Kit Malthouse

As I hope the Minister knows, I have devoted much of my adult life to keeping individuals, neighbourhoods, towns, cities and indeed the entire country safe, but I have to confess that I have never been entirely comfortable with the deprivation of citizenship regime. Unfortunately, his Bill, which he is trying to pass off as an innocuous correction, has sparked that sense of unease. The reason I am uneasy is that, although the objectives that the Minister proposes are laudable, I believe that the cost to our sense of self and the corrosiveness to our sense of citizenship and to the judicial process are perhaps too high. I will not detain the House for too long, but I want to raise three points. We have covered them to a certain extent, but they are worth reiterating. First, the Minister’s sense is that the Supreme Court has created a loophole; my view is that it has corrected an anomaly. It has long been a tenet of the protections with which the judicial process provides me as an individual that an appeal equals vindication and that it is for my accuser to appeal, on the basis that I remain innocent, even prior to the first action that is taken against me. This regime will reverse that. The second alarming point is that the legislation is retrospective. As the hon. Member for Makerfield (Josh Simons) asked, there may be a number of cases going through the courts for which this law will have a highly prejudicial impact. The Government are effectively moving the goalposts mid-litigation to get what they want. That, again, is not something we would normally tolerate, and it is a further development of the power.