Stripping British citizenship: the government’s new bill explained | Hacker News Reader

Stripping British citizenship: the government’s new bill explained

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42 pointsmooreds29 comments

The UK government is trying to make citizenship a political concept. Unless you support the government's ideology then you are an enemy of the state. But your citizenship != political ideology. British people are not the sum of the ruling government of the time. This is why you need a written constitution to protect citizens from oppressive governments.

> British people are not the sum of the ruling government of the time

Not true, the government has been voted in successive terms with majorities. There is a saying that the electorate is never wrong when they choose a government.

Effectively two party system means that no matter how badly the ruling party screws up and gets voted out, all they have to do is wait until the other party screws up and gives them the power back. Pendulum government and FPTP voting is not a real democracy.

The terrible voting system is mostly to blame here. The current government got a minority of the votes (43%) but that led to a huge majority in Parliament. (Obligatory CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo)

In 2019, their share was larger than any other party (Labour got 31%). Under which reasonably fair system would they not have ended up with a majority large enough to form a government? You may not like it, but the Tories were the choice of the UK population. And you may not like FPTP, but we had a referendum about switching to the Alternative Vote system in 2011—only 31% voted in favor.

Quite obviously they should have got about 43% of the seats. They might still have got a majority by teaming up with other parties to making a grouping of over 50%, but they would have had to moderate their policies for that. (Almost every other party in the election opposed a hard Brexit and wanted a second confirmatory referendum so that would have been different, and better).

There was indeed a referendum and predictably many voted against because it wasn't pure PR, not realising that this would later be used against them, as you are doing now. This doesn't change the fact that FPTP is objectively the worst form of democracy.

Immigrant here. They can already do this, infact they already have done this with Shamima Begum. By enshrining this in law it becomes a thing they can do with less notice now. That is all.

They will strip people of citizenship with or without this law.

This whole debate is merely a political one now.

The law has allowed the government to remove citizenship for decades. It's not new and this law does not change the government's powers in that regard. It merely makes it possible to remove citizenship without giving notice, something that was not possible previously.

(Shamima Begum is a terrorist sympathizer who left the UK to join ISIS. She is a traitor and the government did the right thing.)

Stripping someone’s citizenship sounds like a “tough penalty for the worst” kind of thing, but what is the actual point?

I get that an IS terrorist is not a nice person to have, but arguably as a country I’d rather be able to put them in my on prison than have less control over them. You could arbitrarily strip their rights anyway with a law, and can’t do worse than basic human rights, citizen or not.

My suspicion is that this is meant to be more of an “oops” law. Oh we mixed you up with a terrorist so here’s your citizenship gone. Ah well you can apply to have it reinstated in person in UK. Oh you can’t enter the country? Give us 6 months to think about it.

> Stripping someone’s citizenship sounds like a “tough penalty for the worst” kind of thing, but what is the actual point?

As a piece of prior art, the Soviet Union’s policy for revoking citizenship served as an implicit threat of “you’ll become unemployable, homeless, and not eligible for any and all social services up to and including emergency medicine if you gamble on being able to leave and lose”[1].

More recent policies, e.g. the current dual-citizenship French one, seem to be declarations in the vein of “even if you have achieved the coveted naturalized status, you’ll forever be second-class”.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otkaznik

I think you're tinfoiling a bit hard here. My guess is that this is just a populist move, you left the country to fight with ISIS, well guess what, we aren't paying to bring you back and don't feel the need to get your out of whatever horrible prison you're in.

The real question to me is what will Canada do. The terrorist in question is "Canadian" but iirc never set foot in Canada and is only asking for asylum because the UK stripped him from his citizenship. Now that is much more interesting because this creates a clash between that most Canadian would associate with citizenship (having lived a least a bit in Canada) and the law.

I’d agree it sounds tinfoily, but the Windrush scandal in the UK went along similar lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

TLDR is that people who had permanent right to live in the UK and arrived as children were forcibly deported to countries they never lived in, via a humiliating process.

The only clear reason for it was the principle of “hostile environment”, that is that life must be made difficult for illegal immigrants at every stage; went as far as people who were actually “legal”...

If those were truly their goals, they could just pass a law saying they won’t provide consular services or aid to those who fight for ISIS. Stripping citizenship isn’t necessary.

We're talking a system which had to be told by the courts that if the law requires to give somebody notice that the process to revoke citizenship was initiated, it can't count "we put the papers in their internal Home Office file" as "delivery of notice".

We're talking the system of the Windrush scandal, which only after intense pressure cost the Home secretary her job, and which two following holders of the position haven't managed to actually effectively implement the measures promised to attempt to fix the damage done.

Strong skepticism is sadly warranted.

>The real question to me is what will Canada do. The terrorist in question is "Canadian" but iirc never set foot in Canada and is only asking for asylum because the UK stripped him from his citizenship. Now that is much more interesting because this creates a clash between that most Canadian would associate with citizenship (having lived a least a bit in Canada) and the law.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadians_of_convenience

With Priti Patel's involvement, this is almost certainly what you say in the last paragraph. The most pernicious, malicious minister we've ever had.

As the article hints, I think it's more to do with a tension between the Government and the courts. Home Secretaries are frequently blocked from removing citizenship or deporting terrorists/terrorist sympathisers by the courts, largely because of human rights legislation.

Another way of writing that is that the courts prevent the government from taking unlawful actions. The tension is between the government and the law.

Yes, but that law is made by Parliament and the government has asked Parliament to change it.

Terrorism is a pretext. Much like almost every other bill passed in the name of terrorism this one is about raw power. 99%+ of its intended use will be against non terrorists.

I suspect they'll eventually use it to deport naturalized citizens convicted of pretty much any crime, which will scare the rest into line.

> the government’s assertion that these powers are rarely used, and only against the “very worst”

To me, this is without exception a gigantic red flag.

Further details of the Nationality and Borders Bill can be found here, including information about the right to appeal.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nationality-and-b...

Is this in context of people with other citizenships to fallback on or could it be used to make a british national completely stateless?

It is the former. Countries are not allowed to make someone stateless and the UK bill in question explicitly states that this can only be applied to someone with other citizenships available to them. There are different types of birthright citizenship, jus soli (by soil) and jus sanguinis (by blood) where the former depends on where you were born and the latter depends on your parents. The US recognizes both, but jus soli is very much a new world thing while in most of Europe, Asia, and Africa your citizenship depends on the citizenship of your parents. In the case that is the centerpiece of TFA the person being stripped of their citizenship grew up in the UK but her parents were immigrants and she also has Bandladeshi citizenship available to her.

It says available to them, not that they have to have another citizenship or that they can actually obtain one. All the government has to do is declare they're eligible regardless of what the other country says.

For the same reason that, in this case, the UK cannot make someone stateless it is not possible for Bangladesh to do so either. Her Bangladeshi citizenship is by blood and cannot be revoked while her UK citizenship is by naturalization and is therefore relatively easy to remove. This, of course, is discussing things from a rational/legal point of view which is really not the one that is important here; from a perspective of pure power politics the UK is the stronger party in this case so can simply declare a particular reality to be true and there is nothing the others can do about it.

> Countries are not allowed to make someone stateless

The Indian government begs to differ

https://scroll.in/article/935337/detention-in-assam-a-baby-a...

A beuracrat decides your citizenship based on quotas set by higher ups. Your birth certificate/passport is insufficient to prove citizenship

Who is the photo of?

Priti Patel, our Home Minister. The champagne socialists' biggest enemy after Boris because she doesn't behave like a brown person should.

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