The Liberal Democrats are to debate the government’s power to deprive British citizens of their citizenship.

Background: The British Nationality Act 1981 amended by the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Acts 2002 and 2006 gives the Home Secretary the power to deprive people of their British citizenship. This power was unused before 2002, but in recent years has seen a huge increase, up to 107 people being deprived of citizenship in 2017.

Principle: This power is monstrously illiberal, both for the huge imbalance of power it gives to the state over the individual and for creating two classes of citizen, those who can and those who cannot by right of birth be deprived of citizenship. British Citizenship should be a promise that goes both ways. There are huge barriers placed in the way of people seeking to become British Citizens – not least the obvious Life in the UK test introduced by the last Labour government. Once people have passed those tests, it is illiberal to treat them differently to any other citizen.

The proposed motion suggests a considerable curtailment of this power, but the radical and liberal response to this should be to just abolish the power altogether.

We will be making a clear statement of our belief that citizenship rights should be a permanent protection, and just as importantly preventing future governments from making creeping extensions of the power of the sort we have seen under recent governments.

Therefore, we propose the following amendment:

F34 Deprivation of Citizenship

Proposer: Richard Flowers
Summator: James Baillie

Delete lines 43 to 64, and replace with "abolished".
At line 65, renumber Conference Calls for “7.” to “2.”

The effect of this is to replace the existing Conference Calls for with:
Conference Calls for:
1. The power to deprive someone of their British citizenship to be abolished.
2. The UK to ratify the 1997 European Convention on Nationality.