my journey to British citizenship

This is a blog about the process of getting British citizenship:  the journey from ‘foreign national’  to full-fledged, passport carrying citizen of the United Kingdom.

Since 2004-2005 all newcomers to the UK who want to become citizens have to take a citizenship test and attend a citizenship ceremony.  Approximately 13,000 people now take the citizenship test each month. Citizenship ceremonies are held at local registry offices and have welcomed over 200,000 new citizens into British society since they were first established in 2004.

Government reports and the recent review of new citizenship policy by Lord Goldsmith (2008) have claimed that the tests and ceremonies are ‘very successful’ in ‘enhancing the bond of citizenship’.   But what’s it like from the perspective of a newcomer?

I am an immigrant from Canada who, in 2008, after living in the UK for more than three years as the spouse of a Brit, was eligible to apply for citizenship.  Over a six month period, I studied for the citizenship test (by reading the government-approved text ‘Life in the UK: the journey to citizenship’), did some on-line practice tests and took the test at a testing centre in Liverpool.  Once I passed, I had to fill out all the necessary paperwork and send it (along with the required payment of over £650) to the Border and Immigration Agency.   I then waited to be invited to a citizenship ceremony.  When I attended the ceremony (in Kendal), I said my ‘Oath of Allegiance’ to the Queen and took the ‘Pledge of Loyalty to the United Kingdom’ and stood up for the national anthem.  I was then welcomed as a new British citizen by assorted officials and guests.  To mark the end of the journey I was given a ‘certificate of naturalisation’, a passport application, a glass paperweight from Cumbria County Council and a nice cup of tea.   I received my UK passport several months later.

The point of this blog (which I kept from September 2008 t0 August 2009) was both to describe the various steps in the process (which I hoped  might be interesting to others thinking of embarking on the ‘journey’) and to share some of my critical reflections and gut reactions about all aspects of it.

I should note that wrote this blog and went throught the citizenship-aquisition (or ‘naturalisation’)  process while researching UK citizenship policy.  I am a politics lecturer at Keele University.  So, while some of my reflections are somewhat raw and unfiltered – especially about how the process made/makes me feel as a ‘migrant’ – others have been informed by the academic work I have been doing to try to understand the implications of the tests and ceremonies for political life in the UK.