CITIZENSHIP: FROM RIGHT TO PRIVILEGE > they need the British Embassy’s protection because they have been arrested and possibly ill-treated or threatened with ill-treatment (such as torture or execution) by the country’s authorities. Those affected Those potentially affected by the clause include: > any British citizen, whether born British, registered or naturalised, who has another citizenship; > any naturalised British citizen with access to another citizenship. > According to the New Statesman, up to six million citizens have or have access to a second citizenship. > In practice, those most likely to be affected are BME citizens, two in five of whom have or have access to another citizenship.6 Public outrage The contempt which the clause embodied - for those citizens who would be affected, and for basic, centuries-old principles of natural justice demanding that those affected by decisions know about them – shocked many. Fear and anger erupted on social media, in the press,7 in parliament, where Imran Hussein MP asked prime minister Boris Johnson ‘When are you coming for me?’,8 and in MPs’ constituency surgeries. Activists and community groups raised the alarm, with over 300,000 people signing a parliamentary petition to remove the clause from the bill, and several organisations including Reprieve, the Muslim Association of Britain, Rights and Security International, and Status Now for All, mobilised to oppose clause 9. Ministers were at pains to point out that the change would affect only a tiny handful of people, that resort to deprivation was very rare. Yet, although the clause didn’t change the criteria for the removal of citizenship – who could lose citizenship and for what sort of conduct – it brought home to a wider public how precarious and fragile British citizenship is for Black and Muslim citizens. For them, citizenship has become ‘a privilege, not a right’, as a result of changes brought in since 2002 whereby anyone with another citizenship, even if they were born and brought up in Britain and know no other country, can lose their British citizenship if deprivation is deemed ‘conducive to the public good’. The ‘deportation logic’ on which the deprivation powers are based – get rid of them, regardless of family ties, or how long they have lived here, if they cause trouble, or can’t prove their right to be here – is the same logic that deprived the Windrush generation of their livelihoods, their homes, and 6 7 8 Ben van der Merwe, ‘British citizenship of six million people could be jeopardised by Home Office plans’, New Statesman, 1 December 2021. See eg, ‘I was born here but could be sent “back to where I came from” with no warning’, Daily Mirror, 9 December 2021. Huffington Post, 1 December 2021. 5