Pre 61 Childern

[Siggi]

On thursday 12/07/07 an attempt will be made to persuade HM Government to ammend the 1981 imigration Act to include all childern born of British Mothers and not just the ones between 1961 and 1981.
Watch the space and lets hope justice will prevail.

[JAJ]

On thursday 12/07/07 an attempt will be made to persuade HM Government to ammend the 1981 imigration Act

No such thing as "Immigration Act 1981". Presume you mean the British Nationality Act 1981?

[Siggi]

Yeh, Yeh you are right it is in fact "Nationality Act 1981", but the result will be the same if it is successful.

[Jeff Albright]

all childern born of British Mothers and not just the ones between 1961 and 1981.

Is it not how it is now? Children born to all mothers settled here or those holding British passports can always be registered as British Citizens, can they not?!

[Christophe]

Is it not how it is now? Children born to all mothers settled here or those holding British passports can always be registered as British Citizens, can they not?!

No, only those born after 7 February 1961. (Those born after 31 December 1982 are British citizens automatically at birth.)

The reason for the rather arbritrary-seeming date of 7 February 1961 is that on 7 February 1979, a concession was announced that the children of UK-born mothers aged under 18 could apply to be registered as British citizens. Many people failed to take advantage of this concession because they did not know about it, and therefore, in 2003, the government introduced a provision whereby those who had missed out could register themselves as British citizens - but those born before the date of the concession 18 years earlier could not have benefited from this concession: that is the reason for that date.

The British Nationality Act 1981, which came into effect on 1 January 1983, provided that UK-born women could pass on their British citizenship in exactly the same way as UK-born men, so anyone born in 1983 or later to a UK-born mother (assuming she was a British citizen) is a British citizen by descent at birth.

The question now raised by this thread is whether all those who have been born to a UK-born mother ought to be able to register as British citizens, irrespective of the terms of the 1979 concesssion.

(The notion that women could not pass their citizenship on to was not unique to British nationality laws, although the UK was probably later than most other Western countries (certainly than other English-speaking Western countries) to end what would now be regarded as an unreasonable discrimination on the grounds of sex. This was a major change in the 1981 Act, introduced by the Thatcher government.)