Theresa May values “the spirit of citizenship”. I know because she said so in her speech at the Conservative party conference. She waxed lyrical about an ethos “that means you respect the bonds and obligations that make our society work. That means a commitment to the men and women who live around you.”

Forgive me if I choke on my rich tea biscuit, Theresa. I have a citizenship that I am proud of, that links me to a wider community, that guarantees me rights and freedoms, and it’s being revoked against my will.

I’m not talking about the airy concept of “global citizenship” that you poured scorn on – though given the international problems we face, and the impact our actions have around the world, some sense of fellow feeling with the rest of humanity wouldn’t go amiss. No, I’m talking about the concrete, legal citizenship that I have enjoyed since the age of 14. In 2019 it will most likely go up in smoke.

One of the reasons the 23 June referendum was a fraud is that what was posed as a simple question of “in” or “out” in fact hid a multitude of other decisions. Though it wasn’t framed this way, it served as an opportunity for a simple majority of voters (in fact, 37% of the electorate) to decide to strip the entire population of EU citizenship. This was mass deprivation of rights of abode and equal treatment on a scale not seen since the age of decolonisation. Legal scholar Dimitry Kochenov calls it “one of the most radical losses in the value of a particular nationality in recent history”.

Zero chance EU citizens in UK will keep same rights post-Brexit, says expert Read more

You might think that this is all done and dusted. I agree that there’s no going back, no second referendum. But the issue of EU citizenship isn’t quite closed – or rather, it needn’t be.

The EU citizen was created in 1993. It is a person who, across the union, cannot be discriminated against on the basis of nationality; can move and reside freely; can vote for and stand as a candidate in European parliament and municipal elections; and is entitled to consular protection outside the EU by European diplomats. More than that, citizenship established a identity, separate from nationality, shared between individuals in the union. A common bond of the kind that Theresa May otherwise admires. In the 23 years since, cultural, political, academic and social exchange has become the norm. What might have initially seemed like a paper exercise has become durable and meaningful to millions. Eurosceptics hate it, no doubt. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

Neither was it an arrangement entered into lightly. It was the result of a treaty, signed, incidentally, by a Conservative government. A treaty is an international promise, and a promise to one’s own people. There was no suggestion at the time that the rights granted would be taken away again. Mass stripping of citizenship had previously only occurred when an alternative citizenship was created, and often following war: for example, when Algeria won independence from France, and Algerian nationality came into being.

As Kochenov points out, Europe has had a flexible attitude towards citizenship in the past. It has had to, as a result of the massive changes in the territories governed by EU members. That means there is some hope that something of the “spirit” of 1993 could be salvaged. Or there was, until very recently.



The only way these rights could be maintained for British people would be for the UK to agree some kind of “associate nationality” with the union of which it is no longer a member. With political will, that could be achieved. However, it would require reciprocal benefits, most likely equivalent rights for EU nationals in Britain. In apparently opting for “hard Brexit”, without freedom of movement, May has made any such deal extremely unlikely.



What does Brexit mean for EU citizens in Britain – and Brits in Europe? Read more

It was bad enough that 37% of eligible voters were able to make an irreversible decision about the status of everyone else. The prime minister has now compounded that error, and drastically narrowed the horizons of this, and future generations of Britons.

Many of the arguments over how to conduct Brexit are made in transactional terms. Can we swap security cooperation for financial passporting rights? The right of EU nationals to stay put for lower trade tariffs? A customs union for, I don’t know, making Boris Johnson governor of St Helena?

In the meantime, a solemn social contract made between a government and its people a quarter of a century ago is being torn up. Citizenship isn’t a game, to echo one of Theresa May’s most resonant phrases. So don’t pretend to value it while treating it like so much red tape.