My Lords, most of the Bill has focused on those who are trying to arrive in this country and whose status is uncertain and contested. However, this amendment is about our attitudes to British citizens whose status is agreed and lawful and should be uncontentious. Yet parts of the Bill seem to be ambiguous about the rights and status of some British citizens. I remind noble Lords that British citizens are from a range of ethnic backgrounds, with many from first, second and third-generation immigrant backgrounds. As a society, these factors are and should be irrelevant. We are all fully British, and it is what we have in common that matters.
Perhaps it is also worth noting that British society in 2022 is not endemically racist. It has changed over recent decades. When I was a young activist in Coventry, Newcastle and then Bradford, gangs of racist thugs regularly hunted down and beat up immigrants, and often the police turned a blind eye. Workplace discrimination was also widespread. It changed because British citizens, often workers, enacted the slogan “Black and white, unite and fight!” and changed the climate and atmosphere—and, indeed, laws and policies—in this country. In other words, people came together beyond racial differences and created a better society. Citizens came together.
I worry that elements of the Bill undermine those achievements and degrade citizenship. But I also worry that contributions opposing the Bill—I have listened to a lot more of the debates than I have spoken in, which is uncharacteristic of me but I wanted to listen and learn—have sometimes done British citizens a disservice, somehow dismissing perfectly reasonable concerns about, for example, the migrant boats or the lack of control over borders as a populist dog whistle, and implying that British citizens are driven by anti-foreigner or even racist sentiments.
One of the reasons I support this important amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is that I am keen that we use the Bill to show a commitment to a positive citizenship agenda and, as has previously been argued by the noble Baroness, that we have a public debate and discussion on it in positive terms.
As I explained in relation to Clause 9 in Part 1 of the Bill, I am keen that we bolster the virtues of citizenship and I worry that part of this Bill undermines citizenship in a divisive way. This amendment allows
us to check whether this Bill causes any unintended damage, but also more proactively encourages a public debate on the equal rights and duties of all citizens.
Under a range of circumstances, people can work, live and study in the UK without becoming citizens, but for those who actively chose to become citizens or have chosen legally to become citizens, surely our aims should be to ensure that they are fully welcomed and integrated into the social fabric of the UK. Indeed, the amendment mentions social cohesion and it seems to me that the common bond of citizenship is hugely important in 2022, as our society has rarely been more fragmented or atomised.
Despite this, aspects of this Bill and a range of government policies seem to indicate that it is uncertain whether British citizenship is even a good thing. We have heard how the cost of citizenship is prohibitively expensive—the highest cost in the western world, in fact. I am glad that is being addressed. The process is so complicated that most people need lawyers to help them to apply to be citizens.
The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, pointed out that citizenship ceremonies—one of the good ideas of recent years—were joyous occasions. I think they want to be, but they often take place in neglected, hidden-away local council offices, while other countries celebrate them in iconic historic buildings and involve local communities, school pupils and residents in welcoming new citizens. Those kinds of ideas, as suggested by British Future’s excellent report Barriers to Britishness, I think the Government should take up.
Then there are those soulless multiple-choice citizenship tests that reduce British values to a box-ticking exercise and hardly encourage serious discussions of, let alone commitment to, shared national values. One problem, I suspect, is that we as a society are no longer confident that we know what British values are. On that issue, one trend we must avoid is that often when we discuss immigration, citizenship and social coherence, there is an implication that immigrants becoming citizens leads to lack of social cohesion; that they fail somehow to integrate into civil society or identify with the nation state.
I dispute this. So much evidence shows—and anecdotally I know—that many of those immigrant citizens are more likely to identify with the UK and be patriotic than, for example, your average activist student or a decolonising academic in British institutions, from universities to museums. That might be a bit glib, but I think we might all agree that British values are highly contested at home and have got nothing to do with immigration.
I would argue that recasting the project of collective citizenry with an emphasis on what all citizens have in common is a very important and positive move. That requires treating all British citizens as equal. One challenge to this is the present fashion for identity politics which fuels divisions, viewing citizens through the prism of ethnic and cultural boxes. This has led to the de facto treatment of individuals from minority groups not as citizens in their own right but simply as members of a particular ethnic background. This has led to well-documented problems of parallel communities in many towns and cities, and more recently this
identity ideology has morphed into the racialising of politics and, for example, the absolutely unhelpful accusations of white privilege promiscuously thrown at citizens just because of their skin colour.
Surely what we need is a model of citizenship that cuts across this insidious focus on ethnicity or skin colour. It is one reason that I fear that the controversial Clause 9 in Part 1 has doubled down on the notion of tiered citizenship, with many citizens feeling insecure and that they are being treated as second-class citizens. British citizens from immigrant backgrounds fear that this Bill itself is racialising their experience.
This amendment would allow a fresh and positive reassertion of the idea that citizenship in the UK, unlike in other countries, once legally and lawfully acquired, is a permanent and inviolable right. It is not a privilege and it is not provisional; all British citizens are equal. This will undoubtedly help us tackle the fraying of social solidarity. This seems especially pertinent when we think of the boost that British citizens gave to the British democratic system when they voted to take back control. National sovereignty, if it means nothing else, is about creating the real living bonds of a British citizenry who are proud to be part of the United Kingdom. I hope the Government will seize the positive aspects of this amendment to improve their Bill and ensure British citizenship for everyone.