Read the full opinion piece by Baroness Warsi at the Guardian.
“The government’s proposed new powers to strip people of their citizenship without notice rang alarm bells in communities across Britain. Despite being the first Muslim woman in our country’s history to serve in the cabinet, my family and I could be deprived of our citizenship without being told about it, and cast out of our home country if the Home Office believed this would be conducive to the public good. Two in five people from ethnic minority backgrounds could be at risk.
Successive British governments have torn down the basic belief that all British citizens in this country are and should be equal. The consequences of this government’s unprecedentedly broad use of citizenship-stripping powers have become even more clear to me after hearing directly from the families of British citizens detained in north-east Syria.
Last week, the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on trafficked Britons in Syria, of which I’m a vice-chair, published the findings of its inquiry into the grooming and trafficking of British nationals by Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. What we found is devastating. Not only did UK authorities fail to protect vulnerable women and girls from being trafficked by IS, but the government has essentially punished some of those women for the crimes committed by their traffickers by stripping them of their citizenship.”