Court lets Priti Patel keep charging children £1012 for citizenship

2022/02/08 Leave a comment

Of note, law should to be changed from this “profiteering:”

The Home Office will continue to make a £640 profit on each child charged for British citizenship, as of a court ruling on 2 February.

The Supreme Court ended the four-year long fight against fees charged for children, some of whom were born in the UK, to become British citizens. Even if they were born in the UK, some children whose parents have a certain immigration status are not automatically British citizens – their families have to apply for citizenship for them.

While the court recognised that the £1,012 charged for each child was far above the administration cost of registering them as British citizens (£372) it concluded that parliament had allowed the government to set a fee above the ability of applicants to pay – which means it’s up to MPs or peers to change it.

The previous home secretary, Sajid Javid, described the fee as “a huge amount of money for a child to pay”, but failed to change it while in office.

Members of the House of Lords last week attempted to amend the Nationality and Borders Bill to reduce the fee to £372, covering the administrative costs, and to scrap it for children in care.

Child O, who was at the centre of the case, was born in the UK and has never left the country but their family was unable to pay the fee when applying for citizenship when Child O was ten. The now 14-year-old said they felt “very let down and alone”.

Campaigners say excluding these children and young people from British citizenship causes them to feel alienated, excluded and isolated in their home country, and are calling for the fee to be lowered or scrapped entirely for children in care or who are unable to afford it.

Their case was taken up by Amnesty International UK, and the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens (PRCBC).

“This fee deprives thousands of children of their citizenship rights, yet the Home Office has chosen to keep overcharging, despite the alienation and exclusion this is causing,” said Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director.

Sam Genen, the lawyer who represented Amnesty in the case, said: “It is disappointing that the Supreme Court granted permission to hear arguments [on international law] but chose not to decide them.”

He added that the current composition and judgments by the court “show a reductive approach to the rights of the vulnerable. There is a general sense that the court seems less interested [in] individual rights and expertise.”

Amnesty and PRCBC had appealed a ruling by the Court of Appeal last year, which followed a ruling by the High Court in 2020 that the fee was excluding children from their citizenship rights.

Both lower courts found the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had not given consideration to the best interests of children when setting the fee.

While the Home Secretary continues to have discretion in setting the citizenship fee for vulnerable children, parliament could choose to change that – all eyes are now on whether the Nationality and Borders Bill could be amended to reduce or remove the fee for children in care or who cannot afford to pay.

The Supreme Court ruling paradoxically highlighted the importance of British citizenship, noting: “It can contribute to one’s sense of identity and belonging, assisting people, and not least young people in their sensitive teenage years, to feel part of the wider community. It allows a person to participate in the political life of the local community and the country at large.”

Source: Court lets Priti Patel keep charging children £1012 for citizenship

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Chakrabarti and Woolley: The UK nationality bill makes it clear: some British citizens are more equal than others

2022/01/28 3 Comments

More opposition to the proposed changes:

As longstanding human rights campaigners, we are both well acquainted with the harsh realities of inequality and injustice in modern Britain. But the government’s nationality and borders bill– which will be in the committee stage at the House of Lords for the next two weeks – feels like a very personal insult. This is because it lays bare an uncomfortable and usually unspoken truth: that people like us, born in Britain but with foreign-born parents, are second-class citizens.

We are talking about the bill’s provision to strengthen the government’s ability to deprive people of citizenship – a profound exercise of state power. Currently, the home secretary has the power to do this if they determine it is “conducive to the public good” and if they believe the person being deprived is eligible for the citizenship of another country. This last condition has been estimated to be applicable to several million people.

Hundreds of formerly British citizens, especially from ethnic minorities, have already been stripped of their citizenship in the past 15 years. But Boris Johnson’s government wants to go even further. Clause 9 of this generally poisonous bill would give ministers the ability to remove our British citizenship without even telling us. This would severely affect the right of appeal; contesting government decisions needs to be done in a timely and effective way, but how would this be possible if you don’t know that the decision has been made? It seems the government is saying, if we take your citizenship, you’ve lost it. Period.

This is why we have come together, as members of the House of Lords, to oppose the government’s plans and will be supporting an amendment removing clause 9 in committee stage, along with other amendments to restrict already draconian citizenship removal powers.

Why does clause 9 feel so personal? Because it seems to say that no matter that this is the only country we’ve ever lived in; no matter that our life’s work has been to make our nation fairer; no matter that we are both peers of the realm because of this work; no matter that our ancestors gave their lives in two world wars: our citizenship is precarious and conditional in a way that isn’t the case for many others. It can be stripped away by the government of the day.

For those pushing through this bill, the history of Commonwealth migration of British citizens to the UK counts for nothing. Simon’s mother arrived in the late 1950s to give her best years to the recently formed NHS. Soon afterwards, the then health minister Enoch Powell (before he became an overt racist) flew to Barbados to call on British overseas citizens to come to the UK and support the NHS: thousands responded to that call. In that same era, Shami’s parents came from Kolkata to London. Years of race discrimination and even physical attacks never deterred them.

In a House of Lords debate on the bill this month, peers spoke about the hundreds of thousands from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia who fought for Britain in two world wars, believing they were part of a wider family. They believed they had earned the right for their children and grandchildren to be treated as equals. It seems they were wrong.

And this is not just an argument about morality: because when you have a second class, precarious version of citizenship it becomes open to political interpretation – as we have tragically seen in recent years. Everyone now accepts that the Windrush scandal – which saw legitimate British citizens denied healthcare and benefits, or hounded out of their country and left to die impoverished in places they had left as toddlers – is a stain on this country. So why are hundreds of British citizens still being stripped of their citizenship? Just recently a British-born man with Bangladeshi heritage had his citizenship removed and spent four years challenging the decision. He is now on his way back to the UK after winning his appeal.

What the Windrush scandal and other cases show is that governments make a lot of mistakes. The idea that a “good British citizen” – particularly those from the most affected groups of Black and Asian people – can be safe and secure is frankly fanciful. Rather than continuing to erode fundamental rights, the government should be trying to strengthen security and belonging for everyone. That also goes for other parts of the bill, which trash even the 1951 refugee convention by treating the most desperate, who escape persecution by clandestine means, as second-class asylum seekers.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. When the Conservative Lord Moylan spoke passionately about witnessing citizenship ceremonies as wonderful celebrations of belonging, he said: “My conception of British nationality is much more profound than a mere travel document. It is – or should be – a permanent and reciprocal bond of loyalty on the one hand and protection on the other … we should be building up and strengthening the bond between citizen and nation, whereas it seems to me that this provision goes only to dissolve it further.”

He is right, of course. Millions of people in this country, whose passport photos show faces that are not white, are vulnerable to structural racism – including when turbo-charged by broad powers of citizenship deprivation. The thought of citizenship being stripped without notice will only create fear and alienation, and do nothing to bring the people of this nation closer together.

  • Shami Chakrabarti was shadow attorney general for England and Wales from 2016 to 2020, and was director of Liberty from 2003 to 2016. Simon Woolley is the director of Operation Black Vote. He was chair of the No 10 race disparity unit until July 2020

Source: The nationality bill makes it clear: some British citizens are more equal than others

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Middle-class Britons more likely to be biased about Islam, finds survey

2022/01/26 Leave a comment

Interesting, given that in most countries, the greater the education and income, the lower the level of prejudice and bias:

The middle and upper classes are more likely to hold prejudiced views about Islam than working-class groups, according to a survey from the University of Birmingham.

In one of the most detailed surveys conducted on Islamophobia and other forms of racism in modern Britain, data showed 23.2% of people from upper and lower middle-class social groups harbour prejudiced views about Islamic beliefs compared with 18.4% of people questioned from working-class groups.

The survey, carried out in conjunction with YouGov, found the British public is almost three times more likely to hold prejudiced views of Islam than they are of other religions, with 21.1% of British people wrongly believing Islam teaches its followers that the Qur’an must be read “totally literally”.

“It’s the people from an upper and middle class background, who presumably are university educated, who feel more confident in their judgments but [are] also more likely to make an incorrect judgment,” said Dr Stephen Jones, the report’s lead author. “It’s almost like because they’re more educated, they’re also more miseducated, because that’s the way Islam is presented in our society.”

The findings, presented in a report entitled The Dinner Table Prejudice: Islamophobia in Contemporary Britain, were based on interviews with a sample of 1,667 people between 20 and 21 July 2021.

The survey found more than one in four people, and nearly half of Conservative and Leave voters, hold conspiratorial views about Sharia “no-go areas”, while Muslims are the UK’s second “least liked” group, after Gypsy and Irish Travellers, with 25.9% of the British public feeling negatively towards Muslims.

The survey also found 18.1% of people support prohibiting all Muslim migration to the UK, a rate 4-6% higher than the same view for other ethnic and religious groups.

The report suggested a lack of public censure for Islamophobia, citing the example of Conservative MP Nadine Dorries supportively tweeting remarks made by anti-Islam activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson), was one reason why prejudice was so widespread.

“There’s a lack of criticism that follows Islamophobia, and that seems to correspond to the way in which Islamophobia is dealt with in public life,” said Jones. “The survey shows quite clearly it’s a very widespread prejudice. But it’s just not given the same kind of seriousness as other forms of prejudice.

“People who work in public office, whether MPs or councillors, who have got away with saying things about Muslims that they simply would not get away with if they were talking about other kinds of minority. That’s not to say those other issues don’t need to be taken seriously as well, it’s simply to say that this particular form of prejudice doesn’t get due recognition.”

Researchers recommended the government and other public figures should publicly acknowledge the lack of criticism of Islamophobia, and how it stands out compared with other forms of racism and prejudice. The report also suggested civil society organisations and equality bodies should recognise how systemic miseducation about Islam is common in British society and is a key element of Islamophobia.

Jones said: “No one is calling for laws regulating criticism of religion, but we have to recognise that the British public has been systematically miseducated about Islamic tradition and take steps to remedy this.”

Source: Middle-class Britons more likely to be biased about Islam, finds survey

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

British man made stateless by Home Office has citizenship reinstated

2022/01/17 2 Comments

Of note:

A British man who was stripped of his citizenship by the Home Office for almost five years has described the “devastating” impact of the decision as the government pursues fresh powers to remove a person’s citizenship without warning.

The 40-year-old, who was born in London, returns to the UK this week after being stranded in Bangladesh since 2017 when the Home Office served a deprivation of citizenship order on him shortly after he flew to the country for the birth of his second daughter.

E3, as he is referred to in court documents, was working in the UK when he travelled to Bangladesh but not earning enough to sponsor his wife to join him and has since been stateless and destitute with his wife and three daughters.

According to the Home Office’s deprivation order, the Briton was “an Islamist extremist who had previously sought to travel abroad to participate in terrorism-related activity” and that he posed a threat to national security.

Although the UK government has reinstated his citizenship, his lawyers say they have received no explanation or any specific details to support the claims. E3 has never been charged with any criminal offence in the UK or elsewhere.

E3 told the Observer: “The allegation against me is so vague that it even suggests that I only tried to travel to some unknown destination to take part in an unspecified activity related to terrorism.

“How on earth do you defend yourself against an allegation like that, especially when the government relies on secret evidence? The disclosure my solicitors received was almost entirely redacted so I have no idea what the government is referring to.

“Why was I not arrested and questioned? Why have I been punished in this way without ever being shown a single piece of evidence against me? The government should admit that they have made a mistake and own up to it.”

It comes as politicians consider controversial plans contained in the contentious nationality and borders bill, which is going through the House of Lords, to allow the Home Office to remove someone’s citizenship without the need to inform them.

Source: British man made stateless by Home Office has citizenship reinstated

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How you can buy a British passport—the dangerous commodification of citizenship

2022/01/07 2 Comments

Of note:

Last week, the UK Nationality and Borders Bill passed in the Commons. The Bill gave the home secretary Priti Patel the power to strip British people with dual nationality or born abroad of their citizenship without needing to warn them first. Three thousand miles away, in a conference centre in Dubai, a collection of lawyers, wealth managers, immigration experts and High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) were selling and shopping for visas and passports. The event hosted “the right advisers and government contacts” to help applicants “get ahead in life in countries such as Canada, USA, UK, Spain, Greece, Germany, Bulgaria,” including promising to hand-hold applicants through the UK’s investor visa process, where a £2m investment can be exchanged for long-term residency. Both events are representative of shifting currents in global citizenship. But who gets citizenship—and why? Who gets to keep it—and who doesn’t?

The commodification of citizenship began in the 1980s. When the Caribbean islands of St Kitts & Nevis attained independence from Britain, the economy was hindered by a colonial-era reliance on sugar exports. Selling citizenship represented a perfect economic opportunity. An existing resource with apparently unlimited supply, low overheads and limited human capital requirements, selling passports could deliver a direct injection of cash for the government. At $150,000 for a family of four, with no obligation to live or even visit the islands, the passports include access to tax-free income and visa-free travel to over 130 countries. For St Kitts and its customers alike—a diverse group of wealthy investors largely from developing countries from which travel is restricted—there seemed to be few downsides, besides potential displeasure from other countries.

At first, uptake was slow. But after a dramatic slashing of the EU import price for sugar in 2006, the Kittitian government enlisted the help of Henley & Partners, a London law firm, to give the programme a boost. Their influence was profound. In the following eight years, the percentage of St Kitts GDP derived from the citizenship-by-investment (or “CBI”) programme jumped from 1 to 25 per cent. Today, CBI is a booming international industry worth an estimated $3bn.

In short, St Kitts commodified citizenship, and Henley commercialised it. Now operated by around 100 countries around the world, CBI programmes offer a passport or residency permit in exchange for a one-time payment or a hefty real estate investment. Prices range from $130,000 for a single applicant (Vanuatu) to several millions (the UK) to schemes about which little public information is available (Switzerland, Austria). The innovation of CBI is in bypassing the linguistic, cultural or employment-related migration requirements usually tightly enforced by governments when the person involved isn’t incredibly rich. It has also spawned an entire industry. Search “citizenship by investment” on Google and a slew of adverts for agents, lawyers, due diligence firms and advisers appear, all hungry for their share of the application fee. There are even CBI influencers: Nomad Capitalist, a YouTube channel, garners millions of views each year for videos with titles like “12 Second Residence Permits with a Simple Bank Deposit.”

Source: How you can buy a British passport—the dangerous commodification of citizenship

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UK tightens criteria for Afghans to enter despite ‘warm welcome’ pledge

2021/12/16 2 Comments

Yet another example by far too many countries:

The Home Office has tightened the criteria allowing Afghans to enter the UK despite promises from Boris Johnson to give a “warm welcome” to those who assisted British forces or worked with the government.

The department announced changes to the Afghan relocations and assistance policy (Arap) which narrows the criteria from that used during the Operation Pitting evacuation in August 2021.

After the UK’s chaotic exit from Kabul in August, the prime minister launched “operation warm welcome” to ensure the safety of staff in fear for their lives from the Taliban.

“I am determined that we welcome them with open arms and that my government puts in place the support they need to rebuild their lives,” Johnson said at the time. “We will never forget the brave sacrifice made by Afghans who chose to work with us, at great risk to themselves.”

Source: UK tightens criteria for Afghans to enter despite ‘warm welcome’ pledge

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British Labour MP: Children are being priced out of British citizenship – it’s unjust and must change

2021/12/13 Leave a comment

All UK citizenship fees are comparatively more expensive that other EU countries and Australia, Canada and the USA. But the fees for children are particularly high. The previous Conservative government, while increasing adult fees from $200 to $630 (including the right of citizenship), it left fees at $200 for children:

In the 2019 Conservative leadership election, Boris Johnson claimed: “I want everybody who comes here and makes their lives here to be and to feel British”. But government policy is effectively telling hundreds of thousands of children the exact opposite.

The children in question, born here to parents with leave to remain, like me, or born abroad but resident here for most of their lives, like our Prime Minister, are growing up in limbo in the country they call home instead of enjoying their full citizenship rights.

There are between 85,000 to 215,000 children with a legal entitlement to British citizenship who have ended up undocumented due to the extortionate registration fee. Through no fault of their own, they will go on to experience real difficulties in later life as a result, subjected to the same hostile environment measures that caused so much suffering to members of the Windrush generation. Many young people may not even realise they do not have citizenship until they try to travel, get a job, rent a home or are suddenly asked to pay international fees for their university education.

If the £35 fee introduced in 1983 had risen in line with inflation, it would be £120 today. Instead, it is now £1,012 and one of the highest such fees in Europe, doubling in the last decade alone. We are charging British children ten times more to claim their citizenship rights than their counterparts in Spain, France, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden.

Of the current fee, the Home Office reports that £372 accounts for administrative costs and freely admits that the remaining £640 is pure profit. Research by Citizens UK shows that between 2017 and 2020 alone, the government has made a £102,749,216 profit from these child citizenship fees.

When I challenged the Prime Minister on this practice earlier in the year at PMQs, the Prime Minister said there were “costs that must be borne by the taxpayer” and that citizenship was “a prize”. The courts have consistently disagreed with the Prime Minister’s stance, with the Court of Appeal recently upholding the High Court’s ruling that this fee was unlawful and ordering the Home Office to reconsider it.

On questions of citizenship, it’s clear that the government knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. For these children, British citizenship is a legal entitlement, not a prize or an investment. Instead of endlessly appealing, they should accept it’s wrong to set fees so high that it blocks families from applying.

Most of the children priced out of citizenship come from households facing higher levels of hardship and poverty. Many are from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds. Some come from families slapped with the ‘no recourse to public funds’ condition, preventing them from accessing basic services.

The government continues to justify these fees on the basis of fiscal responsibility but it’s absurd that they believe an effective levy on poorer households is a sustainable way of financing their immigration system. Above all, there’s nothing responsible about creating a situation where children are deprived of their rights for want of money.

It’s also a scandal that many looked after children are emerging from our care system without British citizenship. These children have been entrusted to the care of the state. The state has a responsibility to get the best outcomes for them.

I regularly speak to young people in my constituency who face feelings of worry, alienation and social exclusion as a result of being denied citizenship. The harm of being denied your citizenship rights in the only country you truly know cannot be overstated. It’s not just about the societal barriers you face, it’s about the psychological impact of being constantly treated as a second-class citizen.

You can’t put a price on belonging. Yet that’s exactly what this government continues to do. With the return of the nationality and borders bill, we have a chance to change this. My amendment to the legislation would cut the registration fee down to cost price, scrap it completely for looked after children and compel the government to produce a report on the impact that fees have on children’s right to citizenship.

These children are as British as anyone else. It is immoral and unjust that they continue to be blocked from citizenship and subjected to humiliating treatment as a result. If you grow up in the UK, British citizenship should be your right – not a privilege you pay the government large sums of money to bestow.

Source: Children are being priced out of British citizenship – it’s unjust and must change

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Tories break ranks on immigration to demand safe routes to UK for asylum seekers

2021/12/06 Leave a comment

Potentially significant:

Senior Tories have demanded a radical overhaul of the asylum system to allow migrants to claim refuge at UK embassies anywhere in the world – rather than having to travel to the UK – in a bid to cut the numbers attempting dangerous Channel crossings.

Ex-cabinet members David Davis and Andrew Mitchell are among those calling for the change, which marks a stark challenge to the punitive approach taken by Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, who are demanding tighter controls on French beaches and are threatening to “push back” small boats at sea.

Mr Davis, the former shadow home secretary and Brexit secretary, and Mr Mitchell, the former international development secretary, also poured scorn on the home secretary’s plan to take on powers through her Nationality and Borders Bill to send migrants arriving in the UK to camps in third countries overseas for processing – something that has already been ruled out by Albania after it was named as a potential destination.

Writing for The Independent, Pauline Latham, a Conservative member of the Commons International Development Committee, said that allowing migrants to claim asylum at embassies abroad was “the only viable alternative to the tragedy of deaths in the Channel and the chaos of our current approach”.

Twenty-seven migrants, including three children and a pregnant woman, drowned off the coast of France in November when their boat sank, marking the single biggest loss of life of the crisis so far.

The Home Office is opposing an opposition amendment to the borders bill, due for debate in the House of Commons this week, which would allow migrants to seek “humanitarian visas” in France, allowing them to be transported safely across the Channel to claim asylum.

But Ms Latham’s proposal goes a step further, removing the need for asylum seekers to pay thousands of pounds to criminal gangs to smuggle them into Europe and then risk their lives in order to reach Britain to make their claim.

The Mid Derbyshire MP said: “This feels to me like a genuine win-win. The customer base of the people smugglers would vanish, ending deaths in the Channel and ensuring that people seeking safety here can travel in a humane fashion.

“The UK would be better able to control who arrives here, and anyone arriving without a visa or pre-approved asylum claim would face non-negotiable deportation.”

Current government policy has “got it the wrong way round” and should be reshaped as a “global resettlement programme” similar to those set up in Syria and being established for Afghanistan, said Ms Latham.

With the vast majority of those arriving in the UK by small boat having a legitimate claim for asylum, the question Ms Patel must answer is why the UK’s current policy requires them to put themselves in the hands of lawless gangs and then risk their lives in order to be able to submit their paperwork, she said.

“Desperate people will continue to seek safety in the UK for as long as there is conflict and persecution elsewhere,” said Ms Latham. “But nobody puts their child in an overcrowded, flimsy dinghy on a cold November morning if they think a better alternative is available. So, when we talk about deterrence we have to talk about alternatives.”

And Mr Davis said: “Instead of a policy which is built solely on keeping people out, the government should consider creating a legitimate route in for genuine refugees. Migrants fleeing repression in Iran or famine in war-torn Yemen are not able to apply at British embassies. The only options available to them are either illegal, or dangerous, or both.”

The bill being debated in the Commons on Tuesday and Wednesday aims to deter small-boat crossings by restricting the rights of those who enter the UK by “irregular” routes, allowing “offshore” processing of claims in third countries, and speeding up the removal of failed asylum seekers.

It would also give border and immigration staff powers to redirect boats out of UK territorial waters in a way that MPs and unions have warned could increase the risk of capsize and deaths.

Mr Davis said that offshoring would represent a “moral, economic and practical failure”, inflicting a terrible ordeal on those fleeing terror and persecution.

And Mr Mitchell said: “So far, Norway, Rwanda and Albania have all distanced themselves from suggestions that they would host a UK offshore processing centre. The bill seeks a power for a policy which the government is yet to define.

“Even in Australia, 75 per cent of those sent to remote islands for processing eventually had their claims upheld. Indeed, most of the people crossing the Channel are also having their asylum claims upheld. Offshore processing looks like a policy which delays the inevitable. But at far greater cost to the taxpayer.”

The Labour MP behind the humanitarian visa amendment, Neil Coyle, said Ms Patel’s proposals “will cause more dangerous routes and more risk to people seeking to reach the UK”. He told The Independent it was “garbage” for her to claim they would reduce the so-called “pull factors” attracting those fleeing war, civil conflict or persecution to Britain.

“A humanitarian visa offers the government the chance to prove it means what it says, when it says it doesn’t want people to be subjected to gangs and criminality,” said Mr Coyle. “The amendment would save lives, help us meet our international obligations, and prevent money going to smugglers.”

Stephen Farry of the Alliance Party, backing the amendment alongside MPs from the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Green Party and Labour, said: “Claiming asylum in the UK is a fundamental right, but asylum seekers are in a Catch-22, whereby asylum can only be claimed on UK soil yet the UK provides no safe and legal routes to enter the country for those purposes.

“The home secretary doesn’t care about asylum seekers, but if she were serious about tackling people smuggling, this visa is a workable solution.”

But a Home Office spokesperson said: “The government has noted the amendments relating to asylum visas for persons in France and they will be debated in parliament in due course.

“However, there is the risk of creating a wider pull factor, putting vulnerable people in danger by encouraging them to make dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean and overland to France in order to make claims to enter the UK, motivating people to again entrust themselves to heinous smugglers.”

The chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Minnie Rahman, dismissed this argument.

“Like people who travel to the UK for work or study, people seeking protection in the UK deserve safe ways of getting here,” she said. “If the government were serious about preventing dangerous crossings and upholding our commitment to refugee protection, they would back this amendment. Instead it seems they’re happy to continue driving refugees into smugglers’ boats.”

And Bridget Chapman, of the Kent Refugee Action Network, said: “The simple fact is that those who have made this journey tell us that they never wanted to leave their homes in the first place. It wasn’t the ‘pull factors’ that made it happen, it was violent ‘push factors’, such as war, conflict and persecution.

“Once displaced, most people stay close to their country of origin and only a relatively small number come to the UK. There is no evidence whatsoever that making their journey to the UK marginally more safe would be a ‘pull factor’, and we cannot allow that to be used as a reason not to give them better and safer options.”

Bella Sankey, director of Detention Action, said: “This humanitarian visa amendment would help to prevent deaths in the Channel and undermine the dangerous boat journeys offered by people smugglers.

“If the government is concerned about a so-called ‘pull factor’, they should show clear evidence of it and then expand this amendment to include refugees further upstream.”

Source: Tories break ranks on immigration to demand safe routes to UK for asylum seekers

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UK, Islam and media: This is bullying, not journalism

2021/12/03 Leave a comment

Of note. Similar to other countries:

Watching and reading news on Muslims and Islam is not always a pleasant experience. At least one-fifth of all articles on the topic pertain to terrorism and extremism. This was among a number of concerning facts and figures that I and others at the Centre for Media Monitoring found when we analysed more than a year’s worth of material from British newsrooms that referenced Muslims and/or Islam.

This included around 48,000 online news articles and 5,500 clips that aired between October 2018 and September 2019, giving us a clearer picture of how Muslims are reported on and where the problems lie.

Certain publications – the same ones that lambaste ‘cancel culture’ – often target individual Muslims or organisations

The right-leaning media, which includes most of the country’s heavyweight publications, fared worst across our rating metrics. Using a methodology designed alongside seasoned academics who have studied how Muslims are represented in the media, we pinpointed everything from the reproduction of tropes, to the misrepresentation of Muslim beliefs, to problematic headlines and imagery.

A disproportionate number of articles were biased on the subject of religion, with discussions around Islam mired in Orientalism. Islam was repeatedly framed as a hostile threat to the West, as right-wing pundits trotted out tropes with impunity, while Muslim characters in fictional dramas were shown as intolerant – and were often played by non-Muslim actors.

Around half of the news articles and clips we examined associated Muslims with negative aspects and behaviours. While this might not seem alarming given that news generally tends towards the negative, we did not discriminate between items that were predominantly about Muslims or those that contained only a passing mention, which is a cause for concern.

Platforming marginal figures

Our study was not just about identifying what was bad; we also found pieces that were fair and balanced, punching up against those in power, rather than punching down against Muslims, as is so often the case. Examples included the BBC’s John Sudworthreporting on the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China, and the Spectator’s Stephen Daisley opining on the Birmingham schools affair, even as his publication was frequently rated poorly across our metrics.

I am often asked whether reporting on Muslims and Islam is getting better over time. But this is difficult to assess, as much depends on the news cycle and which subjects or events are in focus.

We have, however, seen a return in recent days by British tabloids to platforming marginal and unrepresentative figures as the face of British Muslims. In addition, certain publications – the same ones that lambaste “cancel culture” – often target individual Muslims or organisations, in an attempt to delegitimise and de-platform them.

Our report features close to a dozen instances in which individual Muslims were misrepresented in the media; in some cases, the victims spent years of their lives on a quest for justice and an apology. Some of the cases involved neoconservative organisations feeding information to newspapers who appeared happy to lap it up, targeting Muslims in the public space.

This is not journalism. It is bullying, and it impinges on the civil rights of British Muslims, ultimately aiming to silence them.

Willingness to change

Our report also looked at how words are used to delegitimise Muslims, such as by describing any Muslim organisation or individual in the public sphere as “Islamist” or practicing “Islamism”. Such terms have been used in a scattershot fashion, targeting everyone from Islamic State fighters, to democratically elected leaders, to schoolchildren who eat halal food at lunch.

Muslims cannot, and most do not, expect special treatment from the media. What they do expect is fairness

Producing a report as detailed as ours was an arduous task, and not always a pleasant one. But it was done in good faith, with the hope that it will inform and guide members of the media.

Better reporting on Muslims and Islam is not an impossible task, as shown by Daily Express editor Gary Jones, who in 2018 lamented that past front pages at the newspaper had contributed to an Islamophobic environment. He has worked to change that, setting an example for others.

Another encouraging sign came from the editors of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Times, who welcomed our report, even though it criticised some of their coverage. This suggests that there is a willingness at the highest levels to produce better journalism – and we welcome that.

Muslims cannot, and most do not, expect special treatment from the media. What they do expect is fairness and to be treated no differently than any other community. As the former chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation pointed out a couple of years ago, Muslims have been treated differently by British newspapers. Our findings would agree with him, and it’s up to news editors and journalists to change that.

Faisal Hanif is a media analyst at the Centre for Media Monitoring and has previously worked as a news reporter and researcher at the Times and the BBC. His latest report looks at how the British media reports terrorism.

Source: UK, Islam and media: This is bullying, not journalism

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

British nationality bill allows Home Office to remove citizenship without notice

2021/11/22 Leave a comment

No due process or notification:

Individuals could be stripped of their British citizenship without warning under a proposed rule change quietly added to the nationality and borders bill.

Clause 9 – “Notice of decision to deprive a person of citizenship” – of the bill, which was updated earlier this month, exempts the government from having to give notice if it is not “reasonably practicable” to do so, or in the interests of national security, diplomatic relations or otherwise in the public interest.

Critics say removing citizenship, as in the case of Shamima Begum, who fled Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State in Syria, is already a contentious power, and scrapping the requirement for notice would make the home secretary’s powers even more draconian.

Source: British nationality bill allows Home Office to remove citizenship without notice

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

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