Immigration Bill

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (LD)]

My Lords, I also put my name to the amendment at Report. I have listened with great care to what the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has said. It seems that his remarks, if they are adopted by the Government, indicate that the shift in the Government’s position is substantial. If they are not adopted by the Government, they amount to a demolition of the substance of this shift. I see the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, nodding at that. I, for one, shall be listening extremely carefully to the Minister’s response to the six points made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick.

I want to remind the House why it is important that the Government acknowledge those points. The Home Secretary’s reasonable belief that a man or a woman may avail themselves of the nationality of another country will not assist a citizen in whose case that belief turns out to be ill-founded. He or she will be deprived, in Hannah Arendt’s phrase, of the “right to have rights” and locked out of any mechanism at all for achieving those rights for ever, until another state decides to take this individual on. If that is the position that the Government’s shift leaves us in, as a potential result of decision-making in the Home Office, then this shift does not go far enough.

For my part, I remain of the view that the United Kingdom should not embrace a policy where one of its potential results is statelessness, associated with so many of the degenerate states of the 20th century, and where the outcome, if it is statelessness, is so hostile to human dignity in its most basic form. This is particularly so where that policy is also bound to strike against the international accord that is so central to the maintenance of security both between and within states. In the long run, we cannot and will not make the United Kingdom a safer place by dumping our security threats abroad, sometimes into states where the capacity for dealing with them is completely debased, so that they simply grow. I agree with Professor Goodwin-Gill that a rule-of-law country accepting a United Kingdom citizen on the basis of his passport, lawfully certified and issued by the United Kingdom Government, will be perfectly entitled to respond to our unilateral withdrawal of that passport by insisting that the United Kingdom take this individual back. Which of your Lordships can doubt that if the tables were reversed we would take precisely the same approach?

I will conclude by speaking frankly. The history of this matter is that it appears to have been conjured up to serve an entirely party-political purpose in the midst of a debate in the other place. It is illiberal, it is an affront to civilised international relations, it will not improve our security and, in all likelihood, it threatens a legal and diplomatic quagmire, to no useful purpose and to the detriment of the reputation of the United Kingdom.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, who made a very powerful speech. I welcome the fact that there has been movement on the part of the Government in these amendments, and I very much welcome the helpful questions posed by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who has played such a role in getting us to where we are now. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, acknowledged, some people may still be made stateless as a result of the clause. Therefore, I am not as happy as some other noble Lords appear to be—or perhaps content is the word—and I support Motion B1.

In the Commons, some of the most pertinent questioning came from the Government’s own Back Benches. Sir Richard Shepherd asked,

“how the people of Britain will know that the action has been taken in a rational and reasonable way, when it is obscured from public view”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/5/14; col. 194.]

Dr Julian Huppert asked:

“What will happen if somebody in the UK goes through the process, the Home Secretary believes that they are able to get citizenship from another country and they make a bona fide application for that citizenship, but it is turned down?”.

In effect, this was also the question posed today by my noble friend. When pressed—and he had to be pressed—the Minister, James Brokenshire, responded that they could be given,

“limited restricted leave to remain”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/5/14; col. 196.]

But that is not a satisfactory substitute for citizenship and the rights that go with it.

My noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws and others have expressed very grave concerns that the Government may well be waiting for someone to be out of the country to deprive them of citizenship. One concern of the Joint Committee on Human Rights was how often that has happened under the current powers. I very much welcome the fact that the Minister said he has responded to the Joint Committee’s latest letter about that and that he will make that information available to whoever is given responsibility for the review. I thank him for that.

In the Commons, James Brokenshire prayed in aid the fact that the matter had been considered by the Joint Committee on Human Rights as well as in another place—that is, here—to argue that,

“it is not correct to say that it has not been subject to careful consideration”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/5/14; col. 213.]

Indeed, the Minister made the same point earlier. But the Joint Committee on Human Rights was very critical of the speed with which this measure was introduced and we—I am a member of the committee—made it very clear that we believed that a public consultation,

“would have made for better informed parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’s proposal”,

and that the Joint Committee that was proposed would allow for just that kind of proper scrutiny.

Your Lordships’ House made it very clear that it did not consider that there had been sufficient scrutiny by passing the amendment with such a significant majority. The only thing that has happened since then is that the House of Commons has debated for only 90 minutes something of such grave constitutional and moral importance. I really think that the case for a Joint Committee still stands. Indeed, the Home Affairs Select Committee, which published its report on counterterrorism after the debate in the Commons, has supported Lords Amendment 18, which underlines the point made by a number of organisations outside this House that the measure does not guarantee security against terrorism in any way.

I, too, have read the legal debate between the Government and Professor Goodwin-Gill. As a non-lawyer, I am not in a position to be able to judge that debate. Surely, however, the fact that there is such disagreement reinforces the case for a Joint Committee to tease out these very serious legal matters. The Floor of the House is not the place to do that. As the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, has already made clear, so much is at stake. I quoted earlier the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who is now in his place, because what he said was so important. He said:

“Statelessness is one of the most terrible things that can befall anyone”.—[Official Report, 19/3/14; col. 212.]

The Minister spoke of the evil of statelessness. Another expert in this area said that statelessness was a recipe for exclusion, precariousness and dispossession.

We have not completely averted the danger that we will make somebody stateless as a result of the amendment, welcome as it is. I hope, therefore, that noble Lords will stand firm and support Motion B1 because the amendment does not provide a cast-iron guarantee against the evil of statelessness.