No, I will not give way.
Is this also being done because it means that the appeals process and the decisions that are made will receive less scrutiny? The Government need to think long and hard about all that.
I am also concerned about the extent to which the Government are beginning to increase the frequency of their use of this policy. Between 2006 and 2018, 175 people lost their citizenship on national security grounds, but 104 of those instances occurred in just one year, 2017. If the Government feel that they have to use these powers more and more frequently, that is a worrying trend. Of course dangerous criminals should be locked up and serve their sentences, but if a criminal has been born and raised here and has been radicalised in this country, why do we think it is the responsibility of another country to try that person? That cannot be right.
I know that this will provoke some reaction from the Government Benches, but the truth is that it is nearly always non-white people whose citizenship is being revoked. Before there is any more braying, let me read out the statistics. According to the New Statesman’s analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics, two in every five people from non-white ethnic minorities in the UK are likely to be eligible for deprivation of citizenship. This compares with one in 20 characterised as white. We cannot argue about the statistics.
3.45 pm
In 2016, in the most awful moment of my career, my friend Jo Cox was murdered by a far right extremist and terrorist. He was tried in this country and locked up in this country. If his skin colour were any different, he should not be sent to another country. The following year, in 2017, Darren Osborne drove a van into a group of Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park. Rightly, he was tried and given a sentence in this country. It was not proposed that those convicted terrorists or criminals should have their citizenship revoked. Why is that? Is it because of the colour of their skin? I say this because I genuinely feel—