Political commentary

How to be British

Ferdinand Mount

Abroad is a bloody place to be born, to misquote Uncle Matthew. It is only in later life that you discover the inconvenience of having first seen the light of day in Simla or Rangoon. But the inconvenience suffered so far will be as nothing to what you may be in for under Mr Whitelaw's British Nationality Bill.

Take Uncle Aidan who was born in Assam where his father was a teaplanter. Uncle Aidan used to work for the British Council but, late in life, married Daphne, his equally British secretary (born in Argentina where her father worked for the railways), and they now live in Florence where they both teach English. Much to everyone's surprise, Daphne is now expecting a child. If born abroad after the Bill becomes law, that child will not be a British citizen; its only hope is for Uncle Aidan to book Daphne into a London maternity hospital now, or to make a determined assault on the Home Office, both of which, being Uncle Aidan, delightful in his way but somewhat vague and lacking in push, he is unlikely to do.

I mention first the sort of trouble likely to be suffered by sons and daughters of the Empire — not because they will be worse off than those black people who were born here but don't qualify for British citizenship but simply to emphasise the grand sweep of the Bill. There will be scarcely a family, black or white, without somebody whose status might be called into question.

The Nationality Bill has crept on us by easy stages. It was first proposed for discussion in the last government's Green Paper and then outlined in a White Paper last summer. But few have yet taken in how important it is. Mr Hattersley, Labour's new spokesman, is already limbering up for a full frontal assault.

How startling that it should be Mr Whitelaw who has accomplished something which Mr Enoch Powell has been urging for years and which Mr Heath's government tried but failed to come up with: a legal definition of 'who we are' — a question I have never been able to treat with proper reverence, because it always reminds me of the old Punch joke: Snobbish woman telling stranger about row with hotel manager: 'so in the end we simply had to tell him who we were.' Stranger: 'Really, and who were you?'

But whether you like it or not, this Bill is the most nationalist Bill any government has put forward in living memory. But it is nationalist in a rather curious way.

For the new test of being British is neither whether your parents are British — jus sanguinis —or whether you were born here jus soli. When pressed, the Government does accept its obligations under the Gene va Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. So if, say, both Britain and Uganda refuse to accept Mr X as a citizen and each claims that Mr X is a citizen of the other country, then the ultimate test will be where he was born. But the Government is keen to exclude from citizenship any child born here whose parents are not British citizens and who are not normally resident — students, illegal immigrants and other riffraff.

Mr Whitelaw uses the same argument to exclude these as he does to exclude the children born overseas of British parents who were also born overseas: 'The additional British citizens so created, with the right of abode here, would form a pool of considerable size, and they would have little or no real connection with the United Kingdom.' To stick to either parentage or place of birth as the sole test of citizenship would add to the numbers entitled to come here, not subtract from them. To narrow the numbers requires a new test of Britishness: not blood nor soil but being connected. 'Only connect' is the new way in; how horrified Forster. as a good liberal internationalist, would be to hear that holy injunction used to curb coloured immigration.

Yet while the prime object may be to fend off the five million inhabitants of Hong Kong into the separate category of 'Citizens of British Dependent Territories' — which is logical enough — this 'connectedness' invokes questions wider than keeping out the Yellow Peril.

If you happen to be on the borderline of Britishness, in order to secure citizenship. you will in future have actively 'to maintain strong connections with this country' or `to demonstrate a real connection with the United Kingdom' or, most striking phrase of all, 'applicants should be expected to demonstrate a real intention to throw in their lot with this country.'

These are powerful 'doing-words'. There is a factitive urgency about the new requirements. Citizenship is no longer a matter of passively and unconsciously being British; you must be up and demonstrating your Britisliness.

How are you to do this? Well, by serving the Crown directly, or by working for a British business overseas or for an international business established in Britain, or an international organisation like the UN. Or you could offer some other reason to convince the Home Office that you had thrown in your lot with John Silkin, Big Mal, Esther Rantzen, Sir Hugh Casson and the rest of us: keeping a cottage on Exmoor to retire to, having a daughter at Roedean, or — who knows — belonging to the RAC.

'Who knows?' is very much to the point, because all these matters fall within the discretion of the Home Office and that is a discretion no sensible man cares to fall within. For of all the civil servants that God and Sir Burke Trend ever thought of — but there, we need not waste our middle years abusing the Home Office. It is enough to say — and Mr Hattersley and the British Council of Churches can be relied on to say it over and over again —that no Government department should be entrusted with such a wide discretion over such a precious aspect of anyone's life. At the very least, there must be added to the Bill a system of judicial appeal to decide whether the discretion has been exercised reasonably.

And governments, not unnaturally, conceive of life in governmental terms. How grim and state-oriented these criteria are. Why should I have to work for a British business to stay British? Perhaps I am an industrial psycho-molybdenologist or an expert on the early lyrics of Grcmxzyk and no British firm or institution can even spell my specialism, let alone offer me a job in it. And why on earth should I have to demonstrate my Britishness?

Alas, there we must pause and reflect. This Bill may narrow and governmentalise the nature of citizenship. But in doing so it only reflects, I am afraid, the nature of the modern world, for the net effect of the whole business will be to make our laws of citizenship much like everyone else's, most notably those of the United States which, long before Senator Joe McCarthy, had taught its citizens to regard citizenship as a privilege not a right.

The old British view of citizenship — lazy, broad and generous — is a relic of Empire. And however humane its implications, it reflects a sentimental imperialist view which no longer corresponds either to the facts or to what most people want.

While the passing of the old citizenship is sad, this Bill or something like it had to be brought in some time. With all its faults, it will at least settle the question and keep the Tory Party quiet, so that there can no longer be any excuse for stirring up fears of unlimited immigration. And by the political law of opposites, this unpleasant and difficult business could be managed only by two of the Tories' most liberal ministers. To be honest, I never thought that Mr Whitelaw and Mr Raison would manage it and so must apologise for having doubted the seriousness of their intention to fulfil the Tories' election pledge.

While we are about it, this column also owes an apology to Mr Norman St John Stevas for carelessly imputing that he might have leaked Cabinet secrets or imputing that Mrs Thatcher was imputing that he had. In the heat of the moment, we had mislaid our Bagehot. A dozen Hail Marys and a modest postal order for party funds will follow shortly.