Civitas Blog

He writes:

‘I have no objection to the ceremonies introduced last February for foreigners who take British citizenship. …But there is a world of difference between a ceremony designed to welcome those who switch allegiance from one sovereign authority to another, and … a Blairite [one]… for people who were born British.’

I have slightly altered Mr Utley's wording because, in the original, what he contrasts with citizenship ceremonies for foreigners seeking naturalisation is not some equivalent citizenship ceremony for native born Britons, but a religious service.

Mr Utley makes this substitution following the inadvertent usage of the term 'service' by a Guardian reporter to refer to the proposed ceremony. This word struck Mr Utley as apposite, since, in his eyes, what the government seems intent on introducing is nothing less than ‘an act of communal worship ...[whose] object of veneration would not be God, so much as the Government and the constitution of the United Kingdom, with particular reference to the Home Office’s plans to improve racial integration and “community cohesion”.

I could not agree more with Mr Ultley in thinking that the present Government is liable to exploit the proposed ceremony, as it does every other opportunity that presents itself, to promote its own glory in the eyes of the public, as well as to plug its own highly questionable levelling agenda.

Moreover, I agree with Mr Utley that, were all that could be gained from any such form of ceremony, none would be worth introducing. Maybe, the risk of the ceremony being politicised in this way makes it one not worth taking.

However, it is by no means clear that every form of such a ceremony would be alien to the spirit of the British Constitution. Nor is it clear that no such ceremony could serve any useful political purpose today, claims that appear to be the central reasons Mr Utley offers for rejecting the idea of one.

That Mr Utley thinks any such form of ceremony would be alien to the British constitution is indicated when he writes:

‘Until this government came along, nobody thought that there was need of any state-sponsored ceremony to mark any particular stage in a youngster’s development as a member of the body politic. For Britons, the accumulation of all … rights and responsibilities was just a natural part of growing up.’

That Mr Utley thinks no such form of ceremony could serve any useful purpose is indicated by his observation:

‘We who are born free, need no citizenship oaths … to make us feel that we belong…. Such humiliations are for the people of insecure countries, riven by revolution, or for nations … with a long history of authoritarian rule.’

It is, perhaps, for these two reasons, that he writes:

‘The great thing about being born a British subject is that hundred of years’ worth of rights and liberties come free with our first gulp of breath. No rites of passage are required.’

Classical liberals may, with good cause, be as equally unwilling as Mr Utley ‘to chant from a text written by our …buffoon of a Home Secretary’, or to see their children encouraged to do so.

However, Mr Utley seems a little too eager to dismiss the idea there could be any merit in any form of such a ceremony. That eagerness leads him to make some pretty remarkable and highly contestable claims.

As a matter of historical fact, it is just not true that ‘before the present government, nobody had thought there was need of any state-sponsored ceremony to mark any particular stage in a youngster’s development as a member of the body politic.’

What else were the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Act of 1672, which required any form of public office holder to swear allegiance to the sovereign, but ‘state-sponsored ceremonies to mark a particular stage in a youngster’s development as a member of the body politic’?

It is, therefore, just untrue that, until the present government came along, ‘for Britons, the accumulation of all .. rights and responsibilites was just a natural part of growing up.’

After all, until 1829, Englishmen could not vote unless they had signed up to the articles of the Anglican Creed. Some natural accumulation of rights!

No, the civil and political rights of Britons, as we understand these today, had to fought hard for to be won. Moreover, they came only incrementally and gradually, often through struggle at and following the Glorious Revolution.

As to the value of any form of citizenship ceremony for British citizens, while fully sharing Mr Utley’s reservations about the merits of any form of one likely to issue from the pen of any current government minister or appointee, it seems too hasty to write off the very idea of such a ceremony as easily as Mr Utley seems keen to do.

He sees any such ceremony unnecessary because he thinks the liberties of Englishmen too securely entrenched to need being secured or reinforced by such ceremonies. I beg to differ.

It is true no formal oath or declaration of allegiance by itself carries much moral force, especially if the authority to which allegiance is given is, like the Nazi government was, an evil one. But a sincerely sworn oath or declaration of allegiance given to a worthy source of authority cannot but be a good and a cohesive force in any society whose members are customarily given over to making such pledges.

Making oaths has been the time-honoured way in which the British polity has obtained both the full participation and allegiance of its active members. This holds true, all the way from those who undertake jury duty or give evidence in court, through members of the police and armed forces, all the way up to the sovereign to whom, wrongly, Mr Utley supposes British subjects unconditionally bound.

Sine the Glorious Revolution, every incumbent British monarch has been made to swear an oath at their coronation in which they swear, among other things, to govern in accordance with statute and common law and to preserve and uphold all the customary rights belonging to their subjects as custom and statute accord them.

Arguably, since 1688, it has been accepted that the allegiance of British subjects to their sovereigns and to all those who act in their is dependent upon the sovereign and his or her public 'servants' acting in accordance with these time-honoured statutes and customs.

It is precisely the seeming eagerness with which the present government seems keen to sign away all these time-honoured statutes and traditional liberties of the British to what will be an essentially unaccountable remote ruling power situated in Brussels that makes it such a dangerous force.

Moreover, in an age, when nominal British citizenship can all too easily mask allegiance to some sinister and fanatical foreign prince or charismatic leader, what harm is there in requiring all future British citizens, wherever they might have been born, to make such an oath of allegiance? Our present situation is more akin to seventeenth century England, when deep religious conflicts threatened the body politic, than it is to that of Edwardian England or England just after 1945, when the country was far more uniform than it is now culturally and loyalites could be taken for granted.

Rather than dismissing the present-day relevance or value of oaths of allegiance for citizens of this country, those who cherish their British citizenship for the liberties it accords all who enjoy it would do well at this time to be urging their political masters and mistresses, right up to the very top, to remember what they themselves have personally undertaken to uphold and be loyal to in swearing the oaths they did upon assuming office.

Similarly, serious consideration should be given to the franchise beibng restricted to those prepared to swear such oaths. It should be thought by all Britons a privilege to be one and to enjoy the rights attendant upon being one, rather than something which the authorities should see fit to be anxiously seeking to persuade citizens to exercise.

I leave the last word on this subject to that great champion of English liberty, John Locke:

‘Submitting to the Laws of any country, living quietly, and enjoying privileges and protection under them makes not a man a member of that society: This is only a local protection and homage due to, and from all those, who, not being in a state of war, come within the territories belonging to any government, to all parts of whereof the force of its law extends.… Thus we see that foreigners, by living all their lives under another government, and enjoying the privileges and protection of it, though they are bound, even in conscience, to submit to its administration, as far forth of any Denison; yet do not thereby come to be subjects or members of that commonwealth. Nothing can make any man so, but his actually entering into it by positive engagement, and express promise and compact... This is … that consent which makes any one a member of any commonwealth.’ (Second Treatise of Government, section. 122; Locke's emphasis)