The government may make new British citizens swear an oath of allegiance to “British values”. In my Christian youth we used to argue about whether it was right to swear an oath, even in court. Jesus had said that we shouldn’t and that anything more than just Yes or No “comes from evil”. I think it was because he rejected the assumption that everyone was a lying bastard unless they swore otherwise under some kind of threat from on high.
In later years, when I went to refugees’ citizenship ceremonies, I discovered that they were required to swear allegiance to “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and all her successors”. I realised then that I could never have become a naturalised citizen if I’d had to even just declare such allegiance, never mind swear it. Tony Benn famously found a way round it. Faced with the necessity of swearing allegiance to said Queen and said descendants at the opening of each Parliament, he read out the form of words – but prefaced them with his own: “I, Tony Benn, under protest, and in order to serve my constituents, do swear … ”
But I don’t suppose the new oath makers will put up with any ploys of that kind when they’re registering oaths from today’s new citizens as they swear blind that they are totally committed not only to Her Majesty (even if her governments did try to bomb their home countries to buggery), but to cricket, or knitting, or Manchester United or anything else that they already subscribe to. I saw one list of British values that included “family values”. Unfortunately, our government’s own allegiance to the “right to family life” found in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act is more than doubtful. If you don’t believe that, you’ve never tried to assist already-naturalised citizens to negotiate the obstacles deliberately put in their way to thwart their attempts to reunite their families on good old British soil.
Oaths? I’ll give you oaths.