A couple of years ago, while working on my novel Home Fire, which required me to look into certain aspects of the UK’s citizenship laws, I had a slightly painful conversation with one of my oldest friends. Like me, she had grown up in Karachi. But while I didn’t move to the UK until the age of 34, she came here at 18 to go to university, and has never left. She became a British citizen soon after graduating (her grandmother was British); later, she married an Englishman, and they had a son. Her son was born in London, has never lived anywhere but here. But the painful thing I had to tell her was this: unlike many children who are born and live in the UK, her son’s claim on UK citizenship was contingent rather than assured. He was a British citizen, yes, but he could be made unBritish.

The reason for this stemmed from her decision, made soon after her son was born, to get him a POC – a Pakistan Origin Card. This bit of paperwork, issued by the Pakistan High Commission, meant that her son wouldn’t need to go through the expense and hassle of applying for a visa every time she wanted to travel with him to Pakistan where his grandmother and aunt and cousins lived. At the time my friend made this decision she was unaware of a change in the immigration laws that had come into force a few years earlier, in 2003, allowing for people who had acquired British citizenship through birth to be legally deprived of citizenship – provided they were dual nationals who weren’t going to be made stateless.

This wasn’t the first time that those who were British by birth could be made unBritish. Prior to 1948 if you chose to become a naturalised citizen of some other country then you lost your British citizenship. Also, until 1948 any British woman who married a foreign national lost her citizenship – the undoing of this misogynist law was the result of years of campaigning by feminists and their allies in the House of Commons. It only seems right to acknowledge this, because there’s no point discussing discriminatory laws if we don’t remember that such laws can be and have been successfully challenged in the past.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump has suggested he might use an executive order to end birthright citizenship in the US. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

It is also worth remembering right from the start how fluid citizenship laws are, and how dramatically they can change from one regime to the next. Donald Trump’s recent declaration that he will seek to outlaw birthright citizenship in America has been a well-publicised example of a prospective change – most changes, certainly in the UK in the last 15 years, have attracted far less attention.

When I broke the news to my friend about the 2003 law she said it didn’t apply to her son. While his POC entitled him to many of the same rights as a Pakistani citizen, it didn’t make him a Pakistani citizen. But writing novels can turn people into mini-experts on particular subjects for about five minutes, and so I had to break the news to her that the official wording on Pakistan government websites, which I had looked up just that week, said that POC holders could acquire Pakistani passports; that would make him a dual national, and therefore in a position to be deprived of his British citizenship. He was 10 years old, but that didn’t change the facts of the case.

In the years between that conversation and now, the particular wording around acquiring passports has disappeared from Pakistan government websites, so today my friend’s son appears to be irrevocably British. But if the Pakistan government re-instates the old wording, it all changes again. Which is to say, whether he’s irrevocably British or not depends on some other country’s laws.

This is both Kafkaesque and Orwellian. There’s a story ahead – a gripping story, the elements of which include a promising young footballer, murky government practices, a right-on human rights lawyer, parents duped into betraying a son, a terrorist organisation, a central character of unknown loyalties, ugly Americans, foreign locations and a granny.

That sigh of relief from new citizens who think 'now they can’t throw me out' is a myth

But in order to get there, we first need to grasp that at no point in the process of becoming a British citizen does any piece of documentation signal to you that your citizenship is contingent, that the equality of all citizens is a myth. That sigh of relief that new citizens breathe out, the belief that the certificate of citizenship means “now they can’t throw me out no matter how hostile the environment gets” – that, it turns out, is a myth.

A great many people in Britain were shocked by the Windrush scandal. I wasn’t. The stories of people from the Windrush generation being deported from the UK on the flimsiest technicality were certainly distressing, but not in the least bit surprising. For those who haven’t caught up with the latest Windrush news, Sajid Javid this week told the home affairs select committee that there were 83 confirmed cases of people who were wrongfully deported, at least 11 of whom have since died. Prior to the story breaking, those of us who were personally invested in the rhetoric around citizenship and migration knew that we had, for several years, been living in a country obsessed with cutting its migrant numbers and prepared to be entirely heartless in the way it went about achieving that. But I don’t claim an all-knowing position. Yes, I knew that anyone whose citizenship status couldn’t be unequivocally proved was in trouble; I didn’t know how many of those who were indisputably British citizens were also at risk.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Many in Britain were shocked by the Windrush scandal. I wasn’t … the ship arrives from Jamaica in 1948. Photograph: Daily Herald Archive/SSPL via Getty Images

In 1981, an additional clause was added to the 1948 citizenship laws. “The secretary of state shall not deprive a person of British citizenship if it appears to him that the person would thereupon become stateless.” In the years after the second world war, it was recognised that making citizens stateless was the kind of behaviour associated with fascist governments, and that no liberal democracy should have any truck with it. In any case, the UK’s legislation on depriving people of citizenship was little more than moot in the final decades of the 20th century. The deprivation powers were not used in a single case from 1973 to February 2002.

But then came the “war on terror”, and with it the collapse of all kinds of civil liberties. The chilling new legislation that was introduced included the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002, which came into effect the following year. For the first time since 1948, it became possible to deprive any Briton of their citizenship status “if the secretary of state is satisfied that the person has done anything seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom or a British overseas territory”. In other words, it was no longer only naturalised citizens who could be stripped of citizenship – now even the British-born fell under the deprivation powers provided they had a second nationality. And this is why I had to have the conversation with my friend about her son.

It doesn’t end there. There was a further change in 2014. But first, the story I promised.

Some of you may remember it. Mahdi Hashi came to the UK at the age of five with his parents from Somalia. They were granted asylum and a few years later became British citizens. He lived here from the age of five, grew up in Camden, went to Haverstock school, enjoyed rowing on Regent’s Park canal, was a promising young footballer who trained at Arsenal, and after school became a care worker. He was also Somali born and a practising Muslim.

In 2009, he was one of five Muslim men who went public with claims that MI5 was trying to blackmail them into becoming informers. He was 19 at the time. He had recently travelled to Egypt and on his return to the UK was informed by MI5 that he would be considered a terrorist suspect if he didn’t agree to work for the security services. He said they told him to inform on his friends by encouraging them to talk about jihad and reporting back on what they’d said.

It’s true that we only have his word for all this. We don’t know why MI5 approached him in the first place, if that is what really happened. What we do know is that in 2009 he made public these claims against MI5; we also know that in 2009 his family told their local MP Frank Dobson and the investigatory powers tribunal, the body that oversees MI5, that Hashi was being harassed by security officers. In addition, we know that he was never charged with any crime in the UK, though by 2009 there was no shortage of anti-terror legislation. Later in 2009, Hashi moved to Somalia. He said he went to look after his sick grandmother, with whom he lived when he arrived there, though his family also claims that the harassment he was facing in the UK made him want to leave.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The British government washed their hands of him … Mahdi Hashi in 2009. Photograph: Teri Pengilley

In 2012, a letter addressed to Hashi arrived at his parents’ home in the UK, containing a deprivation order from the then home secretary, Theresa May. He was to be stripped of his citizenship on the grounds that he was involved in Islamic extremism. His parents didn’t immediately know how to respond to this, and did nothing. It isn’t hard to imagine their state of paralysis, as former asylum seekers. And then things took a particularly bizarre turn. The parents received a call from someone in the world of officialdom – probably MI5 – asking if Hashi had received the letter. They replied that Hashi wasn’t in the UK. The official said he had 28 days to appeal the decision, so they should call him immediately to let him know what was happening and give him time to appeal at the nearest British consulate. If this were a TV drama, we’d all start yelling at the screen: “Don’t call him!”

They called him. If anyone was listening in who didn’t already know his phone number and where he was, they did now. His father told him to go to the British consulate. How could he, he said, when Britain didn’t have a consulate in Somalia. The parents didn’t know what to do but a few days later the unusually diligent official called back. He said Hashi must get to the nearest consulate. So, in an attempt to do just that, he crossed into Djibouti, where he was promptly arrested by local security services. “I’m British,” he said. “No you’re not,” they said. But he wasn’t Somali either – Somalia didn’t allow dual citizenship, so he’d ceased to be Somali when he became British.

Now he was stateless, with no access to consular services. How many of those here with British passports have ever really stopped to consider the weight of the words printed on the inside of the front cover: “Her Britanic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.” No one from any government was requesting or requiring that Mahdi Hashi be afforded assistance or protection. He was put in a cell, without court process or access to advice. Here he was treated badly, held in incommunicado detention for three months, during which time he was interrogated at length by CIA officials. Finally he was hooded, taken to a plane, and flown to New York – which is to say, rendered without due legal process. In New York, he was charged with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism – including being part of an elite suicide squad for al-Shabaab and of planning chemical attacks in the US. He was placed in pre-trial solitary confinement where he remained for three years.

Helena Kennedy took up his citizenship deprivation case in the UK in 2013 but it wasn’t until two years later that the judicial process ended with Hashi losing the appeal. In that time, the government made one further change to the laws around citizenship. The new law said that in the case of naturalised citizens without another nationality, citizenship deprivation was possible “if the secretary of state has reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom, to become a national of such a country or territory.” This wording neatly sidesteps the issue of whether that other country is willing to accept the person’s citizenship application once they’ve been stripped of British nationality.

In the case of Hashi we will never know the truth of his guilt or innocence. He was tried in America in one of those particularly Orwellian situations where he was appointed a lawyer who could not disclose to anyone, including Hashi, what evidence there was against him. Though he was originally charged with crimes that carried a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years he finally entered a guilty plea on the lesser charge of providing material support to terrorism – a post 9/11 offence which many rights groups have criticised for imposing guilt by association. Hashi was sentenced to nine years in prison – in the context of US anti-terror sentencing, this counts as getting off very lightly. Did he make some kind of deal or did the case against him simply fall apart once some kind, any kind, of legal process was underway? All we do know is that the British government will never ask the Americans these questions because they washed their hands of him, and then passed a law that made it legal to do what they had already done.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration: Francesco Ciccolella

This change was accompanied by considerable disquiet within both houses of parliament – and not only about the fact of statelessness. It was also about the wording of one of the clauses. Only naturalised British citizens could be made stateless, but a wider category of people – including those British-born with dual nationality – could be deprived of their citizenship if the home secretary was satisfied that deprivation was “conducive to the public good because the person … has conducted him or herself in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom”. What exactly does “seriously prejudicial” and “vital interests” mean? It doesn’t exactly mean anything. You can make it mean whatever you want it to mean. But getting some kind of clarity, some framework around the deprivation powers, was more necessary now than ever before because for the first time those powers were being put to use. This started with May’s stint as home secretary, and the practices she embraced were continued by Amber Rudd and show every sign of continuing under Sajid Javid.

Although the powers to strip citizenship were increased in 2003, they were still very rarely used. But in 2013, 18 people were deprived of citizenship, a huge increase from the six of the previous two years. In 2014, the number was 23. In July 2017 the Times reported that the number of those who had their citizenship revoked so far that year was already over 40. And yes, the rise in numbers occurred at the same time that increased numbers of British citizens first went to join Islamic State, and then tried to return after the collapse of Isis’s so-called caliphate. And yes, that makes it a little difficult to sympathise. Wasn’t it, after all, as the government insisted, a matter of national security? It was impossible to gather sufficient evidence for prosecution against people who had committed their crimes in Syria, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be a threat to the UK if allowed to return.

What are we doing, in Britain, making greater and greater use of this medieval system of justice?

Let us look at it from another angle: the government has said, we don’t have the evidence to prosecute these people. We don’t really know what some of them did beyond the fact that they went to a country that we don’t want people to go to. So the only thing to do is to strip them of their citizenship – unless they’re British born and without dual nationality in which case we’ll have to find a way to deal with them when they come back.

This two-tiered system of justice should not be consoling to anyone. Consider, though, the case of a man whose son went to join Isis; the father, desperate, went to Syria to try to find a way to bring his son back. He failed, he returned alone and was arrested for joining Isis. He’s lucky, I suppose, that he didn’t have his nationality revoked – but the case does highlight what is so problematic in the “we don’t have the evidence to prosecute them so we’ll just send them into exile” approach.

Exile. It’s an oddly medieval word, isn’t it? Exile at the discretion of a single person (the home secretary), entirely bypassing the court system or the need for evidence. What are we doing, in Britain, making greater and greater use of this medieval system of justice?

Let’s turn to a group of men who, in August this year, had their attempts to contest deprivation orders rejected by a court of appeal: three of the members of the Rochdale grooming gang. A fourth, the ringleader who is still in prison, is awaiting the outcome of his appeal. All four were naturalised Brits, who also had Pakistani citizenship. When they were convicted in 2015, May said that they would be stripped of citizenship and deported back to Pakistan after they had served their sentences. I have as little sympathy for rapists and paedophiles as anyone, and I understand the gut reaction of “good riddance”. But as a citizen of both Britain and of Pakistan, I find these deprivation orders profoundly disturbing.

I will look at this first as a citizen of Pakistan. These men are being sent to a country that, unlike Britain, has no sex offender register and where, unlike Britain, the men have no criminal records. There is nothing to stop them walking into a school in search of employment, and opportunity. If they are being made unBritish because they still pose a threat to young girls, then why is that threat being exported to Pakistan? We might pause here to think about President Macron’s words at last Sunday’s armistice commemoration: “By saying ‘our interests first, who cares about the others?’ we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great, and what is essential: its moral values.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘What are the moral values of a country that sends criminals abroad?’ … Kamila Shamsie Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

What are the moral values of a country that decides to send its sex offenders to a country where it will be easier for them to rape vulnerable girls? Can anyone really find it in them to say, “Well, as long as it isn’t British girls …”

Now let me look at this as a citizen of Britain. I’m a dual citizen, a naturalised citizen, and yes, that makes me the most vulnerable to deprivation orders, but I want to consider the underlying question in all of this: what is the relationship between principles and the law? When the choice comes between giving up your principles or giving up on a proposed new law, the answer should always be that if the law undermines the values by which a nation wants to be known, then the law is unfit for purpose. One of the great sleight of hand manoeuvres by many democratic governments since the start of the “war on terror” has been to convince its citizens that we need to set aside our principles in the name of security. I can tell you from lived experience that this is the argument of dictatorships.

The line May used time and again to justify the increased use and scope of deprivation powers was: “citizenship is a privilege, not a right”. It’s true that acquiring citizenship is, for naturalised citizens, a privilege insofar as there is an element of discretion involved. But once you become a citizen then, as Helena Kennedy has written, “citizenship is not a privilege; it is a protected legal status”. What is so dishonest about citizenship deprivation, Kennedy said, is “that it’s using ‘go back where you came from’”.

I haven’t mentioned the issue of race so far but it’s the elephant in the room, shifting from foot to foot. In many countries, citizenship laws have often been used as racial exclusion laws. It came as some surprise to me that until 1952 the American citizenship laws had racial restrictions and until 1965 they had national origin restrictions – all in an attempt to keep the US as Protestant and white as possible. In contrast, the 1948 British Nationality Act is a remarkably progressive, inclusive piece of immigration legislation. I’m not one to speak well of empire, or the processes of ending it, but this first piece of post-empire immigration legislation does make me a little teary-eyed. Overnight those who had been subjects of the empire now found themselves with the right to be citizens of Britain – with no restrictions or quotas around race or national origins.

But there was a gap between what the law allowed, and what was culturally accepted. My mother grew up in England in the 1950s and early 60s and has described how when she was looking for somewhere to board in London she would dial a number, speak in her plummy accent, and be told that yes, there was a room. And then she’d arrive at the front door and the landlady would say: “No rooms.” Recounting this, my mother once said, “I realised I might think of myself as English, but the English never would.” In many ways things felt different by the time I moved to the UK several decades later, in my 30s, but at a certain point I started noticing that if I were with a British Asian friend who had lived here all her life we would often be addressed by white Brits as though we had the same relationship with Pakistan – both of us being asked: “How often do you go back home?”

I would have thought all this relatively benign if I hadn’t been in London just after the 7/7 bombings, and noticed something about the way the bombers were spoken and written about. I placed those observations in Home Fire. This is in a classroom at a British university:

It overturned 790 years of precedent in British law the Kashmiri lecturer had been saying during an impassioned presentation on Control Orders and their impact on civil liberties when she saw the quiet girl in the third row roll her eyes. Would you like to say something, Ms Pasha? Yes, Dr Shah, if you look at colonial laws you’ll see plenty of precedent for depriving people of their rights; the only difference is this time it’s applied to British citizens, and even that’s not as much of a change as you might think because they’re rhetorically being made unBritish. Say more. The 7/7 terrorists were never described by the media as ‘British terrorists’; even when the word ‘British’ was used it was always ‘British of Pakistani descent’ or ‘British Muslim’ or, my favourite, ‘British passport-holders’, always something interposed between their Britishness and terrorism.



Why has it been possible for the British government to start exiling its citizens, without a criminal trial, without the right to defence, without open examination of the evidence? Why has it been so possible to create a two or three tier system of citizenship? It is possible, I would argue, because culturally there are too many people who think that if you aren’t white and of Christian stock then you really aren’t “one of us”. The question that sums it up is: but where are you really from? Historically, the law has been ahead of people’s prejudices. The law said the former subjects of the empire now had the right to be full and equal citizens, even if culturally a great many people still thought and think of the formerly colonised as inferior, and as outsider. The law said that discrimination on religious or racial grounds was not permitted, even if culturally bigotry was and is still prevalent. But the expanding scope of deprivation powers has moved in the opposite direction – it has taken on discriminatory attitudes that exist in the culture and enshrined them in law, distinguishing between those who are “British British” and those who are British until the home secretary decides otherwise.

“What should I do?” my friend asked me, when I told her that her son might possibly be a dual national, and subject to deprivation orders. “Tell him not to break any laws,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “Yeah,” she said. “But how do I have a conversation with my son where I tell him that because he’s Muslim and his mother’s from Pakistan he has to be careful in ways that his friends don’t have to?” I had no answer to that.

• Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire won the 2018 women’s prize for fiction. She delivered this year’s Orwell Lecture on Tuesday.