Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak after the noble Baroness. I wondered how I might find a way of defending this Bill in what I suspected would be a hostile environment, but my anxiety was alleviated when I heard the introductory speech of my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar who made a compelling case for the broad principles on which the Bill rests. I was wholly with him on that.

The starting principle of international law is that no country is under an obligation to grant admission to any non-national. Admittedly, that obligation is moderated by international treaty conventions that we have entered into. I was glad to hear my noble friend say that we were going to adhere to the convention on refugees. It does not, of course, mean that all irregular arrivals are refugees and those who are not should be removed.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, and various other noble Lords have appealed to our common humanity as the basis on which we should be constructing our immigration law. While we all respect and acknowledge the obligations that arise from our common humanity, that is to get things the wrong way round, because we also have a moral obligation to our own people who live here, in part because we claim and exercise the exclusive right to act on their behalf in this area. I regard that as a prior and balancing moral right. In fact, I would say that the purpose of immigration law is the protection of the stability and welfare of our own society and that our obligations under common humanity are a constraint on how we implement that law, rather than confusing it with what its purpose is.

However, there is an area in the Bill that causes me deep concern: the provisions allowing for the removal of British citizenship in even more administratively curtailed circumstances than exist at the moment. Various noble Lords on the Labour Benches have objected to this—the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, gave us a wonderfully distracting pointer to legislation from 1914—but they should note that it was actually a Labour Government, with the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, that for the first time introduced the power to deprive British citizens, by birth or descent, of their nationality, provided they had a second nationality that they might fall back on. That had never existed before. Once that door was opened—once that principle was given up—all this complaint about what are effectively subsequent tidying-up exercises is, in my view, pure hypocrisy.

My concern is different. I object to the removal of citizenship in any circumstances because I have a more conservative—some might say hopelessly quixotic—view of what nationality actually means and should mean for us. My conception of British nationality is much more profound than a mere travel document. It is—or should be—a permanent and reciprocal bond of loyalty on the one hand and protection on the other. It is not a driving licence to be taken away if you clock up the wrong number of points; it goes to your identity. When you lose your nationality, you do not just lose your identity papers, you lose your identity. It really is not a driving licence or administrative ticket.

I say this is quixotic, but that bond is a real and lived experience. When, in the same legislation in 2002, the Labour Government introduced citizenship ceremonies, I thought they would be rather tacky, un-British, American sorts of things—but actually, when I saw people coming time and again to my own town hall when I was a councillor, and coming in a sort of festive, family spirit, almost like they were coming to a wedding, I saw then how real that bond can be between citizen and nation. That is what a Conservative Government should be building up; we should not be pursuing and entrenching this cynical Labour ploy. Especially following Brexit, we should be building up and strengthening the bond between citizen and nation, whereas it seems to me that this provision goes only to dissolve it further.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Thursday 27th January 2022 Lords Chamber

I understand and support many aspects of the Bill that have regard to the rule of law and where the rights of the citizen are to be respected. What I find unacceptable about those parts of Clause 9 that I am seeking to remove is that, through no fault of their own, a citizen could be deprived of their citizenship without having been given prior notice and without their right to consult a legal representative to act on their behalf. With those few remarks, I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 27 in my name. I declare at the outset that I was born both a British citizen and a citizen of the Irish Republic.

I am sympathetic to the remarks made by my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering. She described them as radical but in my view they could be more radical, because they address what is essentially a symptom rather than the underlying disease. To understand that disease, it perhaps helps to go back a little in history. As the First World War went on, there were fantasies in this country about German spies who were everywhere. The belief grew up that the Kaiser had for many years been planting German agents here who had a remarkable ability to look like us, talk like us and infiltrate the highest levels of society. The late Lord Tweedsmuir’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps may read to us today as a Boy’s Own story but it tapped into and encouraged a widespread national anxiety.

In 1917 the MP Noel Pemberton Billing claimed to be in possession of the Kaiser’s “black book” containing the names of 47,000 prominent figures in government and society at large who were German agents or had been blackmailed into becoming so. It was the subject of a sensational libel trial and made headlines throughout the land. This was the background to the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1918, which introduced for the first time the power to deprive naturalised British citizens, and only naturalised British citizens, of their nationality.

At Second Reading, noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar and the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, stated that the power of deprivation was introduced in 1914, but the 1914 Act merely allowed deprivation in the case of naturalised citizens who had obtained that status by fraud, making statutory a power that was always implicit. It was the 1918 Act that made the radical change. Until that point, the bond of British nationality had been indissoluble. Now it could be removed, from naturalised subjects only, in the event of disloyalty or disaffection to the monarch, for trading with the enemy in time of war, for being subject to a prison sentence of over a year in His Majesty’s dominions, and on some other essentially similar grounds.

The British Nationality Act 1948 maintained substantially the same deprivation provisions but introduced a new right for British citizens whose nationality was not wholly clear to register the British nationality that they were entitled to. I shall come to the relevance of that in a moment. The great consolidating and modernising statute that still governs our nationality law, though much amended subsequently, is the British Nationality Act 1981. It is essentially the original language of that Act that Amendment 27 in my name seeks to reinstate. Noble Lords have already recognised the historical roots of the grounds on which the Act allowed the Government to deprive a British subject of their nationality: fraud, of course, but also disaffection towards Her Majesty, trading with the enemy and serving a one-year prison sentence within five years of naturalisation, though now anywhere in the world, not merely in Her Majesty’s somewhat shrunken dominions.

Regarding deprivation, the Act made one change of capital importance. It extended the Government’s power to deprive from naturalised citizens to those registered as having a right to British citizenship. If the 1918 Act made naturalisation a sort of provisional business, the 1981 Act extended that for the first time to the small number of British citizens by right—not by birth or descent, admittedly, but those who had vindicated their nationality through registration.

We move on rapidly to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, and I am delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in his place. This Act radically altered the position, extending the Government’s power to deprive to all British citizens by birth, descent, registration or naturalisation. The flowery language about disaffection and trading with the enemy was diluted to any conduct

“seriously prejudicial to the … interests”

of the United Kingdom. In a subsequent Act in 2006, it was further diluted to allow deprivation if it were merely

“conducive to the public good.”

These measures were introduced by a Labour Government but no party in your Lordships’ House has wholly clean hands in this regard, because the Immigration Act 2014, introduced by the coalition Government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, went even further, diluting the one constraint that the Government faced in exercising this power, namely that it could not be used if it rendered a person stateless. Under the 2014 Act, being rendered stateless is no protection if the Home Secretary reasonably believes that the person could acquire another nationality.

--- Later in debate ---

I will leave the last words to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who talked about his history of the wider power and challenged this House to remove the fear. After what I have said today and some of the further discussions that I will have with noble Lords before Report, I hope that we are on our way to removing that fear.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I think my noble friend has been misadvised in characterising Amendment 27 as imposing any new or further restriction on the power to deprive in the event of obtaining nationality by fraud. That simply is not so; they have misconstrued that clause. Can I ask her a very narrow question? She referred in her speech to the use of deprivation in cases of serious organised crime. Did she mean serious organised crime apart from terrorism?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

It could encompass both, but in the context of what I am talking about, some serious organised crime is outside of terrorism.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Thursday 10th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I will very briefly give support from these Benches to all three of these amendments. They all demonstrate the practical consequences of Brexit. I declare a bit of an interest on Amendment 175—not that I am neither British nor Irish but that I am both British and Irish. In fact, I have been Irish from birth without for a long time realising it, but I have now just got my passport, so I am a dual national.

But it makes no sense—and the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, gave very graphic examples of how silly it is to try to stop people crossing the border. It is not just about tourism; it is about work and business. Surely it is not in the spirit of the good relationship that we have with the Republic of Ireland, or of the Belfast agreement, or of everything that we want to work, Brexit or no Brexit—or despite Brexit. We want to have very good relations on the island of Ireland. I am not sure how it would actually work, but trying to stop people would be a nuisance, to put it at its mildest, and harmful from every direction.

On the point about the ETA system having to rely on the clunky Interpol system, my noble friend reminded me that we are going to be debating the report from the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, in a couple of weeks. We do not have access to SEIS or ECRIS, or other EU instruments, and this is not good for operating an ETA system. So it would be very good to hear from the Minister whether he has anything positive to say about how to remedy the practical consequences, to use a neutral word, of Brexit, both for internal travel on the island of Ireland and for how the ETA system can work optimally.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Perhaps I, too, should declare that I am both British and Irish since birth. I understand the difficulties locally that potentially arise and have been so well illustrated by the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, but I wanted to ask the Minister whether he could put this in the context of the common travel area. Does it really exist in practice as a reciprocal arrangement? I specifically ask because I have never been able to land at Shannon Airport, even on a direct flight from Heathrow, without standing in a queue and presenting a passport—yet when I return and land at Heathrow, I walk straight through and am guided past the passport gates. To what extent is this common travel area being operated by the Irish Republic on a genuinely reciprocal basis? Could it not in a sense be tied up with this issue?