If that’s all it’s worth,” wondered a despairing Economist front page in 1968, depicting a British passport next to an old sardine tin and other detritus. As they saw it, Harold Wilson’s Labour government was trying to extricate Britain from rights that it legally owed overseas British nationals.

It was becoming an increasingly contentious point, as various governments of newly independent East African countries began making life more difficult for the South Asian minorities that had settled (and in some cases, been settled) there under British colonial rule.

The then editor of the Economist, Alistair Burnet, was still in post four years later when Idi Amin gave Uganda’s roughly 40,000 Asians ninety days to leave the country. By that point, a different prime minister was in office in Britain; one who shared Burnet’s liberal Tory instincts, and which allowed those Ugandan Asians who held British passports — which was most of them — to settle in the UK without too much fuss. Heath was rewarded with a duly fulsome front page.

This was during the first era in modern times in which immigration had become a serious political issue in Britain. The earlier assumption that the millions of subjects of the crown scattered around Britain’s far flung dominions would never take up their rights to move to the mother country in significant numbers, had been rudely overturned by reality. The term “subject” was retained rather than the civic-republican term “citizen”; and up until independence all those who lived in the British Empire and its dominions were subjects of the crown, assumed to be loyal. This assumption was enshrined rather absent-mindedly in the British Nationality Act 1948, either causing or immediately preceding the first waves of mass immigration from the British Caribbean, which the Attlee government found itself  administratively unable to block.

Suddenly, the British government needed to create administrative categories to determine what “British” actually meant in practice, and who had the right to enter the United Kingdom without a visa, and then to settle and work in the country. The process of codification began with the Commonwealth Immigrants acts of 1962 and 1968, and Heath’s Immigration Act 1971. It was from this turmoil that eventually the rather foreign-sounding concept of citizenship was first foisted onto the British people with the British Nationality Act 1981.

Before the twentieth century ushered in the era of global mobility, the question of who exactly was British wasn’t a controversial matter; it was obvious. One was British by virtue of being English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish. Those categories were rarely explicitly defined in racial terms, but that was what they were in practice, albeit with entirely porous boundaries between the four home nationalities. Small flows of incomers over the preceding centuries had either integrated through marriage over successive generations, as in the case of the Huguenots and peoples from the Low Countries, or had remained distinct as in the case of the Jews.

In earlier times, Britain wasn’t exceptional in being a multinational state, rather than built around a single nationality, as France was. Austria-Hungary, and the Russian and Ottoman empires still maintained the pre-Westphalian norm of multinational statehood well into the twentieth century; it was only the break-up of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s that would leave the UK and the Russian Federation as Europe’s only surviving multinational states. It was the experience of World War II and its aftermath that would reinforce the principle of nation states as being the guarantors of stability and safety for most continental  Europeans; an experience of which the British had been mercifully excused the worst vicissitudes.

Since being British was necessarily only one part of a dual identity, it was far more natural for people to accept people being “something and British” than for continental nationalities.  Since people were accustomed to thinking of themselves as being “English and British” or “Scottish and British”, it was no great leap for them to consider themselves “Canadian and British” or “Australian and British” as millions of people across the Commonwealth considered themselves until fairly recently.

And there didn’t seem to be any legitimate reason not to extend this to other Commonwealth nationalities that weren’t descended primarily from British emigrants. To do so would have had to make explicit the earlier, unspoken racial understanding of what “English” or “Scottish” etc. meant.After the war, to do so would have been considered at best vulgar, if not completely politically unacceptable among the British mainstream.

A common language, and a close political and cultural relationship, also meant that Britain was far more exposed to American ideas than elsewhere in Europe, and British elites increasingly saw their adoption of American political signifiers as being their means to sustain their place at the top table. The American-style idea of the cultural melting pot became appealing to British political leaders, as well as to an emerging cultural and literary elite that, while overwhelmingly white and British in terms of its ancestry, increasingly found cultural caché by virtue of its small but growing cosmopolitan component. If history didn’t quite support the idea that Britain was “a nation of immigrants” in the same way that America was, then new histories could be written, or at least insinuated.

In many ways, the adoption of the explicit concept of citizenship in the 1981 Act, can be seen at least as much as the Americanisation of British nationality, as it was an attempt to construct a “modern” European identity. The acquisition of citizenship came to be seen as part of a pathway to integration, rather than the end of the journey. This would allow the UK to absorb new arrivals from diverse cultural backgrounds, particularly from South Asia and Africa, along the lines of a New World settler society.

During the 2000s this became tied up in official integration policy driven by the Home Office as a result of concerns about alienation among young Muslim men leading to a drift toward radical Islam. Official Home Office integration policy saw the state become the arbiter of a new, stripped-down national identity, based on “British values” which emphasised the respect for the rule of law, and lowered common denominators to the extent that anybody could sign up to them providing they forswore terrorism or racism.

In education, these values were packaged explicitly as “citizenship”, underlying the obligation of all citizens, regardless of origin, to uphold “British values” in order to enjoy the benefits of life in modern Britain.  For immigrants, it was all contained in the “Life in the UK” test, which invited applicants to choose from multiple choice answers to esoteric questions about the British constitution, and the food, literature and sporting achievements of the home nations, along with subjective questions about the official “British” values, which were presented as a matter of fact.  The media became fond of using this laughable test as an example of the apparent stringency of the process of applying for British citizenship.

Observers caustically noted that these so-called British values; fairness, “decency”, a belief in equality and respect for the rule of law; were in fact things that multiculturalists liked to tout as universal. If anything, however, this emphasised the understanding among such people that the UK, as they always referred to it, was a country operating on the default factory settings of some assumed global norm.

For large numbers of the new arrivals to the United Kingdom, citizenship becomes automatically available once they have spent five years in the country and secured Indefinite Leave to Remain. The latter requires a pass in the “Life in the UK” test, around which an industry has sprung up to support applicants to pass.

The process culminates in a ceremony, in which the newly minted citizen affirms their loyalty to the Monarch. Other than members of the armed forces, police officers and MPs, they will have been among the few subjects of the crown in Britain to have done so since leaving the scouts or guides. For most, citizenship will change very little in terms of their rights or obligations; a majority will already have had the right to vote in all elections since the day they arrived, by virtue of being Commonwealth nationals. But it seals that individual in their position in the United Kingdom; officially, they become just as British as anybody else.

To some extent, such people then vanish from statistics examining the impacts of immigration. Indeed, some prominent political scientists and integration campaigners, such as the University of Manchester’s Rob Ford, and the director of the British Future think-tank Sunder Katwala, have suggested that even considering naturalised citizens among immigrants undermines the concept of citizenship itself.

And to some extent, they’re right, insofar as the rather confused understanding of citizenship we’ve created in modern Britain is concerned. If naturalised citizens are considered in any way distinct from citizens by birth, does this not open the door to the anathematic notion of “two-tier citizenship”, with all of its unfortunate connotations? And what possible reason could anyone have in good faith of examining the “impacts” of somebody living in a country of which they are a citizen, and exercising their rights as such? It’s not as if citizenship could ever be withdrawn once granted.

“Administratively British” has emerged as a phrase used by commentators on the Right to describe naturalised, foreign-born citizens, in a manner that clearly questions whether such people are actually meaningfully British. Particularly, it’s become a feature of the increasingly controversial debate about the disproportionate percentage of London’s social housing stock that is occupied by those who were born overseas. Establishment voices, including some Conservatives, have sought to delegitimise this term before it gains widespread traction outside the anonymous online Right. However, given how contentious the issue of housing has become, and how valuable access to affordable accommodation in Central London is to a young person’s life chances and earning potential, it seems unlikely that they will be able to marginalise this argument indefinitely.

Whatever the position of the academics and campaigners, it is clear that many naturalised citizens (and those who enjoy the right to vote by virtue of their Commonwealth citizenship) still retain a clear identity defined by their origins. Five parliamentary seats in the last general election were won by candidates who based their campaigns on foreign policy platforms that catered explicitly to Pakistani pluralities in those constituencies. The London borough of Tower Hamlets is controlled by a party that exclusively represents the roughly 35 per cent of the borough that is ethnic Bengali. And in what was otherwise a landslide national defeat, the Conservatives gained a single seat, in Leicester, thanks to Indian voters who were concerned that Labour was too favourable to Pakistanis, and who were receptive to explicit overtures made by a number of Tories toward political Hinduism.

Beyond the voters themselves, there are now prominent elected politicians who justify their political positions by appealing to their national origins. The Foreign Secretary has previously done so on the basis of his Caribbean identity, on the subject of Britain’s obligation to pay reparations for its role in the slave trade. The Leader of the Opposition has repeatedly described herself in both national and tribal terms as a Nigerian and a Yoruba, to make political points that remain unclear. And just last week, the Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran referred to the Gaza strip as “our land” — presumably speaking as a Palestinian rather than as a nostalgist for the era of the British Mandate. In each case, mainstream commentators seemed to lack either the language, or an acceptable intellectual framework, to consider the implications on policy of influential individuals in public life holding dual identities in this way.

This is not a phenomenon that is going away. Since 2021, millions of people have moved to Britain under a variety of visa routes, who will start to become eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain over the next year or so, barring a change to the rules. Aside from some alarming estimates about the total lifetime costs per person once “the Boriswave” gains recourse to public funds, it seems that Britain is overdue an uncomfortable national discussion about what British Citizenship actually means.

Looking at societies, around the world today and historically, that have taken citizenship seriously, it feels that the modern British position of near automatic eligibility after only five years is to treat citizenship as a triviality. Crass as academics and journalists might find it, the “administrative” tag comes closer to the mark than the nearly sacred manner in which societies like ancient Rome or republican France hold the ideal of citizenship, and all it stood for. This is just not how most British people have ever really thought about what it is that makes them British.

By using citizenship as a tool to encourage integration rather than as its end point, the British establishment has created a concept of tiered citizenship almost by default. We have seen this in cases such as that of Shamima Begum, where the public has not reacted with any sense of revulsion at somebody being deprived of their British citizenship by order of the Secretary of State. People simply can’t regard something as sacred or inviolable if it gets handed out with the ease that our state offers citizenship.  In the eyes of a normal British national, it clearly doesn’t jeopardise their own claims of nationality or their rights, that a person entitled to dual nationality can be stripped of their British citizenship at the whim of the government. What the government can hand out, clearly it can also take away.

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This article (Britain must take citizenship more seriously) was created and published by The Critic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Chris Bayliss

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RELATED

The Tyranny of International Lawyers

A series of cases in the Uk have seen judges twist human rights law to allow more people to remain who entered as illegal. migrants. The latest case allowing Gazans to qualify under an Ukraine scheme was sufficient to even  draw the PM ‘s criticism.

The UK has often in the past been careful not to put itself at risk of foreign judgements making it do things we disagree with. The International Court of Justice cannot judge matters between us and the Commonwealth, making a Chagos judgement out of order. The UN Law of the Sea does not apply to  us in any defence matter.

In more recent years we casually gave away too many powers to the European Court of Justice. These have now been reclaimed by Brexit. Time was when if the ECHR found against us Parliament would overturn the judgement, as with votes for prisoners.

Keir Starmer advised by Attorney General   Hermer seems keen to side with foreign complainants and courts wherever possible. He needs to grasp that the public want to stop the flow of migrants and expect Parliament to legislate a fix. He should see we must keep the Chagos  as there is no legal power to find against us.

Many in government say they are prevented from acting owing to Hermer telling them of dangers of judicial review. As they are the government they must legislate to deal with over activist judges.

SOURCE: John Redwood’s Diary

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