Massive congratulations to @joncstone and @maybulman for their coverage which led to Fatush Lala being able to come home.

As @DavidLammy said, “it should not require press coverage for the Home Office act on such a gross injustice with basic decency.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fatush-lala-british-man-europe-uk-home-office-sleeping-streets-a9334781.html

Lammy: “It is appalling that he has been forced to spend three weeks stateless, stranded and homeless in Brussels due to a Home Office blunder.

Over and over again, suffering is being caused by the callousness and incompetence at the Home Office."

What’s most shocking here though is that it has exposed that it is actual Home Office policy to remove people’s citizenship while they are out of the country, that they don’t care if it makes someone stateless, and that the law allows it. @ShoaibMKhan:
https://twitter.com/shoaibmkhan/status/1227756385703809026?s=21 https://twitter.com/ShoaibMKhan/status/1227756385703809026

And that, as @SimonFRCox points out, hunting down people who made an error on a form 20 years ago so that they can destroy their lives is a ministerial priority for a dept that takes years to make decisions on asylum and other cases.

I mean, FFS, there isn’t even a requirement for the Home Office to make any attempt to make sure the person knows about it beyond sending a letter to an ancient address.

Worst of all though, the implications that if you didn’t acquire it at birth, British Citizenship, and therefore your own government’s duty to you, will always remain conditional and can be removed by ministerial diktat.

https://twitter.com/guitarmoog/status/1227754810805452800?s=21 https://twitter.com/GuitarMoog/status/1227754810805452800

Some have speculated that the Government is testing the limits of what levels of authoritarianism, victimisation and arbitrary nastiness people will tolerate.

If this is true, let this show them that they’re already way over that limit.

Finally, what the actual fuck were they doing dumping someone they’d deliberately just made sans papiers and washed their hands of onto the streets of another state? Diplomatically, this was not a friendly thing to do to Belgium, a very close friend and ally of the UK.