15 hours ago
4
What medal did Mary Peters win in the 1972 Olympics? How many Scottish ski resorts are there? Where was Florence Nightingale born? Until I got these questions as exasperated screenshots from my husband, I had no idea, like any normal Briton (it’s gold, five and Italy, apparently). They came from an app he downloaded to revise for his Life in the UK test, a prerequisite for applying for citizenship. Other recent questions have featured the divine right of kings, Hadrian’s Wall fort names and trying minor crimes in Scotland. Can the test itself possibly be this hard? We’ll soon find out: he’s taking it next week, if he doesn’t give up and go back to France instead.
Much has been written about the absurdity of the Life in the UK test – it’s inaccurate, partial and sloppily worded, unfit for purpose, a “bad pub quiz” – and now it’s ruining my life (in the UK). Home is tense: my husband is tetchy because he has spent years here (he works, volunteers, pays taxes, can identify both Mitchell brothers and responds appropriately when asked “You all right?”), but now needs to prove he is assimilated by answering multiple-choice questions on the repeal of the Corn Laws. I’m mortified, partly because we’re making people pay £50 to take an absurdly hard exam – you need 75% to pass – and partly because it keeps humbling me. I’m a history graduate, but couldn’t tell you the date of the Habeas Corpus Act with a gun to my head.
Other bits are even worse: my husband mentioned Britain being attached to Europe by a land bridge 10,000 years ago and I corrected him confidently, saying he “must have misread”. He had not. I also qualified as a solicitor, but apparently know nothing of judicial history. It’s causing irrevocable damage to my brand as household smartarse.
You could argue that I’m stupid – I am, but we’re all stupid these days! New York magazine just published a whole issue about how much stupider we’re getting. Research in 2021 suggested that two-thirds of Britons would fail the UK citizenship test and that was before TikTok and ChatGPT fully ate our brains; I bet it would be higher now. It’s not fair to demand that citizenship applicants jump through hoops that would see us all faceplant in the attempt. For my successful citizenship interview in France I was asked to identify a photo of General de Gaulle.
Maybe applicants should have a degree of cultural understanding. Why not, I suppose. But it’s meaningless testing people on a UK they don’t actually live in: a dated, sanitised version with an unproblematic imperial legacy and an Elgar soundtrack; where there are still Welsh cakes (they come up bafflingly often) for tea and the rivers aren’t full of faeces. A revision guide chapter entitled “A modern, thriving society” is illustrated with a picture of the Mall thronged with white faces waving union jacks, for goodness sake.
Workshopping a better test was a fun distraction for a while. We considered testing identification of the Greggs logo and the Strictly theme tune, “contextual swearing”, meal-deal value extraction, and soap opera modules (it’s ridiculous you need to know about 14th-century poet John Barbour but not Deirdre Barlow). I also suggested that candidates should study videos to identify the correct order of boarding in a poorly organised bus stop queue, demonstrate a working knowledge of the various usages of the word “sorry” and implement hot drink protocols in domestic and workplace settings. But then I started thinking how the delighted fetishising of our humdrum foibles is quite an unappealing national trait and depressed myself further.
So I’m back to pinning lists of dates on the fridge and praying my husband passes the test, despite his fatal inability to retain any of them. Actually, he has learned one, he says: “1066, when we conquered you. So, you’re all French – you should take a life in France test.” It’s also taught him, he says, that we’re all immigrants, whether we took that land bridge I still don’t believe in, came over with the Conqueror or only arrived last week. And we’re all rewriting what life in the UK is every minute. That, at least, is cheering us up.
