‘There is a clear need for a wider political conversation about the notion of citizenship and voting rights in the UK in 2024.’
So declaims Modernising Elections, a new report from the IPPR, a heavyweight progressive think-tank (page 20). What it means by this is that there are ‘around 5 million permanent tax-paying residents of the UK do not have the right to vote in its elections’. It proposes either relaxing the rules about non-residents voting in elections, or ‘encouraging citizenship acquisition’ by making it cheaper (and, implicitly, easier).
Quite why this is a problem is assumed more than stated. The paper draws a direct comparison between this group and historically disenfranchised groups, such as ‘non-propertied men, women and younger adults’.
But this skates over what ought to be a – no, the – fundamental difference: that those were disenfranchised citizens, and this new group are not. In so doing, it tries to completely circumvent the fundamental questions posed by the franchise about what a political community actually is.
I have made before the principled case against enfranchising permanent residents: that it fundamentally shifts our conception of nationhood to that of a mere tax base and service recipients. And while it is true that Britain doesn’t currently operate a strictly citizenship-based franchise, the exceptions (Ireland and the Commonwealth) are based on long-standing cultural connections to Britain – although the latter may yet come under strain if mass immigration from Commonwealth countries continues.
Such arguments are unlikely to move the IPPR and its presumed audience. But there is another case which it and other progressive advocates of franchise dilution would do well to heed, especially at a time of rising nationalist and populist sentiment both in the UK and across the West.
To whit: if you want to maintain a civic conception of citizenship, it is extremely important that you make your concept of civic citizenship substantial. History attests that a ‘thick’ civic citizenship can serve as a viable alternative to the older, bloodier-and-soilier nationalist alternative as the basis for a participatory, democratic polity. But not a ‘thin’ one.
Let’s boil it down to the fundamental question: if you are British or French, what is it that makes someone as British or French as you? Which is to say, as deserving of full participation in the political community and – and this latter is growing increasingly salient in Britain – entitlement to state services and welfare.
The civic-nationalist answer is citizenship, and it is (on paper) a good one. Unlike membership of a particular ethnic group, it is latently inclusive; people from other places and cultures can, at least in theory, join it. But the crucial thing about a coherent identity, and the part which I suspect many progressives struggle with, is that to cohere it must both unite the people within it and meaningfully exclude those outside it.
France gets this. Anyone can be French – indeed, it was for some time the underlying philosophy of French imperialism that everyone governed from Paris could and would be French, eventually. But ‘Frenchness’ is well-defined: it has its shibboleths and rituals, and assimilating into those is a big part of what ‘becoming French’ entails.
The UK is, in theory, well-suited to a similar system. While ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ could be argued as ethnic communities, ‘British’ is not. It has historically extended explicitly to very large groups of people (Australians, Canadians, et al.) living overseas who were nonetheless culturally British – an attitude that persists today in the welcome given to Hong Kongers.
But unlike France, there is no ‘thick’ conception of Britishness, at least not in the minds of our governing classes. All we get instead are hazy invocations of ‘British values’ which, whatever their individual merits, are a complete non-starter as a basis for nationhood because they don’t exclude those outside it. (Seriously, scan any proffered list of ‘British values’ and ask yourself if the author genuinely thought that they were the basis on which you could distinguish a Briton from a (progressive) German, or Kazakh.)
On the surface, this has allowed Britain to be touted as an integration success story relative to France. But it is very much a case of set a low passing grade, get a high pass rate. France has real challenges with communities that have not assimilated into its ‘thick’ conception of Frenchness; the UK doesn’t ask people to assimilate into much of anything, and calls that success.
Which brings us to citizenship. At present, we have a very lenient approach: anyone who can stay here long enough to qualify for permanent residency (a mere five years) has an automatic pathway to citizenship, should they choose it. The only barriers are financial. (There is an oath to ‘be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles III, his Heirs and Successors, according to law’, but what does that really ask of someone? What consequences are there if it is broken, and does anyone check?)
All this is already, although many perhaps do not yet know it, laying landmines for civic nationalists (of which I am one) – because the easier citizenship (or the privileges of citizenship, such as welfare and the vote) are to get, the less they serve as a useful barometer of how British (and thus, how deserving of those privileges) someone actually is.
Put another way: if you want the mere fact of someone having a British passport to close down the question of whether or not they should be in social housing, it is very much in your interest that British passports are relatively hard to get, and signify a substantial effort of assimilation into a thick shared culture.
If, instead, the concept of citizenship is further diluted, the opposite happens. If you tell somebody that a relatively new arrival is as British as them merely on the basis that they have a passport and have notionally subscribed to some nebulous ‘British values’, you have nothing to offer someone who’s response is ‘no they’re not’.
You have just reinforced to them a disconnection between citizenship and national belonging, and their natural follow-up question (‘So what does make me British?’) will lead them to places that no progressive civic nationalist wants them to go.
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