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On oaths
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.
“It rests on injustice”
Forgive me, but there’s no end to quoting Tony Benn. These are taken more or less at random.
He always had confidence in the people he represented. When he won the battle for the right to get rid of his inherited peerage and sit in the House of Commons again he knew that without the support of his Bristol constituents he wouldn’t have won at all. On the night he was finally re-elected, he congratulated them and thanked them:
“You have defeated the Tory cabinet, you have defeated the House of Lords, you have defeated the courts. You have changed the constitution of this country by your own power.”
When MPs take up their elected seats they have to swear an oath of allegiance to “Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors”. In earlier times, if anyone refused, they went to jail. Today, if they refuse, they get fined £500 a day until they agree. So they don’t refuse! Benn got round it by adding an explanation and the words “under protest” to the oath: So it was:
“As a committed republican, under protest, I take the oath required of me by law under the Parliamentary Oaths Act 1866 to allow me to represent my constituency: I, Tony Benn, under protest, do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm, etc., etc.”
There’s a brilliant video somewhere of him doing that! No surprise, then, that when describing the opening of parliament for a BBC television documentary he pointed out:
“When the Queen came that day and sat on the red carpet she was sitting just above the spot where Charles I stood trial and was condemned to death by the Commons.”
And even when he was being mischievous, there was a political point to be made:
“There’s an absolute hierarchy of lavatories in the Houses of Parliament: the bishops have their own lavatory, so do the peers, and the peeresses. There are separate lavatories for members and others for lady members. There are male and female staff lavatories. They even have lavatories for gentlemen. But it all ends up in the same place.”
But he wasn’t being mischievous when, in 1981, at the height of his inspirational powers, he passionately urged the Labour Party conference to face the truth:
“We tried to make capitalism work with good and humane Labour governments and we haven’t succeeded. Because it can’t work. Because it rests on injustice.”
When Thatcher resigned he didn’t see why there should be any difficulty repealing Thatcherite laws, although Thatcherite ideas in people’s heads, he thought, would take longer to erase. So he told the House of Commons he had “a little Bill” to bring forward: “It’s called the Margaret Thatcher Global Repeal Bill.” Well, it didn’t pass, and Blair took the ideas of Thatcherism and ran with them, imposing them on his own party in the process.
It is this we’re left to deal with, to reverse. And how we’re going to do it – and how we’re going to do it without Tony Benn – I don’t know. But we will have to try.
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