It is a great delight to follow the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) although I would like to correct him on a few details. Although Palmerston thought that Don Pacifico was undoubtedly a British citizen, merely because of his birth in Gibraltar, that would not necessarily apply today in the same way because he was actually a Portuguese Jew who therefore had more than one nationality at the time. I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman’s point applies reliably to the debate.
I entirely agree with everything the Home Secretary said about sham marriages. They are a real problem and in certain places in the country—most notably around London and the west midlands—there is a real issue to be tackled. I warmly commend Ministers who have taken the right actions in the Bill to deal with that. I am concerned, however, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) said earlier, about the business of removing people’s citizenship, not least because the way the proposal has been drafted gives a phenomenal degree of Executive power to the Secretary of State. I worry about that, as do several other Members, including the hon. Members for North East Somerset and for Brent Central (Sarah Teather).
Two years ago I remember going to the deportation centre at Heathrow and seeing a young man whose state we do not know. He refuses to say where he is from because he thinks he will be deported back to that place. He had then been in that deportation centre for four years because for him, that half life in a sort of prison was better than the danger of being deported back somewhere. Some think the best way of dealing with the problem of deporting foreign criminals involves measures to change the rules on article 8. The biggest problem lies not with that, however, but with an awful lot of people who get to this country and instantly abandon their paperwork, either because that is what they intended to do from the beginning, or because they are from countries to which we simply cannot deport people. Again, I commend those Ministers who have worked—as Labour Ministers did in the previous Government—to try to ensure that people will not be subject to torture if they are returned to their country of origin, and that they will have a fair trial and so on There are, however, many countries around the world where such things still do not apply, and those cases make up the largest number of people, let alone those whose paperwork has been lost by the Home Office—also a substantial number. Of course I want foreign criminals to be deported and sent back to their country of origin, but I also want their human rights to be protected. I still believe in the right to a fair trial and am opposed to torture. I believe in all the things we have signed up to as a country. Let us not pretend that the Bill will sort out the bigger problem.