Millions of Britons would fail the citizenship tests being proposed for new migrants

I am a citizen of the UK; I have a certificate to prove it and a passport, too. I acquired the citizenship after filling out a form. I am also a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago; I was born into it. Both my national identities are the consequences of my ancestors' long, tortured and intimate 400-year involvement with British imperialism. But many recent migrants are not linked in the same way to Britain's imperial past and so may need to fill some gaps. Tests in English showing a simple knowledge of how and by whom we are governed - followed by a warm ceremony to receive their citizenship certificates - would be enough. We can borrow this process wholesale from America. Migrants deserve a prize if they overcome three years of xenophobia, prejudice and, at times, physical brutality to get to this stage.

But, instead, professors and other middle-class professionals want to test them on a complex range of historical and other data to discover whether they have surrendered to that vague category pompously called Britishness. The proposal, however, reveals ignorance of how migrants develop. They are, by their nature, inquisitive about their new country and its institutions. Each new discovery produces a glint in the eye. It takes a generation or more before they descend into the torpor of the "born here".

I met an Albanian a few days ago. He worked like a slave, digging up the road and relaying it around London's Trafalgar Square. He is paid by cheque, he has negotiated with the police on a number of occasions and he has visited the courts in solidarity with friends. His alertness and knowledge of the UK is sharpened by hate-filled encounters with the indigenous folk.

Yet it is proposed that he be asked questions about how parliamentary democracy and the British nation state came about. I am sure that fine historian, the late E P Thompson, would have had a completely different view on these processes from, let's say, Professor Sir Bernard Crick, who chaired the panel that invented this confusion.

The Guardian suggests people may be asked: what does it mean to be a good neighbour? Along with many immigrants, I have learnt that the English may know nothing about people to whom they have lived next door for a lifetime. It is migrants who have restored neighbourliness to this place. Millions of British, including Caribbeans and Asians, would fail such tests. Perhaps they, too, should take them before they get a passport.

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