CITIZENSHIP: FROM RIGHT TO PRIVILEGE > Many UK & Colonies citizens were turned away when they arrived here, and ‘shuttlecocked’ around various airports; > The European Commission on Human Rights ruled, in a case brought by 25 excluded citizens, that their exclusion constituted race discrimination which in the circumstances amounted to degrading treatment;33 > Instead of restoring entry rights to UK & Colonies citizens, the government rewrote citizenship law in 1981, so that only UK & Colonies citizens with UK ancestry became ‘full’ British citizens with rights of entry and residence in the UK; > Under the 1981 Act, the UK & Colonies citizens with connections to a colony or former colony became ‘British Overseas’ and ‘British Dependent Territories’ citizens with no right to enter the UK. The Windrush scandal of 2018, leading to the resignation of a home secretary, was another reminder of the careless betrayal of former colonial citizens: > The Windrush generation arrived from 1948 onwards as ‘British subjects: citizens of the UK and Colonies’; > Many lost their citizenship without realising it, on Jamaican and Trinidadian independence in 1962 and Barbadian in 1966; > Their right of permanent residence under the 1971 Immigration Act turned out to have been written in ink invisible to the officials administering ‘hostile environment’ policies in the 2000s, until the revelations of destitution, detention and deportation of thousands.34 In May 2022, a leaked Home Office-commissioned report which had been suppressed for a year, The historical roots of the Windrush scandal, written for dissemination to all 35,000 Home Office employees, found that ‘during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK.’35 Access to citizenship has been narrowed in other ways too: > The 1981 Act also removed the right of those born in the UK to automatic British citizenship, granting it only to those with a British parent or one who had settled status; > Those born in the UK to parents who later become British or settled, and those born in the UK and living in the UK for ten years, have the right to register as British, but must now pay over £1,000 in fees to exercise that right – which the Supreme Court recently held lawful despite acknowledging that it was unaffordable;36 > The 2002 Act imposed more requirements for naturalisation including English language and life tests; 33 East African Asians v United Kingdom, 1973. 34 See The embedding of state hostility: A background paper on the Windrush Scandal, IRR, 2019. 35 See ‘Windrush scandal caused by “30 years of racist immigration laws” – report’, Guardian, 29 May 2022. 36 R (O and Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens) v SoSHD, Supreme Court, February 2022. 12