My Lords, I added my name to an amendment in this group. I spoke at length to a similar amendment, my own Amendment 210, earlier in the Bill, so I will be fairly brief.
I fully support everything the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, has said. It is important that we should understand that the loss of EU citizenship would affect British citizens resident in the UK as well as those living abroad. That is a huge number of individual citizens whom the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, avoided referring to in reply to my own amendment but who are aggrieved at that potential loss of individual citizenship. In that same reply, the noble and learned Lord said:
“Let us be clear that EU citizenship is linked directly to citizenship of a member state”. —[Official Report, 7/3/18; col. 1081]
I do not argue with that. The court case begun in Amsterdam is to determine the nature of such linkage and whether a citizenship, once held by a citizen, cannot be taken from them against their will whatever actions are taken at the national level.
It is young people who will feel the loss of EU citizenship most keenly, not just the principle of European citizenship; it is young people who feel most European. Also they will feel the real practical effects of that loss, particularly if we also leave the single market. As others have pointed out, young people have found a strong voice in the group Our Future, Our Choice—one of whose founder members, incidently, was a leaver who changed his mind. We have all learned a lot since the referendum; that is something that, as a country, we should freely admit.
In the EU citizenship debate in the House of Commons on 7 March, the Immigration Minister, Caroline Nokes, said:
“We are content to listen to proposals from the EU on associate citizenship for UK nationals”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/3/18; col. 351]
So I ask the Minister: has there been any development on that front, bearing in mind that such a citizenship, according to Voelker Roeben, would not depend on revision of the founding treaties? I warmly support the amendment.