UK Borders Bill

moved Amendment No. 42: 42: After Clause 20, insert the following new Clause— ““Children of Female British citizens After section 2(1)(b) of the Immigration Act 1971 (c. 77) (statement of right of abode in United Kingdom) insert— ““(ba) he would be entitled to be registered under section 4C of the British Nationality Act 1981 if the words ““after 7th February 1961 and”” had been omitted from section 4C(2)””.”” The noble Lord said: The purpose of this amendment is to correct what is now almost universally seen as an anomaly in our nationality and immigration law. The amendment confers not citizenship, for reasons that I shall explain later, but rights of entry to the United Kingdom on people who were born abroad between 1 January 1949 and 7 February 1961—just over 12 years—and who are children of a foreign father and a British mother. The amendment adds new matter to the Bill and has no effect on anything now in it. I raise this issue because in February I received a letter from Mr Kenneth Luke of Houston, Texas. He is the son of an American father and a British mother and was born in the USA. He was 56 at the date of his letter, so he was born in 1950 or early 1951. He wants British citizenship. He knows that had the nationality of his parents been reversed—had his father been British and his mother American—he would have been entitled to British citizenship, even if he had been born in the USA. He knows that if he had been born after 7 February 1961, he would have been entitled to British citizenship, even with his actual parentage and place of birth. I shall read a short extract from his letter: "““Those of us with British mothers who are still seeking UK citizenship do so because we have deep cultural and family ties to the country—ties that the passage of time has done nothing to diminish. We are not seeking citizenship for a better economic life or because we want to live in ‘cool Britannia’. We are seeking citizenship because Britain is the land of our mothers, and as such, it is our motherland. This relationship is immutable, and if we should all die without ever having been allowed to live in Britain, it will not be because we did not remain steadfast until the end in our desire to come home and in our belief that our claim to be British by descent was warranted and genuine””." I was particularly interested in this letter because Mr Luke’s position bears some similarity to my own. I, too, have an American father and a British mother, although, because I was born in the United Kingdom, I am a British citizen by birth. My mother was not a British citizen at the time of my birth because she was stateless. This matter is relevant to the amendment and its history needs some explanation. At the time of my parents’ marriage in 1924, United Kingdom law assumed that a woman marrying a foreigner would automatically get her husband’s nationality, and therefore she lost her British nationality. However, under American law, a foreign wife did not acquire American citizenship on marriage until she had been resident in the USA for a year, which my mother never did because my father’s career was in this country. By 1933, this statelessness had affected enough British women to lead to a change in the law. Under the Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1933, women retained British citizenship if they did not acquire their husband’s nationality on marriage, but not if they did. My mother at that point became British again. It was not until the British Nationality Act 1948 that British women who had lost their nationality on marriage were given it back, and even then they were not given the same right as British men living abroad with a foreign wife to pass on citizenship to a child. I am not seeking by this amendment to give any rights to anyone born before 1 January 1949—the date when the British Nationality Act 1948 came into force. That would raise a difficult question whether rights could be given to children of mothers who were not British nationals at the date of their child’s birth but nationals of some other country, and the practical difficulty of identifying the status of the applicant’s mother at the time of the applicant’s birth. Therefore, 1 January 1949 has real logic as a cut-off date for granting the right to British citizenship; 7 February 1961 has none. Under the British Nationality Act 1948, the Home Secretary had discretion to register a child of a British mother as a British citizen while the child was under 18. That presumably was originally intended for cases where the mother was widowed or divorced and wanted to return to live in the United Kingdom with her child. On 7 February 1961, the Government decided to register any child under 18 of a British mother on application. There was no formal change in the law; it was simply described as a concession. The next step, under the British Nationality Act 1981, was that women became entitled to pass on citizenship to future children on the same basis as men, but that was limited only to children after the 1981 Act came into force. In April 2003, new Section 4C was added to the 1981 Act by the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. That backdated the citizenship rights to all children born to British mothers after 7 February 1961 even if they had not applied for registration before becoming 18. New Section 4C resulted from amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Avebury in Committee and on Report. He has also added his name to this amendment. Those amendments in their original form would have backdated the 1981 Act to 1 January 1949, which is what I seek now. On Report on 9 October 2002, the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, who was the Minister acting for the Government, said that the Government would look into the matter and come back with proposals at Third Reading. That is reported at column 269 of Hansard for 9 October 2002. They did so, but to an unnecessarily and unjustifiably limited extent. The Government were prepared to grant citizenship only to those born after 7 February 1961. The Government announced that they would give citizenship to all applicants born after that date who applied for it. The noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said that, "““there must be a cut-off point … One can only go so far towards righting the wrongs of history before the number of ‘what ifs’ to be taken into account becomes unmanageable … there is a certain logic behind our selection of 7th February 1961 as the cut-off point””.—[Official Report, 31/10/02; cols. 295-96.]" What is this logic? It is hard to see. Why not make the commencement of the British Nationality Act 1948 the cut-off point? I accept that 1 January 1949 is, for reasons I have already explained, a justifiable cut-off date. Why exclude people born in that relatively short period between 1 January 1949 and 7 February 1961? So far as I can see, it is wholly impossible to justify that distinction. Refusing to back-date citizenship to children born before February 1961 was simply continuing unjustifiable gender inequality. It does not matter whether the children affected are male, as Mr Luke is, or female. It preserves discrimination against mothers because they are women and not men. It is also at least arguable that it is ageist because there is a wholly irrational discrimination between those born on or before 7 February 1961 and those born afterwards. I can see no detriment to the United Kingdom from allowing people in this class right of entry to the United Kingdom. The class of people affected by this amendment is now closed. It can apply only to those born abroad between 1 January 1949 and 7 February 1961 whose mother was a British citizen and whose father was not. There may be no more than a few hundred, certainly no more than the low thousands, of people in this class. All must be at least 46 years old and, no doubt, the great majority of them will be well established in their present home countries. They would welcome the right—when visiting the United Kingdom as tourists, on business, for family reasons or, as some may wish, to live here—to entry on the same basis as UK citizens. The costs are negligible. I cannot see that the correction of this anomaly would give any precedent for other groups; it is a unique situation. There is no reason to suppose that the children of United Kingdom-citizen fathers exercising their undoubted right to UK citizenship impose any serious burden whatsoever on the state. Why should the children of UK-citizen mothers be different? The simplest way of dealing with this problem would be a further amendment of the British Nationality Act 1981 to give rights of citizenship to children of UK-citizen mothers. My amendment does not do that because this Bill is about immigration and not nationality. A further amendment of the British Nationality Act 1981 would therefore be outside the Long Title. This amendment does the next best thing: it amends the Immigration Act 1971 to allow children of British-citizen mothers the same rights of access to the United Kingdom as if they were British citizens by descent. Accepting this amendment would remedy what is now seen as an anomaly which preserves an old-fashioned rule of gender inequality. It does so in favour of a small, closed class of people. It would not throw any perceptible burden on the state, and there is no justification for the Government objecting to it. I beg to move.