In this official history, Britain always gives, never takes
September 13, 2020 8:23 AM   Subscribe

Frank Trentmann on the glaring inaccuracies and whitewashing of history in the official Life in the United Kingdom handbook, required reading for the citizenship test. The latest version of its history states there was an “orderly transition from Empire to Commonwealth”, the slave trade was not “evil” but “booming”, and Britain alone invented or discovered insulin, DNA, MRI, and the Web. posted by adrianhon (30 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is what conservatives actually believe.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:45 AM on September 13, 2020 [14 favorites]


Saying “conservatives believe X” at this point is like saying “Trump thinks X” — I’m not sure those verbs really describe whatever mental processes are going on, and it sure as hell doesn’t provide any predictive power.
posted by bjrubble at 9:15 AM on September 13, 2020 [4 favorites]


So, in order to become a citizen of the UK you have to be able to parrot a bunch of lies about history. Stiff upper lip, old chap, don't complain, it's how we've always done things. Know your place, what what? Don't rock the boat, wouldn't be cricket, don't you know?
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:21 AM on September 13, 2020 [1 favorite]


Same as how it is in the US, really. And worth adjustment. Thanks for this post.
posted by jessamyn at 10:12 AM on September 13, 2020 [5 favorites]


I suspect that any history from the UK government will try to offend no-one, and in doing so become a pale shadow of any truth
posted by mdoar at 10:45 AM on September 13, 2020


Gammons gonna gammon.
posted by acb at 10:58 AM on September 13, 2020 [2 favorites]


I suspect that any history from the UK government will try to offend no-one, and in doing so become a pale shadow of any truth

All the people offended by this whitewashing don't count?
posted by Dysk at 11:54 AM on September 13, 2020 [15 favorites]


On top of all of this, when I took it a few years ago, it focused on England at the expense of the other nations in the UK. Living in Scotland at the time I was naively surprised at how little my adopted home figured in what was considered essential knowledge for new citizens. It wasn't until I moved to England that I realized how little the rest of the UK is discussed or considered here.
posted by sudasana at 12:15 PM on September 13, 2020 [4 favorites]


So gracious and humble of them not to mention the UK creating the largest number of Independence Days (59) in the process of "countries being granted their independence".
posted by Revvy at 2:03 PM on September 13, 2020 [3 favorites]


Mrs. Example and I did our Life in the UK tests recently. On top of all the inaccuracies and the Rule Britannia rah-rah we had to regurgitate, it was also apparently vitally important that we know things like who directed Chariots of Fire for some reason.

Oh, and then there were the questions that took the form of something like:
What percentage of the UK is of Chinese descent?

A.) 0.1% B.) 0.2% C.) 0.3%
The correct answer--"D.) Are you fucking kidding me?"--was not an option.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:25 PM on September 13, 2020 [5 favorites]


When I did it, it had questions like “which month of the year are electoral enrolment forms sent out?”

This was before the Tories put in their jingoistic questions, so it was mostly irrelevant administrivia, inoffensive except for the fact that you could be denied Indefinite Leave To Remain for being bad at memorising irrelevant administrivia.
posted by acb at 2:31 PM on September 13, 2020 [9 favorites]


Same as how it is in the US, really. And worth adjustment.

The US test isn't nearly as bad as this makes the UK test out to be. Certainly, there are more than zero self-serving questions+answers in the US test (ie the short list of acceptable responses to "Why did the US declare independence?"), but it's far more concentrated on political-history trivia like who the first president was or what war Eisenhower was a general in. Certainly there are no film directors.

It also seems to be structured differently; instead of a booklet and questions based on it, there are just 100 questions where you can go see the questions and acceptable answers right now (with fudged answers for current officeholders).

OTOH, the US permanent residency and citizenship process does ask you whether you were a member of the Nazi party between 1933 and 1945 a truly astounding number of times, even if you were born long after 1945.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:48 PM on September 13, 2020 [6 favorites]


I've taken this test recently. Thank heavens I now know that Scotland has five ski centres and the longest dry ski slope in Europe.

If anyone finds themselves having to take this test soon: first, good luck; second, observe that Henry VIII's wives form a nested structure, Catherine-> Anne-> Jane <-Anne <-Catherine <-Catherine. It is important that you know this arrangement and also the number of ski centres in Scotland, and also the majestic supremacy of that one dry ski slope.

The 2020 edition of the handbook is careful to point out the results of the Brexit vote to the tenth of a percent (p69, the very end of the section called "A long and illustrious history"). It is less careful when it comes to the text formatting in the section about the UK's modern-day international relationships, where there is literally a big blank area where one has to assume the EU used to be. This is on Page 138 for folks playing along at home---it's mostly empty, and then on the next page it picks right back up with the Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights, which... lolololol. Looks like they'll need to blank out more text before long.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 4:30 PM on September 13, 2020 [4 favorites]


Insulin? Really? That's one of the few major scientific advances from Canada. There are controversies about who exactly gets credit, but it was certainly in Canada.
Wow.
posted by PennD at 4:58 PM on September 13, 2020 [6 favorites]


A minor point in the whole, maybe, but the guide doesn't claim that insulin was a solely British invention, it says "The Scottish physician and researcher John MacLeod (1876–1935) was the co-discoverer of insulin, used to treat diabetes" (which still seems like a bit of an exaggeration, going off the Wikipedia entry, but it seems insulin was at least discovered in his laboratory in Toronto).

Very good article overall though. Both the shoddiness of the history and the strange questions (as cited above) are real areas of concern. I wonder what an ideal guide would look like? I feel it would have to critique some of the country's own assumptions ("we want to think we hold these values; but we haven't always lived up to them", or "actually, some of us don't welcome migrants").
posted by Pink Frost at 6:01 PM on September 13, 2020


No mention of Churchill's Bengal Famine then, I guess
posted by Tom-B at 6:47 PM on September 13, 2020 [7 favorites]


Why should anyone have to pass a test anyway? We have one in Australia as well and it doesn’t prove anything other than some people are able to study for and pass a test.
posted by awfurby at 11:43 PM on September 13, 2020 [5 favorites]


The way we treat immigrants in the UK is entirely gross. These measures are all a form of theatre that plays well enough to win the votes of middle England racists but isn't quite connected enough to lose liberal votes. Of course, because both the conservatives and labour were united in their distaste for immigration there wasn't really much ground to run to for those unhappy with the mood music.

I suspect that a small minority of the UK would pass this test if forced to take it, and frankly I always feel like immigrants are much more patriotic than those born here: after all, if you immigrate somewhere you choose to live there, while "natural" citizens are here by an accident of history.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 12:02 AM on September 14, 2020 [2 favorites]


and frankly I always feel like immigrants are much more patriotic than those born here

That is very much not my experience. I have never been threatened by an immigrant for not being sufficiently praising or obsequious when discussing Britain or Britishness. I have never been shouted at to "speak English" or been moaned to about others "speaking their own language" (as if the Brit spitting this phrase like a slur wasn't speaking their own language too) by immigrants. I've never seen immigrants physically attack someone for supporting a football team other than England. I could go on. I've met immigrants that were proud of the countries they came from and immigrants who are somewhat proud of the UK, but never have any of them approached the nationalistic zeal of a gammon.

But maybe "patriotic" means something different to you than it does to me. To me it means violence.
posted by Dysk at 12:20 AM on September 14, 2020 [5 favorites]


That is very much not my experience. I have never been threatened by an immigrant for not being sufficiently praising or obsequious when discussing Britain or Britishness. I have never been shouted at to "speak English" or been moaned to about others "speaking their own language" (as if the Brit spitting this phrase like a slur wasn't speaking their own language too) by immigrants. I've never seen immigrants physically attack someone for supporting a football team other than England. I could go on. I've met immigrants that were proud of the countries they came from and immigrants who are somewhat proud of the UK, but never have any of them approached the nationalistic zeal of a gammon.

But maybe "patriotic" means something different to you than it does to me. To me it means violence.


Yeah, apologies, I agree that patriotism is inherently a violent and unpleasant concept in practice that leads to the kind of conflict and violence you describe.

What I was attempting to gesture at with my comment was a notion of patriotism as purely the idea of a nation as a fundamentally good place to be in, which I think immigrants may have more of a feel for because as I say they have actively chosen to live in their country, and have also struggled through the outrageous demands made by said host nation to "prove" their willingness to live there, imposing both a financial and emotional cost on them.

But you're completely right that fundamentally patriotism is a pretty poisonous concept in most if not all of it's expressions.
posted by Cannon Fodder at 1:07 AM on September 14, 2020 [2 favorites]


The way we treat immigrants in the UK is entirely gross.

*godawful scraping sound as a soapbox the size of a bus is dragged into view*

Sorry in advance, everybody. This is going to be a long one.

So Mrs. Example and I applied for indefinite leave to remain last October. For those of you not immersed in UK immigration law--and oh, how I envy you--that basically means permanent residency in the UK. (For US readers, it's the local equivalent of a green card.) The actual mechanics of the process are better than they used to be. Everything used to involve printing and filling out giant stacks of forms, then mailing everything--including your passport--off for months while someone made a decision in Croydon or Bootle or somewhere. These days the forms are all online and you just have to go in to get your passport scanned and your photo/fingerprints taken. Additionally, for long boring reasons I won't go into, we were able to use the shorter, simpler form instead of the long-ass one that requires you to cough up five years of bank statements, have a minimum salary, and so on.

However.

The application fees have been spiraling upward ever since Theresa May (anathema upon her) brought in her whole "hostile environment" thing back in 2012. The current fee for the kind of thing we did? It's £2,389. Per person. Payable up front. (Fortunately we didn't have to pay the exorbitant NHS surcharge, which is currently £400 per person per year, also payable up front, and going up to £624 next month. That's an entire other can of worms.) So that's £4,778 we had to cough up as a lump sum. Oh, and the Home Office doesn't do refunds if anything goes wrong, so we'd have been out that money.

Even that's not as terrible as it could have been, though. For some unfathomable reason, we have decent credit ratings in the UK, so our bank was willing to front us the money, and my employer reimburses visa fees and does interest-free loans for spouses. They tax the reimbursement as a benefit for some godawful HMRC reason, but ugh. Fine. Better than it could be, right?

However.

The Home Office have recently done the thing that Tories do and outsourced a lot of this process to a private company. You used to be able to go to a local post office and get all of your photo/biometric/ID checking stuff done. Not any more. Now you have a choice of one of a handful of "core" service locations around the country where you can get an appointment for free. Oh, but if you don't want to scan and upload your passport yourself--and God help you if you make any mistakes in that process--there's an additional fee of £45 for them to do it for you. Also, there are almost never any actual appointments available.

If you want a better chance at getting an appointment slot, you can go to an "enhanced" service location, where the fees for an appointment start at £60 and go up from there. But hey, document scanning's included in that! Good luck getting an appointment near you, though, because a lot of them are only open for a few hours a day. The one in Stockport, for instance, is open for an hour a week. An hour. A. Week.

Oh, and did I mention that you only have three weeks to schedule an appointment after the Home Office notifies you that you need one? Someone's getting your extra £60 to £120 (for next-day slots), and it's either going to be Sopra Steria or your local train company (if you have to get an appointment in another city). Pay up.

This is if everything functions smoothly. Don't worry if something goes wrong, though--there's a helpline you can call.

The helpline is £2.50. Per minute. At this point the Home Office might as well change its official logo to someone holding an immigrant upside down and shaking the change out of their pockets.

And bear in mind that this is us playing UK immigration on easy mode--we're white1 native English speakers from a "safe" country. We are very, very privileged and lucky. It gets exponentially harder if you're a minority, or an ESL speaker, or from a "risky" country, or...

I've got horror stories about this stuff, but I've already taken up enough of your time, and I need to get this soapbox back to the rental agency.


1No, us being white shouldn't matter...yet somehow when we've had to show up to immigration offices in person, we've always been whisked through while all the not-white people in the waiting rooms were, well, kept waiting.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 3:12 AM on September 14, 2020 [14 favorites]


Ugh, that sounds awful and so stressful. It beggars belief this government thinks it can do "Moonshot" covid testing or whatnot when it can't even get the basics right.
posted by adrianhon at 4:03 AM on September 14, 2020 [1 favorite]


Given that no health experts are involved in the “moonshot”, it appears to be a looting raid on the public purse and/or some of Dom's superpredicting incels Dunning-Krugering this using AI and blockchains or something.
posted by acb at 4:09 AM on September 14, 2020 [1 favorite]


@Dysk, @CannonFodder Today's quote on word-a-day prises apart Patriotism & Nationalism:
"Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest", but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is." -Sydney J. Harris
But George Bernard Shaw, whom the Brits may claim as one of theirs, wasn't so particular "Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it"
posted by BobTheScientist at 5:51 AM on September 14, 2020 [1 favorite]


I am deeply ashamed of my country. Yes there absolutely should be knowledge people should have in order to live here - important stuff like... how do I get employment, what are my rights and responsibilities, how do I get healthcare, how do I access emergency services, how do I get a driving licence, how do the laws differ from my home country in ways that might catch me out in an unfortunate manner, what voting rights do I posses and how do I use any which might exist, how do I avoid getting deported by an increasingly hostile government, etc.

I don't think it's necessary to know about ski slopes or Henry VIII or the history of the Empire.

Of course, they should teach all the above useful things to people who were born here as well...
posted by mathw at 5:56 AM on September 14, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'm studying for this test right now and I can't say it's completely pointless. Yes, some of the questions are blindingly obvious (True or False: Extremism and terrorism have no place in the UK?) and others obscure (During which king's reign was the Statue of Rhuddlan issued?). But over the past few weeks that I've been dipping in and out of the book, I've found myself drawn to go and read more about most of the events covered. I've never studied much history and it feels like something I should make an effort to do. So it's been somewhat worthwhile just as a stepping-off point for that.

However like many others, I have found it really hard to move past some of the things in this guide. Not the inaccuracies - I don't know enough to spot them, and I hope I'm not learning anything that's actually dead wrong - but the choices of what to omit and the weird sanitised wording. mdoar, I know exactly what you mean when you say that it tries "to offend no-one, and in doing so become a pale shadow of any truth". At first I thought maybe it was a consequence of having to write in simple English, and having to write history as black-and-white so that you can make a multiple choice test out of it, but I don't that's enough to explain how just wrong some bits felt to me. The most jarring moments for me so far have been:

- that the transition from Empire ("a force for good in the world") to Commonwealth was "orderly" (mentioned in the article)
- "The living and working conditions for slaves were very bad" - pretty much the only acknowledgement of the effect of slavery on those enslaved, followed by a much longer paragraph about how Britain's greatest contribution to the slave trade was all the effort they put into ending it

I've also honestly lost count at this point of how many times I've gone to skim the Wikipedia page to learn more about a paragraph that I just read, and I find a section called something like 'British atrocities' that was ignored or downplayed in the text. The strongest condemnation of British actions I can find is an acknowledgement that Cromwell's suppression of the rebellions in Ireland have been considered "near-genocidal". Oh no, wait, that's my own personal notes from when I went and read a little more on the subject - the book says just that Cromwell used "such violence" that he is "still controversial in Ireland".

Overall I'm just left with a slight sense of sadness, that this bare covering of odd facts to memorise, this document that glosses over the bad and yet still fails to present the good in an inspiring way, is supposed to make me a better citizen. I guess I don't know if any citizenship test could ever achieve that. Sure, focus on rights and responsibilities, I'll be happy to memorise some trivia about elections and choose TRUE when asked "Jury duty is an important part of civic responsibility, true or false?", but the history left me wanting something much better. Maybe I just need a recommendation for a good general history of the UK instead.

---

Of course, we all know that a real Life in the UK test should include the following questions:
- What is Monster Munch?
- In a pandemic, should you prioritise reopening pubs or schools?
- In Devon, jam or cream on the scone first?
- Where would you find an "Ant & Dec" (a. hardware store b. television set c. restaurant menu)
posted by dashdotdot dash at 2:28 PM on September 14, 2020 [5 favorites]


The whole splitting hairs between patriotism and nationalism has always just struck me as rationalisation for engaging in the problematic behaviour and attitudes while being able to tell yourself "but I'm not like those people - they're nationalists, which is bad; I'm a patriot, and that's good." I see no meaningful distinction.
posted by Dysk at 11:44 PM on September 14, 2020 [4 favorites]


Where would you find an "Ant & Dec"

Surely it would be offered (in the old days) on a postcard in a newsagent's window: "Strict young teacher, F 28, offers French, O-Level, A-Level, Ant & Dec".
posted by Grangousier at 12:33 AM on September 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


adrianhon: Ugh, that sounds awful and so stressful. It beggars belief this government thinks it can do "Moonshot" covid testing or whatnot when it can't even get the basics right.

I would suggest that the government is getting things exactly right, by its own measures. The cost and inconvenience imposed on prospective immigrants is surely the point. You don't put official barriers in the way of people; you just make it difficult and expensive, and reduce numbers that way. And then if you have to let people in, they've paid plenty for the 'privilege' [even saying all that, and knowing about the increasing costs, my mind is blown by Mr Bad Example's figure of £2,389 - I think when I considered ILR near the start of last decade, it would have been closer to £800-1000].
posted by Pink Frost at 12:57 AM on September 15, 2020


Just for fun--suitable values of "fun", anyway--here's a graph of ILR fees since 2003. Notice how they stopped jacking up the fees in 2018...my speculation is that they started feeling the heat from the Windrush scandal and didn't think they could get away with any more increases for a while.

I look at that £155 in 2003 and weep a tiny bit on the inside.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:54 AM on September 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


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