Why we must fight Tories'

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Angry picket of Timothy Raison in Rochdale last month The British Nationality Bill is an immense and complicated document, 62 pages long. We are printing here an interview given to Socialist Press by John Tilley, Labour MP for Lambeth Central, and one of the experts on this racialist and sexist measure which the Thatcher government has introduced.

The Bill has now entered its Committee stage in the House of Commons and will be intensively discussed there for at least three months. John Tilley will 'What are the main changes which the Bill will bring about in the law?

I think the purpose of the Bill is to replace the 1948 Nationality Act for • two main reasons: first, that Act gave people in Britain, indeed people throughout the British Empire one single citizenship-of the United Kingdom and Colonies.

What this Bill seeks to do is to give a clear British citizenship to people connected with Britain and separate citizenships for those who are in the colonies and those people who are in many ways the sort of jetsam of empire, the East African Asians who are stranded at the moment, not able to get into Britain.

That is the first major change in the law.

The second major objective of the Bill is to recognise that the 1948 Act has been amended something like 40 times since then and has made nationality law a mess.

The major amendments, of course, are the 1962, 1968 and 1971 Immigration Acts which restricted the rights of people from various parts of the empire, and particularly black people from the empire and the Commonwealth from coming into Britain.

We in the Labour Party support the idea that there should for this reason be a new nationality law; but we feel that this Act is really another. Immigration Act which bolsters up the racism and sexism of earlier Acts without providing a good basis for nationality.

There were some proposals under the Labour government. How does the Tory Bill differ from those?

The Labour government Green Paper was a discussion document which aired a lot of the possibilities: about the Act and its review. I thought, and many groups did, that some of those possibilities were racist, discriminatory and unfair.

Some of the worst aspects of the Green Paper have been dropped such as the possibility that dual nationality would no longer be aliowed. But the Tories have also put in things which weren't in the Green We are not defending the Green Paper. Even though it was only a discussion document, I don't think it is someare is a for and are be one of the leading Labour spokespeople.

Socialist Press agrees with much of what John Tilley says about this Bill, though we do not believe that despite improvements, Labour's immigration policy has yet fully thrown off the reactionary nature it has shown in the past.

We will soon print a review of Labour's Citizenship and Immigration document.

Meanwhile John Tilley here provides a very clear guide to the provisions of the Bill on which the labour movement needs to be much more fully informed in order to take up an effective fight against it.

thing that the Labour Party should be in any way proud of. Party policy now is a long way the Labour away from the Green Paper. What categories of people will be most adversely affected if the provisions of the Bill become law?

I think there are two approaches to that question. The first one is to say that everyone in Britain is going to be badly affected because the Bill is going to harm race relations in general.

In terms of the injustices done to particular groups of individuals, there are really three categories I would pick out.

First of all, as i said, some children born in Britain will not be British because their parents. were not legally and permanently settled here. That means the children of students who are here, people on work permits, people who are declared to be illegal immigrants -even though they may be declared illegal entrants years after they originally came in.

Those children in many cases going to be stateless. There very complicated procedure them to acquire nationality I think that many of them going to fail to do so.

Making children born Britain stateless for the first time in British history is a major injustice in terms of individuals.

The second group who miss out are the Commonwealth citizens-people who came largely from the black Commonwealth-who have a right under existing British law to register as British citizens; they don't have to pass tests for naturalisation, they have an automatic right to British citizenship when they apply for it.

Those people will only have that right for a couple of years more and then it will be gone.

And the third group-and I suppose this is the worst of allare the East African Asians.

Something like 70,000 who are in East African countries now have gone to India.

These are people who, when their countries became independent were told, promised, by: Britain that, if they kept their British passport, they could stay as British citizens and that they could have the right of entry into Britain. That right, of course, was taken away in 1968 by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act that the Labour government passed.

What this Bill does is to take away the passport as well, because they will become something called British Overseas Citizens, which means they will have no rights at all-no rights of entry, no rights to live anywhere; they can't transmit it to their children, and their children in some cases will become stateless.

Take the example of Malawi: an East African Asian family in Malawi-their children when this Bill goes into law will be stateless because this Bill says quite clearly that a child must have one parent of African origin in order to be a Malawi citizen.

Those people-where they are now their children will be stateless; and I believe that this is a preliminary to the Tories using even the limited entry voucher system under which small numbers of East African Asians are coming into the country now.

Also among, those who are particularly hard hit of this group are those who went to India.

A lot of them went to India when they were driven out of East Africa (mainly through the activities of Amin) on the basis of a promise that they would sometime be allowed into Britain.

I pick out those three but there are lots of other little groups all over the world who suffer as well but those are I think the worst hit.

Raison That supports what you said earlier on about the Bill being racist. You also said it perpetuates the sexism which was in the Green Paper. In what sense is it sexist?

It's very interesting because the Tories will not accept that it is sexist. We acknowledge that.

156315 some sexual discrimination which existed before is removed in the Bill-for instance, a woman can now transmit citizenship by descent abroad.

But that makes it all the worse that the Bill actually introduces a new sexism by taking rights away from women in the field of marriage. At present a non-citizen woman Who marries a citizen man has an immediate and automatic right to become a British citizen.

Now she would have to wait for three years before she could apply for British citizenship. The Tories say that that brings women into line with men; that removes: discrimination because men at the moment have to wait five years. We say that taking rights away from women is no form of progress.

It would be unacceptable even if they did have equality elsewhere-which they clearly don't.

Another way in which the Bill maintains a sexist bias is that illegitimate children will only be able to acquire the right to citizenship through the mother.

Foreign women for example who have children in this country-if those women are not legally and permanently settled-whether the man, the father of that child was a fully fledged British citizen will do no good in establishing citizenship for that child.

In that sense it perpetuates the burden of illegitimacy which inevitably is borne by the mother as well as by the child. So it continues sexual discrimination.

What were the concessions which were made by Whitelaw the other week and do they have any significance?

Yes, they do. One was a major one and an absolute one Previously the Bill as printed child born abroad, could only be transmitted by a citizen who was born in this country, not a citizen who was naturalised or registered.

What that meant was simply this: if say a British couple were born in Britain and went to a Common Market country, say Belgium, and had a child that child would be British. If, however, a couple who were born in Trinidad but as children had come to this country and had been registered as British citizens, by their parents, 'paid taxes here, obeyed the laws here and so on, that is had been full British citizens here-if that couple had gone to the Common Market country for example and had had a child, the child would have been stateless, because they couldn't pass on their citizenship because they were only naturalised or registered:

The other group that would have lost out on that is Asian women because there is a perfectly understandable tradition among young Asian women to go home to their home village in the sub-continent, when their first child is due, simply as I understand it, to be with their mothers-a perfectly normal, indeed international, tendency.

But if those women had only been registered as British citizens then if their kids were born back in Bangla Desh, even if they were only going to be there a few months, then those children wouldn't have been British citizens.

That point, which we hammered hard, has been conceded totally by the government; and now citizenship by descent is irrespective of how the parent acquired citizenship so those children will now be full British citizens.

The other concession is a minor one. It says that if a child who was stateless at birth because he or she was born in Britain to parents not legally or permanently settled then, when that child reaches the age of ten, if he or she had lived continuously in this country with only a maximum of 90 days in each of those ten years out of the country, the child would then have the right to citizenship. = Clearly that's a concession, but it's a very minor one because there "are so many hurdles that a child would have to pass to qualify.

Whitelaw What do you think is the overall political objective of the Tories in introducing. the Bill at this stage? How much are they making concessions to racialist forces to their right as well as within their own ranks?

I think they are. Obviously it's difficult to know how far this has been thought out by individual Tories; but there's no doubt that before the General Election when they were elected they promised a whole shopping list of racialist measures, particularly by Whitelaw is his Leicester speech in 1978.

And partly as a result of that, partly as a result of Thatcher's remarks. about "swamping', they got a big slice of what you might call the racialist vote. I think that contributed to the decline of the National Front vote.

I don't think people stopped being racialist; I think a lot of them voted Tory. The Tories feel electorally that they have to keep assuaging that group. How do you see the possibility of opposing the bill, both inside and outside Parliament?

Obviously, the first thing we had to do was to straighten out Labour Party policy. I haven't supported Labour government policies on these issues in the past.

We have had to make it clear, as we have done, that we think the 1968 Act was a mistake, and that it was racialist; and, as I've said earlier, that there were lots of mistakes in the Green Paper.

So at NEC level the Labour Party have during the last year been trying to hammer out a new policy which we have set out in a paper called Citizenship and Immigration, which largely tallies with what I have been saying-particularly the basis of fair citizenship being the basis of a fair immigration policy, rather than the complete reverse of that.

But I think the key to opposing this Bill doesn't actually lie in the House of Commons. It lies in the community at large, • particularly black groups, political groups, civil liberties groups and so on. Also the women's movement. We've been very keen to make them see that there were clear sexist elements in the Bill.

The pressure's got to be kept up all the time, partly because the Bill's going to be in Committee at least three months. We do have a flying start: we're amazed to get a major concession before the committee stage. That shows that the pressure has got to be kept up-at local as well as at national level.

I think we've established the Labour Party's credibility -I put it no higher than that-there was a credibility gap before. We have partly closed that gap in terms of how the black groups and indeed the labour movement as a whole, sees us on this issue.. But we alone aren't going to convince the Tories to chante it.

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CIALIST Wednesda: CIDN

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