Being ‘British’ is one thing, but what exactly are we so proud of?
Iam currently applying for French citizenship. It’s a slow, intricate process – a bit like quilting, I imagine, except I am stitching together proof of my good character, spousal affection, mastery of the subjunctive and, er, birth, instead of fabric.
I am very lucky. I am entitled to French citizenship, but do not need it. I have no immediate plans to live in France; I don’t need citizenship to work, be with my family or have the sense of stability and permanence that motivates many applicants. It is more a lockdown hobby than an immediate aspiration. I used to be desperate to be French, but maturity has brought an acceptance that Yorkshire Gold runs through my veins and I really love apologising. I’m stupidly happy living in the UK, despite, well, pretty much everything.
Unfortunately, I can’t expect my French husband to put up with the Etonian venality and incompetence forever, especially post-Brexit. France has its share of suboptimal leadership, of course: Macron’s mid-pandemic reshuffle went down like a pasteurised Camembert and Prime Minister Castex’s recent tone-deaf declaration that he hadn’t downloaded the state Covid app because it’s not really for people like him was worthy of a British cabinet minister. But at least in France, my spouse argues, he could drown his sorrows by seeing a GP the same day for something non-life threatening.
My application process has been one step forward, two steps into paperwork chaos. It’s largely self-inflicted. I have mislaid apostilled translations (I still don’t know what an apostille is, maybe a bit like an armadillo), missed deadlines and even registered for the wrong language test (the Canadian one, tabarnak!) This latest idiocy has necessitated a series of panicky emails to the testing centre, couched in those flowery French politeness formulas, where I beg the revered reader to accept that I, a disgusting wretch, might have the insolence to sully their eyes with the expression of my humblest respect. I love that stuff, thankfully, since the testing centre only replies to one email in three.
It is not purely my incompetence. The French citizenship process is densely bureaucratic, requiring a black belt in form filling. It’s also inexplicably ravenous for recent birth certificates – what do they do with them, why must they be so fresh? An official somewhere must be sitting on a Mont Blanc of crisp, new certificates.
This is, of course, nothing compared to the painful, labyrinthine process of trying to acquire British citizenship. Nesrine Malik has written beautifully about the dehumanising cruelty of the “UK’s brutal and incompetent” immigration regime – the endless changes of policy, the bad faith and injustice, the soul-sapping sense of insecurity it engenders.
To take just one aspect of the grotesque process, have you tried taking a Life in the UK test, the notorious “Britishness” exam that demands you know the number of raisins in a Welsh cake, the birthdays of Queen Anne’s prime ministers and every time limit under Code C of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (I paraphrase, but only very slightly)? I have, and can confirm it is simultaneously stupidly hard and plain stupid. I got multiple legal and history questions wrong despite being a qualified solicitor and history graduate. One test question asks whether “new ideas about politics, philosophy and science” were developed during the 16th, 17th, 18th or 19th centuries (yes, there’s a single “correct” answer). A child could devise a better citizenship test; anything short of the A-Level algorithm could.
This idea that citizenship is a rare prize is horribly persistent. In the UK it demands a mythological hero’s quest through the hostile environment in which you prove your worth by completing a set of baffling tasks at great personal cost. Stray from the path, mislay a payslip, fail to get 70 points and you’ll be eaten by a Minotaur (or Priti Patel might banish you to live on a volcano).
In other places, on rare occasions, citizenship is bestowed on the heroically virtuous (remember the undocumented Malian hero who was “given” citizenship for saving a child from a burning Parisian building?) Even this dubious approach is too much to hope from the UK government, which refused to exempt NHS workers saving lives and risking their own this year from the healthcare immigration surcharge.
This system continues its alienating work as the Migration Advisory Committee has just added senior care workers and nursing assistants to its “shortage occupation list”, declaring itself “particularly concerned about the social care sector”, and noting the declining number of migrants coming to the UK. Duh, frankly.
Our immigration system is based on a notion of Britishness as a privilege and source of pride that feels absurd in 2020, as economic indicators tumble, poverty deepens and spreads and public life looks more corrupt and tawdrier than ever. It does not have to be that way. Imagine living in a country that is transparent, humane and welcoming towards those who want to live here: that really would be something to be proud of.
Imagine living in a country that is transparent, humane and welcoming towards those who want to live here