I also rise to speak in support of amendment 12.
Citizenship is a fundamental right that speaks to our very sense of belonging and identity, which is why it is enshrined not just in law but in the UN charter, the universal declaration of human rights and the 1954 convention relating to the status of stateless persons.
Under this Home Secretary, the Government have failed to treat citizenship with the reverence and respect it deserves. By removing the requirement to give notice, she has done away with due process and has expanded her already draconian powers that allow her to deprive anyone of British citizenship, provided she believes it is in the interest of the public good.
Reference has been made to powers that, according to the analysis of the Office for National Statistics, could affect 6 million people, many from a Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Jamaican or Nigerian background. Let me be absolutely clear: that is the group of people the Bill will disproportionately impact, which is why this House must vote the clause down today.
Over the past fortnight since I originally raised this issue, I have had people telling me, much like some of the arguments we have heard from the Government Benches, “As long as you don’t break the law, you have nothing to fear from the Home Office.” I absolutely disagree: working-class people from a black, from an Asian or from any ethnic minority background have everything to fear from this Home Office. Let us not forget that it is this Tory Home Office that presided over the mass deportations in the Windrush scandal; that it is this Home Office that continues to prosecute a hostile environment against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers; and that it is this Home Office that uses Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” not as a warning, but as a guidebook. I therefore have no confidence, and neither do my constituents, that, based on its record, the Home Office will not further expand the scope of its powers to deprive someone of British citizenship on more spurious grounds.
The powers that the Home Secretary has even now to deprive someone of British citizenship already create two tiers in society based on foreign ancestry, but removing the requirement to provide notice takes things even further. An individual stripped of citizenship will not be told or given reasons and will therefore have no real right of appeal—and all this can happen even as they are being deported. Frankly, such a move should send shivers down the spine of anyone interested in upholding liberty and due process. I simply ask those who want to accuse me of sensationalising the situation to come walk for a day, for a year, for a lifetime in the shoes of
someone the Home Office has decreed to be a second-class citizen, and then tell me that they honestly believe that these are not the real fears of those from ethnic minority backgrounds in our own country today.