My Lords, it is a privilege to speak after the noble Baroness. I wondered how I might find a way of defending this Bill in what I suspected
would be a hostile environment, but my anxiety was alleviated when I heard the introductory speech of my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar who made a compelling case for the broad principles on which the Bill rests. I was wholly with him on that.
The starting principle of international law is that no country is under an obligation to grant admission to any non-national. Admittedly, that obligation is moderated by international treaty conventions that we have entered into. I was glad to hear my noble friend say that we were going to adhere to the convention on refugees. It does not, of course, mean that all irregular arrivals are refugees and those who are not should be removed.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, and various other noble Lords have appealed to our common humanity as the basis on which we should be constructing our immigration law. While we all respect and acknowledge the obligations that arise from our common humanity, that is to get things the wrong way round, because we also have a moral obligation to our own people who live here, in part because we claim and exercise the exclusive right to act on their behalf in this area. I regard that as a prior and balancing moral right. In fact, I would say that the purpose of immigration law is the protection of the stability and welfare of our own society and that our obligations under common humanity are a constraint on how we implement that law, rather than confusing it with what its purpose is.
However, there is an area in the Bill that causes me deep concern: the provisions allowing for the removal of British citizenship in even more administratively curtailed circumstances than exist at the moment. Various noble Lords on the Labour Benches have objected to this—the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, gave us a wonderfully distracting pointer to legislation from 1914—but they should note that it was actually a Labour Government, with the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, that for the first time introduced the power to deprive British citizens, by birth or descent, of their nationality, provided they had a second nationality that they might fall back on. That had never existed before. Once that door was opened—once that principle was given up—all this complaint about what are effectively subsequent tidying-up exercises is, in my view, pure hypocrisy.
My concern is different. I object to the removal of citizenship in any circumstances because I have a more conservative—some might say hopelessly quixotic—view of what nationality actually means and should mean for us. My conception of British nationality is much more profound than a mere travel document. It is—or should be—a permanent and reciprocal bond of loyalty on the one hand and protection on the other. It is not a driving licence to be taken away if you clock up the wrong number of points; it goes to your identity. When you lose your nationality, you do not just lose your identity papers, you lose your identity. It really is not a driving licence or administrative ticket.
I say this is quixotic, but that bond is a real and lived experience. When, in the same legislation in 2002, the Labour Government introduced citizenship ceremonies, I thought they would be rather tacky, un-British, American sorts of things—but actually,
when I saw people coming time and again to my own town hall when I was a councillor, and coming in a sort of festive, family spirit, almost like they were coming to a wedding, I saw then how real that bond can be between citizen and nation. That is what a Conservative Government should be building up; we should not be pursuing and entrenching this cynical Labour ploy. Especially following Brexit, we should be building up and strengthening the bond between citizen and nation, whereas it seems to me that this provision goes only to dissolve it further.
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