists to do: take back control to represent the working people of this great country.

Southport Attack

Josh Simons Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

I thank the Home Secretary for updating the House, and welcome the uncompromising inquiry that she and the Prime Minister have announced. I would like to ask about social media and the digital information environment. I worked in a technology company for a long time, and I concur with the Home Secretary’s comments: the companies that we are talking about know what is circulating online and what is getting virality. After last summer, does she feel that she and the Prime Minister have the information that they need to make decisions in real time in order to secure our online information environment?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I do not think anyone would suggest that Ministers are in a position to make decisions on individual cases, but what we need is the right kind of framework. Clearly, the Online Safety Act will put new structures and systems in place. The Prime Minister made it clear this morning that we should not shy away from taking any further action needed to address this issue, because fundamentally, if it is impacting the safety of our children, we need to act.

United Front Work Department

Josh Simons Excerpts

Monday 16th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for raising the plight of his constituents. Yes, I can give him those assurances. The Government take very seriously the kinds of interventions he refers to. Through the defending democracy taskforce, we are looking carefully at the issue of transnational repression, and we will have more to say about it in due course.

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

Can I ask the Minister about the integrity of our democracy? In particular, what steps is he taking to ensure the integrity of the processes and institutions of our political process, especially but not only with regard to China?

[Dan Jarvis]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I briefly mentioned earlier the importance that this Government attach to the defending democracy taskforce. We inherited that body from the previous Government. We are working at pace to ensure that it works across Government as effectively as possible. Fundamentally, it seeks to address the point he made about challenging those threats to the integrity of our democracy. This Government will ensure that no stone is left unturned in seeking to address the significant challenges that we all know we face.

Respect Orders and Antisocial Behaviour

Josh Simons Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I take crime, urban or rural, very seriously. The neighbourhood policing guarantee, for example, is not just about urban areas; it has to cover rural areas as well. People living in rural areas should feel that when they need the police, the police will come, and that there is a police presence in their communities. I am happy to discuss rural crime further with the hon. Gentleman, if there are specific points that he wishes to raise with me.

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

Since I was elected, there has been a constant stream of antisocial behaviour incidents across the towns that I represent, at Hindley Town and Ashton Athletic football clubs and in Platt Bridge and Winstanley. It really dents people’s pride in the towns that they live in, as the Minister said. Does she agree that the capacity for councils and housing associations to apply for and issue respect orders is a vital part of the new powers that she has announced today?

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Yes, I absolutely agree. This is not just about the police; it has to involve councils, social housing providers and the other agencies that will tackle, together, the scourge of antisocial behaviour.

Border Security and Asylum

Josh Simons Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I realise that the right hon. Member is keen to get rid of me before I have even finished standing up at the Dispatch Box. Unfortunately, we have seen a succession of Conservative Home Secretaries—eight, I think, in the last eight years—none of whom resigned. Two of them were sacked under the last Government—actually, those two were the same person. Look, we have to be serious about this, because the dangerous boat crossings are undermining border security and putting lives at risk. Nobody should be making those journeys, and we have to work not just here but across other European countries to stop boats before they reach the French coast in the first place, to ensure that lives can be saved and the gangs are held accountable for their terrible crimes.

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

I thank the Home Secretary for her statement on the shocking figures that are symbolic of the failure of Conservative Members to restore control over our borders. I note that, despite that spending of taxpayers’ cash, removals of failed asylum seekers and foreign national offenders collapsed under the Conservatives. What is the Home Office doing to ensure that those who have no right to be in the UK are swiftly removed and the rules are properly enforced?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I welcome him to his seat in Parliament. He is right that removals of failed asylum seekers have fallen by a third since 2010. Removals of foreign national offenders have fallen by a quarter. That is not good enough. It means that the rules are not being respected or enforced, and it is why we will set up a new returns and enforcement programme. We have committed to 1,000 additional staff to work on returns and enforcement, to ensure that the rules are respected, not only where we have returns agreements in place but looking at individual cases as well. We must ensure that we have a system that people have confidence in. There is a lot of chaos to tackle, but we are determined to do it.