Rightwing politicians are using extreme immigration cases to make an argument for “two-tier” citizenship that could affect hundreds of thousands of Britons, the head of an immigration thinktank has warned.
Sunder Katwala, the head of the integration-focused British Future, said that the British passports of dual nationals and settled immigrants risk becoming “provisional” after Conservative and Reform politicians called for an Egyptian-British human rights campaigner to be stripped of his citizenship over historical tweets calling for violence against white people, Zionists and the police.
The prime minister and foreign secretary came under fire last week for celebrating the return to the UK of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who was born in Egypt and obtained citizenship via his mother, who was born in Britain.
His return came as the European Court of Human Rights questioned the rulings at every level of the British courts to uphold then home secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship in 2019. Begum, now 26, travelled to Syria to join Islamic State (IS) as a child after being groomed online.
Asked about the significance of the cases, Katwala said: “There’s the public intuition that when you become a migrant citizen, you’re kind of taking an oath of allegiance; you’re making a set of promises. And so if you egregiously breach those promises, then you’ve broken the rules, in the same way you might break the rules of a visa.
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“But if you accept that intuition, you’ve then made all acquired citizenships provisional, or two tier – like having a learner plate, and you could lose it.”
He added that the rise of Reform UK, the politics of the right, the “online right” and the impact of Donald Trump were having an effect on attitudes to citizenship.
“You’ve got this quite concerted effort to shift the boundaries using difficult, complex and controversial individual cases to put whole groups in doubt,” he said.
Last week, Abd el-Fattah issued an apology for tweets dating back to 2010 that included calling for the “random shooting of white males” and comments about using drones to “shoot Zionist weddings”. He rejected accusations of racism and antisemitism, pointing to his 12-year prison stint for equal rights activism in Egypt.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, the shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick, and Reform leader Nigel Farage have led calls to take back his passport and deport Abd el-Fattah, who was granted citizenship in 2021.
Successive governments have campaigned for the release of Abd el-Fattah from prison in Egypt, and the Home Office has indicated that the “abhorrent” tweets do not meet the threshold for citizenship to be stripped. The row was followed last Thursday by news that the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, planned to “robustly defend” a Tory predecessor’s decision to strip Begum of her citizenship, who was 15 when she joined IS.
The Home Office argued that because Begum, who was born in London, qualified for Bangladeshi citizenship via her parents, who both had settled status in the UK when she was born, she was not being made stateless.
More than 1,565 citizenship deprivation orders were made from 2010 to 2024, with the vast majority for fraud, according to a government report last month. A total of 223 were made by the home secretary for terrorism, largely linked to British nationals joining Islamic State.
Professor Robert Ford, of the University of Manchester, warned that the supreme court ruling being scrutinised in Strasbourg could be weaponised by any potential future far-right government.
“We live in a country of laws because laws are what protect us from authoritarians. You want the protections of citizenship to be ironclad because what happens if the storm comes for you?
“We are potentially three years away from a radical right majority government, and we have a situation where the home secretary of such a government could declare anybody who could potentially have dual citizenship to be liable for deportation on the basis of what they’ve said and done.”
Photograph Sam Tarling/Getty Images