Reintroduce birthright citizenship and reduce integration barriers for children Most of the public mistakenly believe that a child born on British soil is automatically entitled to British citizenship, 65 as is the case in the USA and France among other coun­tries. This has in fact not been the case since the 1981 Brit ­ish Nationality Act which ended automatic birthright citi­zenship in the UK. This act was one of several in the post­World War 2 period(1962, 1968 and 1971) that gradually restricted the rights of immigrants from the British Empire and Commonwealth to move to the United Kingdom. The 1981 Act should be put in the context of the fraught race re ­lations of the time, with rising National Front marches and systemic police racism terrorising minority communities. The Act and associated policies have subsequently been found by a 2024 independent Home Office investigation into the origins of the Windrush scandal to have had the intention of limiting the number of people who were not white who would be able to settle here. 66 John Tilley, the left wing Labour MP who represented constituents in Lam­beth who would be affected by these changes, argued in 1982 that it would disproportionately impact black commu ­nities, pointing out these children were already experienc­ing racism and economic disadvantage more widely. 67 Today, more than four decades later, the process for obtain­ing British citizenship, even as a child born in this country and who has never known another home, is expensive and bureaucratically complex. 68 Barriers to citizenship for chil­dren and young people often aren’t even known to them until such time as they plan to travel, or to attend universi­ty and find themselves ineligible for student loans. 69 This can have a severe impact on the mental health of young people who consider themselves British, and can impact their career paths, and ability to reach their potential. The government should restore the automatic right to be considered a British citizen to everyone born in this coun­try, and remove the economic barriers that prevent people from lower income families from registering, even when they are eligible for citizenship. This would not only reduce hardship unnecessarily faced by young people whose home is the UK, it would send a strong message about what citi­zenship means, pushing back against racist and exclusion­ary messaging and making it clear: if you build your life here, you and your children will belong here. Children who are British in all but paperwork are also neg­atively impacted by harsh and counter-productive immigra­tion policies in other ways, despite the fact that they are in no meaningful way“foreign” to this country. Policies like the ban on migrant households accessing state support in­cluding universal credit – the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) condition – has been named as a major barrier to ending child poverty. 70 The exclusion of households with children from access to the welfare state is responsible for trapping families in cycles of poverty and debt, and has been found to represent no savings at all to public finances anyway, because it forces people into dire situations where they are more likely to have to rely on emergency support, which is more expensive. 71 Ending NRPF entirely in favour of a universal state support system available to all resi­dents at the time of need would greatly decrease financial hurdles that keep migrant communities as“outsiders” in our communities for the long term. At the very least in the interim, the exemption of families with children from NRPF would allow us to overcome the arbitrarily imposed long­term impacts of child poverty on young people who are highly likely to end up living in the UK for their entire lives. Embrace a positive narrative about immigration, diversity and belonging Beyond the practical policy barriers, we are also seeing a significant deterioration in community relations and a sharp rise in hostility and outright racism aimed at immi­grants. This has, shamefully, not been robustly responded to by the Labour government. The communications from the government has often been disastrous – playing into false anti-migrant and xenophobic narratives. In a particu­lar low point, the Prime Minister’s flagship immigration speech in March 2025, even appeared to echo the language of Enoch Powell’s infamous Rivers of Blood speech. Gov­ernment Ministers have repeatedly failed to condemn vio­lent and racist anti asylum-seeker demonstrations, at times even expressing their sympathy for the angry mobs who have terrorised innocent refugees. The government’s white paper on immigration claimed, contrary to the evidence, 72 that immigration has a negative economic impact, and shockingly went further in describing immigration over the last decade as having done“incalculable harm” to the country. This represented an appalling and demeaning ca­pitulation to xenophobic lies about immigration. It is well past time to change this broken approach to far-right radi­65  https://www.britishfuture.org/citizenship-inquiry-report/ 66  https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal-independent-research-report-ac­cessible#:~:text=Major%20immigration%20legislation%20in%201962,half%20of%20the%20twentieth%20century. 67  It should be noted that it was common among anti-racists at the time to refer to all minority ethnic communities as“black”, a more general use of the term that that has fallen out of favour today. Source: Hansard, Immigration, Volume 31: debated on Thursday 11 November 1982. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1982-11-11/ debates/8e460419-68e7-4c3d-8225-ff832a68139e/Immigration 68  https://prcbc.org/why-is-british-citizenship-important-to-children-and-young-adults/ 69  We Belong(2021)‘The deintegration generation’, website last accessed: 8 August 2024. https://www.webelong.org.uk/issue/deintegration-generation-we-belong-report 70  https://www.ippr.org/articles/every-child-is-equal 71  https://www.lse.ac.uk/geography-and-environment/research/lse-london/documents/Reports/Social-Cost-Benefit-Analysis-of-the-NRPF-policy-in-London.pdf 72  https://obr.uk/box/the-impact-of-migration-on-the-fiscal-forecast/ Time for change 15