The history of British citizenship is a history of state racism – from the differential treatment of ‘non-patrial’ citizens who acquired citizenship through a colony rather than through British ancestry, which led to the ‘East African Asians’ scandal of 1968, and the quiet withdrawal of British citizenship from former colonial citizens when their countries became independent, which led to the Windrush scandal, through the dilution of the right of citizenship by birth in the UK (ius soli) in 1981, to current laws which apply the logic of deportation and exclusion to black and brown citizens. British citizens are divided into those claiming only British citizenship, who can never lose it whatever they do, and those who, although they may have been born here, have another citizenship and can lose British citizenship on the say-so of a minister. The latter group, with a second-class, disposable, contingent citizenship, are mostly from ethnic minorities – and the changes to citizenship law which have created these classes of citizenship were brought in to target British Muslims of South Asian and Middle Eastern heritage. While the government claims that only those whose actions pose grave threats to national security, or who have committed abhorrent crimes, will lose their citizenship, the division of citizens into those with secure and insecure status affects vastly more people.
Philip Hensher, ‘It’s wrong to strip Abu Hamza of his citizenship’, Independent, 3 April 2003 (reissued 8 December 2013).
3.
https://irr.org.uk/article/removing-clause-9-and-beyond/.The IRR had been asked in 2021 to prepare a report on the deprivation of citizenship and the public sector equality duty as part of the appeal against the revocation of the citizenship of a number of young British Muslim women of South Asian heritage, who had travelled to Syria, often as children, to join ISIS.
4.
Now section 10 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022.
5.
In law, documents are legally served if they are sent to the person’s last known address, and do not have to be given personally to the individual affected.
6.
Ben van der Merwe, ‘British citizenship of six million people could be jeopardised by Home Office plans’, New Statesman, 1 December 2021.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken Books, 1951), Chapter 9.
13.
Trop v Dulles, US Supreme Court (1957) 356 US 86 (Chief Justice Warren).
14.
British Nationality Act 1981, s 40. The 1948 British Nationality Act deprivation provisions (s 20) were in similar terms, with an additional ground of living abroad for more than seven years while failing to register the intention to remain British.
15.
By amending s 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981.
Matthew Gibney, ‘Should citizenship be conditional? Denationalisation and liberal principles’, RSC working paper 75, Refugee Studies Centre, 2011, p. 22.
See the work of Professor John Holmwood, in particular (with Theresa O’Toole) Countering Extremism in British Schools? The truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018) and the New York Times podcast, The Trojan Horse Affair Podcast on the affair, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/podcasts/trojan-horse-affair.html#listen.
Human Rights impacts of policies aimed at preventing violent extremism, A/HRC/43/46, 2020, para 32.
52.
Covering Islam: how the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 157, cited in K. Moore et al., Images of Islam: the representation of British Muslims in the national print news media, 2000-2008 (Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, July 2008), p. 6. See also Matt Carr, ‘You are now entering Eurabia’, Race & Class 48, no. 1 (2006), pp. 1–22.
‘Britishness and Muslim-ness: differentiation, demarcation and discrimination in political discourse’, Identity Papers: A Journal of British and Irish Studies 1, no. 2 (2015).
57.
Moore et al., Images of Islam: the representation of British Muslims in the national print news media, 2000-2008.
58.
Katy Sian, Ian Law and S. Sayyid, ‘The media and Muslims in the UK’, Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies, Leeds University, March 2012.
59.
Aisha Gani and Tom Phillips, ‘Inaccurate or misleading stories about Muslims have been shared hundreds of thousands of times this year’, Buzzfeed, 16 August 2017.
60.
Muslim Council of Britain, The Impact of Prevent on Muslim Communities, February 2016.
61.
Copsey et al., Anti-Muslim hate crime and the far Right (Middlesbrough: Teesside University/TellMAMA, July 2013); TellMAMA annual reports.
62.
Imran Awan and Irene Zempi, ‘We fear for our lives’ (Birmingham City University, Nottingham Trent University, TellMAMA, October 2015).
63.
Abrams et al., Developing a national barometer of prejudice and discrimination in Britain, EHRC Research Paper 119, October 2018.
