Just before the new king appeared on the balcony, I got some wonderful news: my Bolivian friend had passed her UK citizenship test. The fifth time was a charm. We’ve been revising for this since 2018, during which time I have learned, forgotten and learned again what the Picts were up to and when, what a traditional Northern Irish dish is and which view was voted by Britons in 2007 as the nation’s most beautiful. OK, it appears that I’ve forgotten that last one all over again, but it doesn’t matter, because my friend is now legit.
By about two years in, I was finding everything about this test offensive. It required a huge amount of quite diffuse knowledge that would probably never reside in the same person, whether they were born in Britain or not: some of us can name Olympians, some of us can name signature titles in the canon of David Lean and some of us know whether or not the UK government has ever used its power to suspend the Northern Ireland assembly, but the only people who know all these things are quiz teams. That is, apparently, what Great British Values boil down to: could you, or could you not, pull your weight in a pub quiz?
Some questions were obviously editorialising, there to determine whether the citizen was sufficiently paranoid about terrorism. “True or false,” one asked, “members of a terrorist group will dress alike?” The answer they wanted was “false”, but it really depends on the group, I’d say – good luck getting into the Baader Meinhof without a black polo neck.
There were a bunch of questions about the responsibilities of a British citizen whose answers were frankly debatable: are you supposed to avoid shopping on a Sunday, keep your dog on a lead at all times, grow your own vegetables or look after yourself and your family? OK, fine, you could probably do it by a process of elimination, but try to imagine you’re Bolivian, you’ve lived in the UK for 20 years, you’ve seen plenty of British-born people look after neither themselves nor their families, and you don’t own a dog. What are you supposed to make of that? Anyway, she passed, and she’s now a citizen of a country too foggy on its own constitution to know that it doesn’t have citizens, but subjects. Well done her, though. I couldn’t be more pleased.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
