My Lords, I cannot discuss matters of nationality and borders without confessing that this is extremely personal territory for me, as I know it is for others in your Lordships’ House. It is personal territory because I am the daughter of migrants to this country—hard-working people no longer with me and yet with me always. They came, as so many like them did, at the invitation of the late first Earl of Stockton when he was Prime Minister.
In my working life as a human rights lawyer, first in the home department and subsequently outside it, I have seen time and again the manner in which Governments and politicians of all stripes have eroded the hard-won rights of refugees in particular, and how dog-whistle politics around immigration has toxified race relations and undermined race equality, even to the detriment of British people whose migration stories go multiple generations back. So these are issues as much of equality and common decency as of nationality and borders.
The Bill has a patriotic title. The use of the word “borders” is surprisingly colourful for parliamentary counsel: it could have been taken directly from a campaigning slogan. I have no objection to nationality or borders, but I must observe that neither Covid nor climate catastrophe respects either very much. A truly global Britain would cherish the refugee convention as a central pillar of the post-war international settlement once promoted by Britain and would not seek to dilute it. The Dunkirk spirit is about saving people in little boats, not turning them around. So soon after the still incompletely resolved Windrush scandal, we would be wise indeed to give the most anxious scrutiny to any two-tier system of rights to refuge or nationality.
Clause 9 has rightly caused outrage in civil society—if not sufficient media coverage or even debating time in the other place. To deprive a national of that status without notice should be beyond the contemplation of any civilised society that cares about rights and freedoms in general and due process in particular. A nation’s
citizens are its responsibility and are not to be dumped like waste, even or especially on the vague and subjective grounds of security, diplomatic relations or
“otherwise in the public interest.”
That the Government are bound by international law not to render people stateless ensures that this provision must inevitably be applied in a racist fashion, with the Executive determining without public scrutiny, judicial involvement or even notice to the individual concerned that they are of a category of British citizen who may potentially qualify for nationality somewhere else, regardless of whether such nationality has even been applied for, let alone granted. No wonder this provision has inspired fear and loathing in our minority communities in particular.
Even the subject heading of Clause 11 sends a chill to the bones, with its “Differential treatment of refugees”. To penalise and even criminalise desperate people in any way for the manner in which they make their escape from persecution to the UK is to violate the letter and the spirit of the refugee convention, which was in no small part the world’s apology for some of the darkest moments in the history of the last century. The Bill attempts to redefine Article 31, thereby ripping up years of interpretation by specialist judges so as to grant only second-class protection to the majority of refugees.
These are but two of the myriad objections to this measure. I say that as an advance apology to noble Lords opposite for the many long nights and longer nightmares to come.
5.18 pm