Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I fear that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, did not grasp the content of what I said in my earlier intervention on the relevant amendments, because I was being extremely cautious. Perhaps I may answer his question very directly. You may have a perverse outcome, and you may go down a road that you do not sincerely believe in. However, all of us in this Chamber volunteer three or four days a week in all sorts of things—accepting a dinner invitation to be a speaker when we do not particularly want to do it and scratching our heads to think what we might say or do, or moving amendments where we are under pressure from our parties or from lobby groups towards which we feel well inclined. We often undertake activities about which we are not entirely convinced. My personal experience has been that when I look at the detail of things with which I am unfamiliar, when I work with people to whom I have not been exposed previously and when I venture into areas where I have no expertise, I have often developed a passion for those people and causes. I learn through my interaction with other people outside my scope of knowledge, friendships and employment. They are amazing people. So volunteering often has the opposite effect to that mentioned, particularly for migrants and newcomers to this country, because it provides the opportunity to work alongside other people who are not newcomers. Newcomers, particularly from my part of the world, are often ghettoised. If you are a woman, you will be ghettoised in your home and with your extended family, many of whom live with you. You will be expected to perform conventional forms of daughter-in-lawship or sister-in-lawship, or whatever else are the bases of your being there. You are seldom permitted time away from those duties, which I consider often to be unpaid domestic chores, even to do English lessons. You will live in a street full of people similar to you and you will have very few opportunities to go out of your ambit, which is often that of the village from which you previously came, and interact with other people. An incentive to volunteer might convince your husband that you might be let out of the house to do it. You might be given a bit of rope to be an adult and make up your own mind about what you wish to do. You might even learn a few words of the language while you are at it. From volunteering in a legal advice centre or a women’s refuge, you might discover how the law works in the country for which you are applying for citizenship. Having spoken to men and women who live in those communities, I only wish that we could create the avenues for them to go out and volunteer, because it is quite often the community that holds them back and keeps them segregated. Unusually, therefore, I am not at one with the noble Lord, Lord Judd, on this matter. I urge the Minister to desist from agreeing to the amendment. He will have heard expressed during the previous hour and a half the divergent views on, and strong reservations about, the Bill. If we were to introduce an element of partisanship by including trade unions—the other side will say, "In that case, why not also political parties?"—we would immediately kill off any good that he is trying to achieve in the Bill, because it will not get through. I think that he will recognise that trade unions and political parties would introduce an element of incentivisation that may not be construed by others to be just for the good of active citizenship; it may be construed as a means of their recruiting members to their cause and making them partisan. If political parties were to come into the frame, you would have another problem. We know of many migrants who, once they have come here, want to close the door behind them. It is a common phenomenon for migrants to say, "I’m here now; we shouldn’t let any more of those bloody foreigners in"—I hope that your Lordships will forgive my unparliamentary language. What would we do if joining political parties was considered active citizenship and the BNP managed to recruit a large number of members as a result? Extremist parties might benefit, too. My noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire mentioned religious groups whose political ethos we may not like. I would have thought that trade union and political party activity was ruled out because you would have to pay a membership fee. The Bill states that you cannot have financial interaction of any sort. Payment of a membership fee for passive citizenship, whereby you have joined a political party, you carry the card in your pocket, but you do nothing more than that, is not what active citizenship is about at all. I urge the Minister on that basis to resist the amendment at this stage until we have a clearer idea of where we going.