Suzy Dean (London, The Manifesto Club): A couple of weeks ago the Manifesto Club hosted a mock version of the citizenship test that everyone wishing to become a British citizen must now pass. In reality, as Jon Bright has already commented on these pages, it proved to be vacuous and superficial. And with questions such as "What is the population of Wales?" and "Why was there a fall in the number of people migrating to the UK from the West Indies, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the late 1960s?" it couldn't have been less practical. But its disconcertingly abstract quality is no accident: it expresses a view of citizenship that is grounded not in the lives of citizens, but the minds of politicians.
This is evident throughout the test. It seems that far from migrants learning about British culture for themselves, by taking note of what they need to know according to their own lifestyle and interests, the citizenship test is about the government informing new members of the population what they think migrants should know. But even when matters of content are put aside, a fundamental problem remains; while the government can make people pass a test they cannot make citizens. This is because being a citizen is an active role based on becoming, not knowing something.
So, if the best way to become a citizen of any country is through experience, in other words, by contributing to and mixing with people that already live within that place, what is actually driving citizenship tests?
In short, they derive their impetus from the problems of an estranged political elite. In the absence of having a vision to offer society, some idea that might actually galvanise citizens, they have turned instead to trying to define who we are. Incapable of positively envisioning what society might become, they attempt instead to capture how it is. As Gordon Brown's definition of Britishness last year indicates - ‘liberty, responsibility and fairness' - the results, if they are to be inclusive, are necessarily vague. The citizenship test is equally culpable. It seeks to impose a sense of shared meaning around a common identity, despite being unable to articulate, or at least uphold, that with which people are meant to identify.
The lack of substance in the citizenship test and meaning of Britishness more generally is most clearly revealed in the discussion about how to engage with young Muslims. In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute in London in early 2006, Gordon Brown emphasised the need to win the hearts and minds of young Muslims. He suggested that this should be done through a clash of ideas in media, art and literature to show young Muslims that Western, in particular British, ideals are better than the fundamentalist ones that attracted the 7/7 bombers. This is a valid point. However, he failed to make something useful out of it because he struggled to outline the precise values Britain is supposed to embody.
It seems that New Labour isn't clear about what its values are, and cannot explain them. Rather than engaging in a New Labour imposed debate about what citizenship should be, a far more important debate is one we should be having over the kind of society we want to live in. We rarely hear a politician offering us an inspiring vision and a good reason why we would want to try and make it a reality. It is only a real sense of vision which will reinvigorate the lost sense of citizenship in the UK.
