The hoots of derision that greeted Lord Goldsmith's citizenship review in early March revealed a continuing reluctance on the part of much of the British political class to think straight about national citizenship. Most of the media coverage got stuck on a single footnote in the review—the idea of a school-leaver oath of allegiance to the Queen (or to British society)—thereby providing an opportunity for leading figures on both left and right to disdain the modest reforms to the language and institutions of citizenship that this government is proposing.
Opposition from the left was to be expected. Since the 1960s, part of the western left has tended to see the "universalist shift" of the mid-20th century—the embrace of the moral equality of all humans, within countries and between them—as rendering national borders and traditions irrelevant. This was especially true of the British left, perhaps because of the country's imperial history and the absence of a 1789-style "people's" nationalism. An honourable internationalism got mixed up with a self-hating post-nationalism, with the result that, at least until recently, the symbols and language of the nation were largely ceded to the right.
Meanwhile, the right has been equally dismissive of the Goldsmith proposals, but on the grounds that if citizenship is not instinctive then it is valueless. Most people in Britain, especially from the white majority, tend to have a view of the nation that is a mix of the historical/ethnic (a loose sense of belonging to a "people") and the civic (the rule of law, parliament, the rules of citizenship). To say "I don't need a motto, I'm British" or "We don't do flags on the lawn" may sound postmodern, but they are actually pre-modern, assuming the implicit understandings that come with ethnicity—we don't need to spell things out because we know intuitively.
This convergence between the left's post-nationalism and the right's organic nationalism led both sides to pour scorn on Goldsmith and, implicitly, to embrace the status quo. But the status quo, especially in England, is fuzzy, overcomplicated and full of anomalies from the colonial era—for example, the fact that Irish citizens resident in Britain can vote in general elections. One point of the Goldsmith report was to sort some of these things out. He proposed, for example, simplifying the various categories of citizenship and introducing a presumption that people granted residency in this country should become citizens (an increasing number do not). He also put forward some more contentious proposals on the rituals of citizenship—such as a national day and the oath of allegiance—with a view to extending them to all citizens, not just new ones.
Of course, there is something to be said for British diffidence on these matters and for our mockery of pompous displays of national vanity. But this is not a game. Nor is it just about sorting out a few historic anomalies; there are deeper strains here, ones to which the government is trying, not always successfully, to respond with its narratives of Britishness and citizenship.
In the past 50 years, Britain has changed out of all recognition. Many of the old collective identities—class, religion, ethnicity—have faded. There has been a big increase in value diversity, stimulated by affluence, individualism and mobility. Immigration means that there are now lots of British citizens with other attachments, both ethnic and, especially in the case of Muslims, religious. Whether deliberately or not, these have been fostered by Britain's laissez-faire multiculturalism. The rise of Scottish, Welsh and English nationalism within the United Kingdom and the free movement of people within the EU have further complicated the picture. And as the sacrifices and solidarities of the two world wars fade from the collective memory, younger generations no longer feel the same automatic commitment to fellow citizens or national institutions. We cannot and do not want to turn the clock back. But it would be odd to imagine that the same approach to citizenship that made sense in the 1950s still makes sense today.
The point is that from the 1960s onwards, Britain did not develop a modern, postimperial language of national citizenship and identity that was comfortable with the idea of equal citizenship. The right did not fully embrace equality (and after Enoch Powell, the liberal right just wanted to avoid the subject). The left did embrace equality, but thought it meant burying the nation state; it did not accept that even if all people on the planet are in some sense morally equal, we still have a far greater political and social commitment to our fellow citizens, of all classes and ethnicities. There is a "middle way" between universalism and ethnic nationalism, and other traditions such as the French and the Canadian often express it more comfortably than we do.
British citizenship needs modernisation and clarification in at least three ways. First, spelling out what Goldsmith calls "the package of rights and responsibilities which demonstrate the tie between a person and a country." Most of these already exist, but they are not written down anywhere—and we can no longer assume that everyone intuitively understands them.
Second, we need to clarify the dividing line between citizens and non-citizens. At its most basic, this means controlling our borders and who crosses them (and counting them properly). It also means making new citizens more aware of what it is they are joining. This is where the current government has made most progress with its citizenship ceremonies and tests, and its idea of staged, "earned" citizenship.
Third, in an era of greater mobility we need a more overt assumption that the interests of British citizens, of all colours and creeds, must come first. This is more complicated than it used to be; we grant, as we should, many rights to non-citizens, including, of course, other EU citizens. But why on earth in the NHS doctors recruitment fiasco did we give no preference to British citizens, or even to people coming out of British medical schools?
One cannot, of course, legislate for a sense of belonging. And it takes time for new citizens to absorb a country's norms and unspoken codes. State-sponsored patriotic rituals are not necessarily the answer, for either new or old citizens, especially in a country as individualist and sceptical as Britain. But the ceremonies for new citizens, derided when introduced in 2004, have proved popular. If they go with the grain, top-down ideas can have popular appeal.
Yet what difference is a national day going to make to those disaffected young Muslims whose primary commitment is to the umma, or to east Europeans who have a purely financial motive for being here? A national day will make little difference on its own. But if in the 1960s and 1970s Britain had projected a clearer and more confident idea of itself, and if it had made a clearer "offer" to new citizens about what rights they could expect from their new country and what it expected from them, perhaps minority identity politics would have had less of a pull. Similarly, if there was now a clearer distinction between full British citizens and "associate" citizens (from the EU and elsewhere)—with their slightly different rights and duties—some resentments might be taken care of. And if we had had a Canadian-style system of selective immigration, with an explicit stress on immigration being designed around the interests of existing citizens, there might be less hostility to it today among the British majority.
The nation state is still necessary for most of the things that liberals want, from democratic accountability to redistribution of wealth. But it needs help, especially from the left, which after all wants the state to make more, not fewer, demands of citizens—whether paying higher taxes or being more active citizens. We do not advocate a return to Edwardian jingoism, but a minimum sense of "being in this together" is necessary to avoid long-term ethnic balkanisation and a small, low-tax state. People can feel or express national commitments in many different ways. And if people on the left find the idea of the nation distasteful, then the simple answer is for them to give it another name: society, or just plain citizenship. To dismiss this belated attempt to modernise national citizenship as "puerile," in Helena Kennedy's word, is just complacent.
