LONDON LETTER:WRITER AND academic Bernard Crick, who drafted the UK's first citizenship test for immigrants in 2006, ignored edicts from on high to include questions about history.
“I refused, both in principle and on grounds of practicality: could any test for immigrants be devised that 80 per cent of our fellow citizens would not fail?”
It was probably just as well, since an introductory essay to the test dealing with the country’s past was so littered with errors that it led to furious protests from historians and seven pages of corrections.
However, if nothing else, it represented the late Professor Crick’s idiosyncratic charm: an early draft of the test posed a question about what an immigrant should do if they spilt a local’s pint in a pub.
The guide to the test, Life in the UK: A Journey to Citizenship, included a declaration from Crick, the biographer of George Orwell, about the UK’s need for migrant labour – this was later removed.
In 2007, the guide was amended to include detailed material on employment law, the status of women in British society and education.
Explaining the reasons for the changes, the UK home office said it had “tried to maintain an appropriate balance between making the text accessible to those with limited language skills” and not sounding patronising to fluent English speakers.
The reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales best reflected the attempt “to make it more of a textbook and less of a piece of prose”: it was now described as “a long poem” rather than “a secular poem of a nominally religious pilgrimage”.
Thus amended, the home office’s current guide for intending applicants declares the UK’s pride “in its tradition of offering safety to people who are escaping persecution and hardship”. The tradition, it says, includes a reference to Britain’s willingness to offer shelter to Irish people “fleeing a terrible famine” in the mid-1840s – words that would be questioned in many quarters.
Undaunted by Crick’s opposition to history, Conservative home secretary Theresa May is returning to the issue, having ordered the rewriting of the Life in the UK multiple-choice questions.
Seeking “a more patriotic guide”, May, supported by British education secretary Michael Gove and others, wants applicants to know that the UK is “historically” Christian, with a “long and illustrious history”.
“Putting our culture and history at the heart of the test will help ensure those permanently settling can understand British life, allowing them to properly integrate into our society,” says the home office.
With history taking a more prominent role, other sections of the test would fall by the wayside, including explanations of the Human Rights Act, welfare benefit rules and reading gas meters.
Critics – and they are many – believe the current test, despite its flaws, makes some effort to ensure immigrants learn about issues they might subsequently need to understand.
Between 2005 and 2009, more than 900,000 people took the test, though the pace has slowed down with approximately 80,000 a year putting themselves forward for it more recently.
Of the 906,464 tests taken up to 2009, 263,641 people failed, giving a pass rate of just over 70 per cent. Candidates from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US tended to score 95 per cent or more.
By contrast, the results for people from countries such as Iraq, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Turkey were below 50 per cent. Indians scored above average, reaching nearly an 80 per cent average.
As in any test, there was cheating. In 2008, two Chinese men were jailed after they supplied applicants with miniature cameras, microphones and ear-pieces. Sitting in a car outside the test centre, the men gave instructions to the applicants – who could not speak English – on which boxes to tick.
Centres in Wales offer a Welsh-language version, while the Scots put forward a Scottish Gaelic option, though it can be safely assumed that demand for both is slight.
Last year, Channel 4 put some of the questions on the test to the native population and, if anything, the locals knew less than the immigrants. Just two-thirds were able to identify St George’s Day (April 23rd), while one in five knew how many MPs occupy seats in the House of Commons (650, for now).
The changes to be introduced fit into a Conservative narrative: immigrants must integrate and Labour did too little, or nothing, to bring this about during its years in power.
Like many others in the Conservative Party, UK communities secretary Eric Pickles believes Labour opted for multiculturalism rather than integration. The plain-speaking Yorkshireman has argued that the UK’s tradition of tolerance has been derided, while its culture has been placed second – behind the views of incomers.
“A handful of activists have insisted that it isn’t enough simply to celebrate the beliefs of minority communities; they want to disown the traditions and heritage of the majority, including the Christian faith and the English language.”
He says local authorities have bent over backwards to translate documents into several languages, while Christians have been admonished, or worse, for wearing crosses at work. This, says Pickles, “is the politics of division”.
