Bad Character

The Home Office recently changed its naturalisation guidance so that anyone who now arrives in the UK on a ‘dangerous journey’ will normally be denied the right to acquire British citizenship however much time has passed between their arrival and their application. Many such people will have been recognised as refugees. This permanent and blanket ban on naturalisation seems inconsistent with the UK’s commitments under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which requires that no penalty be imposed on refugees for unauthorised entry (Article 31) and under which states undertake to facilitate naturalisation (Article 34). The logic behind the convention’s requirements is clear: people fleeing persecution usually cannot comply with the border requirements of the countries they enter, and people who have effectively lost the nationality of their state of origin need, eventually, to have the possibility of full membership of the state where they live.

The Home Office claims to have made the change because people need to be deterred from making dangerous journeys in small boats, and the prospect of British citizenship is a ‘pull factor’ that encourages them. It seems unlikely that the prospect of being denied citizenship a decade or two hence will put off people who are willing to risk their lives to seek asylum, but such is the apparent logic. A more plausible explanation may be that the Labour government, having pledged to do something to stop the boats, needs to wave a measure in front of the public and the media to show that it is indeed doing something, however ineffective that something is likely to be.

There is, however, a troubling disconnect between the deterrent rationale and the mechanism that will be used to deny citizenship: the home secretary’s discretionary power to refuse someone on grounds of ‘bad character’. Perhaps the idea is that an asylum seeker has shown evidence of bad character by breaking the UK’s immigration laws, whatever the Refugee Convention may say. But this looks both implausible in itself and perversely at odds with other parts of the government’s rhetoric.

It looks implausible in itself because the judgment of a person’s character needs to be made when their application is assessed, and it seems disproportionate to allow the historic fact of unauthorised arrival to outweigh many years of blameless contribution to British society. It looks perverse because the government usually tries to portray the people who arrive on small boats as victims of the ‘evil smuggling gangs’ that ministers hold responsible for the journeys. If they are victims rather than perpetrators, it cannot be right to hold the means of their arrival against them as character evidence.

If, on the other hand, we see refugees not as passive victims of smugglers but as having made their journeys by choice, however desperately, they will often have shown great courage, fortitude and ingenuity in the face of the obstacles placed in their way by their persecutors and by states such as the UK. Showing such virtues in order to escape oppression is not normally seen as evidence of bad character, rather the contrary.

Most people would recoil from the idea that past lawbreaking always indicates bad character. Gay men who had sex when it was illegal and women who sought illegal abortions did not show evidence of bad character. And those who deliberately broke the law in the name of a higher justice are widely admired: you won’t find many Labour ministers with a bad word to say about Nelson Mandela or Rosa Parks. Perhaps most pertinent to the current case is the late Sir Nicholas Winton who, in the course of helping children evade the Nazis with the Kindertransport, forged documents and bribed officials.

It’s also hard not to feel that many of our lawmakers are in no position to pass judgment on others’ bad character. There are recent Cabinet ministers, for instance, with records involving fraud, creative expenses, racist WhatsApp messages, serial groping and lockdown parties. Then there’s what a politician will stoop to for a favourable headline: a bit of immigrant bashing, perhaps, which makes life harder for the most vulnerable but might grub a few votes. The standard of good character required to become an ordinary British citizen should not be more demanding than for the highest offices of state, especially not when it’s a means to an end that has nothing to do with character at all.