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British Nationality Bill
28 JANUARY 1981
Hong Kong of the strict provisions of clauses 13(1) and 46(2)
not been given sufficient weight. I hope that
that will be considered.
There is continuing concern about the provisions covering nationality of children of British business men born in Hong Kong. The Bill proposes that only if one parent is a British citizen by birth in the United Kingdom, or is a Crown servant, or is an employee of a British firm with headquarters in England, is citizenship granted automatically to children born abroad. There is provision for the Home Secretary to make exceptions and to grant British citizenship in other cases. However, many British business.men whose families have been abroad for more than one generation were not born in Britain.
It seems anachronistic to encourage business men to go overseas to establish companies that increase Britain's overseas trade and then, by introducing the clause, to raise a question mark over the citizenship of their children. It would be possible to overcome the problem by allowing in such cases the children to be registered as British citizens in the same way as the children of diplomats and Service men living abroad.
I do not wish the comparatively narrow but important problems of the expatriate living abroad to distract from my main concern with the Bill, which is the reaction to it by the people of Hong Kong. Feelings are running particularly strongly among young people in Hong Kong, who believe, however mistakenly, that the prime intention of the Bill is to turn them into second-class citizens in the eyes not only of the British but of other nationalities with whom they come into contact.
These young people clearly see the influence that we can have over their future. They wish to contribute towards the maintenance and strengthening of economic and cultural links between Hong Kong and Britain. They can play a significant role in building up Britain's trading position not only in Hong Kong and with China but in the Pacific basin as a whole, where economic expansion is on a scale unequalled in the rest of the world. In short, they recognise that their destiny is linked with that of Britain. Against that background it would be folly to risk the alienation of the citizens of Hong Kong in the course of what is meant to be no more than a tidying up of out-of- date nationality laws.
5.30 pm
Mr. David Steel (Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles): My colleagues and I consider this to be a thoroughly bad Bill and one that we shall oppose at all stages. I hope that the hon. Member for Howden (Sir P. Bryan) will forgive me if I do not comment on the problems of Hong Kong. His speech illustrated the point made by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) and others that the Bill contains so many specific complexities that it should properly be considered by a Seclect Committee under the new procedure so that representatives of communities, such as Hong Kong and Gibraltar, can give evidence.
It was an unfortunate but perhaps, in some ways, a significant printer's error that the first copies of the Bill were issued with the title "Restricted British Nationality Bill".
I thought that the Home Secretary, for whom I have always had a soft spot, was at his most sweepingly unconvincing in his speech. His fondness for categorising citizens in the Bill has extended to categorising Members
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of the House into major figures and problems. I was reluctant to intervene in his speech because I did not know whether to be offended or otherwise if he did not give way to me under either of those categories.
The criticism of the Bill in principle, before I come to the details, is that it is the latest in a long line of rather shabby measures which are reducing basic rights and discriminating against ethnic minorities, stretching from the 1968 Act through the 1971 Act and various rules and regulations. It is no answer for Conservative Members below the Gangway to say that the Bill is not really racist because occasionally a white person is caught in the same unfair discriminatory net. That is the only argument that they produce to try to counter the charge that the Bill is racist, because it is racist in its effect and in the implementation of its terms.. The people discriminated against are overwhelmingly from ethnic minorities. The Bill is an attempt to massage our nationality legislation to suit immigration policy. The statement made by the Leader of the House last Thursday, which has already been quoted, underlines that fact.
I listened with great interest to the speech by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook. In 1968, a number of members of the Labour Party, including, to his credit, the present Leader of the Opposition, voted against the legislation. The right hon. Member for Sparkbrook was not among those who voted against it. He voted for it. Although I admire, as I always do, his dialectic skill in analysing the difference between the Labour Government's Green Paper and this Government's White Paper, I am left wondering, given his consistent views in recent years, which I respect and admire, where he was in the Cabinet when that Green Paper was being concocted. It is no argument to say that it was a document for discussion. That is what a Green Paper is. But Governments do not put into documents for discussion policies which they have ruled out. Indeed, in parts of that Green Paper, specific proposals were ruled out. Some of the principles that have appeared in the Bill stem undoubtedly from the Labour Government's Green Paper.
The Liberal Party produced a document in response to the Green Paper at that time. Our starting position was that there should be a positive assertion of what nationality and citizenship mean.
"The guiding principle of any new statute should be that it preserves and wherever possible enhances the freedom of the individual. It should take as its starting point the needs of the individual rather than the convenience of the state. Nationality is a legal tie, conferring rights and obligations on the holder. It should not be entirely within the powers of the executive to confer or withdraw it on the arbitrary assessment of a person's degree of connection with the state. On no account should anyone be deprived of the citizenship he currently enjoys, unless he is given some other citizenship more appropriate to his needs." That is a direct quote from the document that we produced, and on that test the Bill fails.
We welcome the provision which allows women the same rights as men to pass down citizenship and to give foreign husbands the same rights as foreign wives to register for citizenship. However, there will still not be true sex equality until the immigration rules are changed, since they make it difficult for some British girls to bring ***foreign husbands into Britain for settlement, and
settlement is a prerequisite for citizenship.
We deplore the innovation, highlighted. by the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook, that some people born in Britain will not automatically be British citizens. It is
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