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Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I strongly support my noble friend in this amendment. It seems disgraceful that this Government should ever have brought this provision forward. I shall tell noble Lords a little bit about Jack Edwards. He came from Cardiff and served as a sergeant in the Army during the Second World War. He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and was held in Japanese camps for a long time. When he was released, he made it his business to seek out war criminals. It was as a result of his efforts that he discovered the only surviving copy of a Japanese order to massacre all prisoners of war if the allies landed on the Japanese home islands. Jack Edwards then moved to Hong Kong, where he was chairman of the British Legion and much involved in tireless efforts to obtain monthly pension awards from the British Government for ethnic Chinese veterans and their widows. In 1996, he fought for and won the granting of British citizenship to the wives and widows of those veterans. We are told that there are about 53 of them left. I met Jack Edwards; indeed, he was patron of the Hong Kong Welsh Male Voice Choir. I declare an interest as I followed him as its patron and have sung with it in the Sydney Opera House and the Royal Albert Hall. I therefore have a personal interest in Jack Edwards, who unhappily died in 2006. He was married to a delightful Chinese lady—Polly—who I met at the Armistice service the year before last. Why should these 53 widows be asked to pass a good character test? They must be in their 80s and 90s, and there are probably far fewer than 53 of them. I regard it as an insult that a clause of this sort should be put into the Bill, presumably as a result of a desire for bureaucratic tidying up of the legislation relating to the good character test. I am sure the Government will, on reflection, remove it from the Bill.