New Statesman has a piece about the creeping changes to the law that allow the government to strip people of their citizenship. These are the changes that I discussed
here.
(Not so) quick timeline of legislation related to depriving British people of their citizenship:
British Nationality Act 1981
British nationals can be deprived of citizenship if they have shown themselves "by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected towards Her Majesty", or "has, during any war in which Her Majesty was engaged, unlawfully traded or communicated with an enemy or been engaged in or associated with any business that was to his knowledge carried on in such a manner as to assist an enemy in that war" or "has, within the period of five years from the relevant date, been sentenced in any country to imprisonment for a term of not less than twelve months". Citizenship can only be deprived if keeping it has been determined to be "not conducive to the public good". The person must be given written notice of the reasons why they had been deprived of citizenship and must be given the right to appeal. The law did not require the person to have citizenship elsewhere except under the clause that allowed citizenship to be removed as a result of being sentenced to imprisonment. According to
this letter (Q20, p9] - PDF), Home Office figures showed that between 1949 and 1973 10 people had been deprived of their British citizenship and rendered stateless. According to this
government report (PDF), between 1973 and 2002 no-one had been denied citizenship.
Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002
This amended the 1981 act so that British nationals, whether born in the UK or elsewhere, could be deprived of citizenship if they had done anything "seriously prejudicial to the vital interests" of the UK or an overseas territory. They could not be made stateless and they must be given written notice of the reasons why they had been deprived of citizenship and given the right to appeal. What you have to do to be deprived of citizenship has changed. This act expanded who could be deprived of citizenship to those born in the UK as well as those born elsewhere but made it explicit that you could not be rendered stateless.
Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006
This amended the 1981 act so that British nationals could be deprived of citizenship if "the Secretary of State is satisfied that deprivation is conducive to the public good". Again, they could not be made stateless and they must be given written notice of the reasons why they had been deprived of citizenship and given the right to appeal. What you have to do to be deprived of citizenship has changed and was "met with criticism that the new wording reduced the threshold for making deprivation of citizenship orders" (
source - PDF)
Immigration Act 2014
This amended the 1981 act so that foreign-born British nationals could be deprived of their citizenship if "the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom, to become a national of such a country or territory". In other words, you no longer needed dual citizenship, just the prospect of being able to get citizenship elsewhere. As an aside this is also the act that removed protections for the
Windrush generation. It also "took away rights to appeal against immigration refusals of non-asylum and non-human rights based claims" and "allowed the Home Office to remove people from the UK without giving notice of when their removal would occur" [
source - PDF].
New Proposals
The Nationality and Borders Bill will remove the need to notify people under the following conditions (
p12 - PDF),
(a) the Secretary of State does not have the information needed to be able to give notice under that subsection,
(b) it would for any other reason not be reasonably practicable to give notice under that subsection, or
(c) notice under that subsection should not be given—
(i) in the interests of national security,
(ii) in the interests of the relationship between the United Kingdom and another country, or
(iii) otherwise in the public interest.
These are incredibly broad conditions and easy to exploit. The Home Office claims that they are to allow citizenship to be removed from people while they are overseas in conflict zones where informing them is either impossible or would reveal intelligence sources.
The New Statesman article looked at census records and calculated that,
Almost half of all Asian British people in England and Wales are likely to be eligible (50 per cent) [to be deprived of citizenship], along with two in five black Britons (39 per cent).
Though it's worth pointing out that this is already the case, the new legislation would only make it so that the British government doesn't have to tell them their citizenship has been removed.
I wanted to end by looking at the figures for citizenship deprivation. Home Office figures aren't easy to come by, and some contradict themselves. But I've been able to put together the following:
Number of people deprived of citizenship:
2006 - 1 (Source 1) or "less than 5" (Source 2)
2007 - 1 (Source 1) or 0 (Source 2)
2008 - 0 (Source 1) - confirmed in Source 2
2009 - 0 (Source 1) or "less than 5" (Source 2)
2010 - 4 (Source 1) or "less than 5" (Source 2)
2011 - 6 (Source 2) - confirmed in Source 2
2012 - 6 (Source 2) - confirmed in Source 2
2013 - 18 (Source 2) - confirmed in source 2
2014 - 23 (Source 2) - confirmed in source 2, or 4 (Source 3)
2015 - 19 (Source 2) - confirmed in source 2, or 5 (Source 4)
2016 - 14 (Source 5)
2017 - 104 (Source 5)
2018 - 21 (Source 6)
I cannot find any figures after 2018 and all the whatdotheyknow.com FOI requests for data that I've found have been rejected. I think the discrepancy for 2014 and 2015 may be that they are including deprivations due to fraudulent applications in the larger figures but I can't be sure. I have made an FOI request of my own asking for a breakdown of figures to try and understand this difference.
I think it's important to realise just how unprecedented the government's use of the deprivation legislation has been. This is a graph of the data (I know it's bad form to provide data in both table and graph form in the same piece but I can't provide the sources so easily in the graph). Where there's conflicting data I've chosen the higher figures.
- Deportations by year.jpg (20.02 KiB) Viewed 3379 times
If you've read this far, well done. I'm sorry this is so long, but I thought providing the background on the legislative creep and its consequences were important to understanding just how dangerous this new bill is. And remember, this is just one new clause. The bill is massive and is giving the government sweeping powers that they
will use. This bill is going to pass, there's no doubt about it, which means we have a very long fight on our hands to get the law changed, particularly as the bill will restrict what protesting can be done legally.
Source 1
Source 2
Source 3
Source 4
Source 5
Source 6
Source 7