So Labour loves these sorts of initiatives – making the lives of immigrants just that little bit harder. It scores them Brownie Points with the Daily Mail, after all.
It’s the “Life In Britain” Citizenship test for non-EU immigrants wanting to live in the UK. The link to the official practice version of the test is currently doing the rounds on Twitter, and you can take it yourself. Note that every single link on the page other than the one to begin the test takes you through to the TSO bookshop where 3 books are available to help you prepare for taking the test, costing £9.99 for the book version and £8.99 for the PDF version – but then that one has VAT added, so it also costs £9.99.
What’s interesting is that most people, those sacred ‘Indigenous Britons’ can’t pass the test. I failed it myself, getting just 16 right. Toy Liberal failed it, despite having an A* GCSE in Citizenship. I didn’t even know there was a GCSE in Citizenship. If I had, I’d have had a good long rant about it long before now, rest assured.
The questions on this special super-hard test for immigrants, including “what year did women get the right to divorce their husbands?” and a remarkable number of questions about parliament, expose this test for what it is – a hoop, for the sheer sadistic pleasure in having made someone jump through it.
Labour like to argue that the reason they do things like this is because they need to take account of the fact that people want them to be sadistic towards immigrants, and if they’re not then someone else will win power and be even more sadistic.
If I was thinking about coming to live in the UK, and this was my introduction to the UK’s Government and “Life in Britain” I would probably reconsider. But then, that’s the point isn’t it? Hoop, monkey: Jump through it or piss off. Daily Mail loves that sort of crap.
SaltedSlug said...
7 Jul 09 at 9:25 am
I failed with 20.
Did you notice that some of the correct answers weren’t actually offered the first time round, but were mentioned in the debrief at the end? i.e the EU meeting in Strasbourg and Brussels when only London, Paris and Strasbourg were offered.
Other questions were ambiguously put, e.g:
Yeah it’s CV, but I’ve personally applied for jobs needing all of those.
What arbitrary and pointless bollocks.
Mark Reckons said...
7 Jul 09 at 9:26 am
Immigants, I knew it was them. Even when it was the bears I knew it was them.
Letters From A Tory said...
7 Jul 09 at 9:34 am
GCSE Citizenship is comical in itself – it’s compulsory for every single school child but they don’t have to take any examinations.
Go figure.
Holly said...
7 Jul 09 at 9:38 am
Citizenship is optional but you have to take this test if you even want to become a resident in the UK, as I did when my visa ran out after the first two years I was married.
I took the test just now, about a year and a half after I had to do it For Real, and managed to scrape a pass (19/24), but some of those only because I vividly remembered the answers from having studied the book they tell you you have to buy.
It costs a tenner, which wasn’t too bad for me at the time but a year or two earlier would’ve been a massive expenditure. And I had to pay something like 34 or 37 pounds for the privilege of taking the test itself, which was again annoying to me but surely much worse to some of my fellow test-takers: mums with small kids, nervous young people, nobody giving off an air of middle-class comfort to say the least.
And the test you take is exactly like the one you see here, done on a computer, available in no other language but English (and, almost laughably, Welsh as if there’s anyone who’d have a better grasp of that in their brief time in the UK) (no disrespect to the Welsh language, which I personally admire and am fond of as only the entirely ignorant can be, I’m just saying it seems to twist the knife a bit in offering only that one other language rather than others that might be more useful because clearly you have to speak English to live in the UK!).
It all seemed to me thinly-veiled attempts to make sure everyone who moved here is as English-speaking and financially well-off as possible (not least because you’re not allowed to claim any benefits until you pass this test and jump through all the other expensive, invasive hoops to attain leave to remain). Even though I can speak English and am comfortable with computers and could pay all the fees, I still detested having to be a part of this system that was so hard on so many people who are not as lucky in this regard as I am.
SaltedSlug said...
7 Jul 09 at 9:45 am
Oh and I meant failed with 12 (50%).
asquith said...
7 Jul 09 at 9:47 am
I got 11!? I actually thought I was going to do well.
Debi Linton said...
7 Jul 09 at 10:06 am
I’m shocked that they offer the test in Welsh – where do you have to be immigrating from that you understand Welsh better than English?
Some of the questions are appallingly written;
– and then proceeds to list FOUR types of people.
Holly said...
7 Jul 09 at 10:39 am
Oh and I forgot to add that I got that question about speed limits on a dual carriageway on my real test.
I’m pretty sure I got it right; I remember reading it in the book. But at the time I wasn’t even sure what “dual carriageway” meant.
I’m registered blind so I’m not going to be driving anyway.
There was much talk, when I showed my friends, my husband’s family, and my co-workers my book of practice questions. Like all of you a lot of them were baffled by the questions, stymied by the particular things asked, not to mention offended by the existence of such a test in the first place. But we did discuss the kinds of things we thought should be on the test, questions about Radio 4 and how to order a pint. There are millions of things far more pertinent to life in the UK than the statistics of people who identify themselves as Muslim or what year women legally got the right to divorce their husbands.
DavidNcl said...
7 Jul 09 at 10:53 am
“What arbitrary and pointless bollocks.”
QFT
I got 12. And I’m a poliical geek.
Jake Motta said...
7 Jul 09 at 11:14 am
People from Patagonia might find the Welsh version handy… Diolch yn fawr….
It’s surely just a symptom of what politics has become i.e. lets try to please all the people all the time and fail miserably. It will not change whichever party gains power next year
I’d love the political arena to be debating big questions and big ideas but frankly no one seems to have them. Which is why we need PR to remodel the political landscape and change the game.
Matthew Huntbach said...
7 Jul 09 at 11:17 am
I don’t think they’re doing this to be sadistic or to make money from selling the book or to filter out those who can’t afford to buy the book. It’s much scarier than that – they’re doing it because they genuinely believe in it. In the name of “fairness” anything requiring human judgment and decisions made at the lowest level is thrown out. Anything, however ridiculous, which can be measured in an unambiguous way and the required measurements imposed from on top is accepted as the way to make decisions.
The reality seems to be that every question on this test can be answered by rote memory from the book. So the approach to it is to turn it into a memory game – don’t stop to think about the questions or answers, just know that if the book says the answer to “asdfghjk” is “zxcvbn”, then if in the test you’re asked “asdfghjk?”
with answers 1) “qwerty” 2) “zxcvbn” 3) “poiuyt” 4) “lkjhgf”, you put 2) as the answer.
In many cultures, rote memory is highly valued. In many cultures too it is often confused with deeper understanding, people genuinely feel they have learnt something because they’ve memorised something even though because they treated it as a memory game they cannot apply what they’ve supposedly learnt at all when it’s taken out of the context of the memory game and needed in real life.
I find this as a university teacher – one of the biggest reasons for student failure is when they confuse memorising with gaining a deep understanding and cannot break out of that way of thinking. There are certain cultures where this becomes pathological – whole chunks of memorised notes thrown back at you in exam scripts even when they aren’t relevant to the question (I don’t set exams where memorising works, doing that is a cop out). But, in the name of “fairness”, UK GCSEs and A-levels have also gone down the memory test route to some extent. That is why, for example, A-level ICT is completely useless as a preparation for what I teach, which is computer science.
Holly said...
7 Jul 09 at 11:49 am
I very much agree about it being rote memorization; I felt exactly as I did when I was in school and had to learn the main exports of Paraguay or the derivative of a trig function; I’m very good at that sort of thing so always did well on the tests but the older I get (and I’m only 27 now) the less satisfying I find it; as Matthew said it doesn’t integrate at all with real-life experiences. And though I don’t think that the problems presented to non-English-speaking, poor, or computer-illiterate people is the main aim of the test, I think it’s a nontrivial consequence of its impact.
Tristan said...
7 Jul 09 at 11:53 am
My better half recently had to go through all this crap.
I can pass that test, but only because I helped her study. Quite why one needs to know how many Ugandan Asians came to this country I don’t know. Surely knowing that they were fleeing Idi Amin’s government and we gave them refuge is far more important (even then its hardly necessary to live here – as is demonstrated by the fact that very few British people would know of that).
As for squeezing money out of you – the cost of a visa is over £800 now, and going up each year. We’ve had to shell out for two of the things, first two years ago for a marriage visa and now for the indefinite leave to remain. Applying for citizenship would cost a similar amount.
If you actually need to get your visa with a guarantee of when you’ll have it you have to pay out more for one of the extremely limited number of in person appointments (the availability of which has been reduced of course), that is if you’re lucky enough to get one, they’re harder to come by than tickets for a big name band at the O2.
I pity anyone who has to have direct contact with the border agency – they tend to treat you like shit, all the time hinting that you shouldn’t be in the country.
Once you’ve applied, they take the money as soon as possible, then send you a letter telling you not to contact them.
Oh and if you have to leave the country in this time (say for a family emergency), they keep your money, cancel your visa and make you start from the very start, another couple of grand to pay.
And this is for someone who has always worked in the country, is over worked (in the public sector no less), is paying taxes and has never required benefits (not that she could get them) and hardly uses the NHS. All whilst she sees people on livejournal spending their lives on benefits and the computer buying clothes with their dole money.
Add in the blatant anti-Americanism she has to put up with regularly…
And then the anti-immigration fuckwits have the temerity to tell us that there’s too much immigration and we should close the borders.
John Scott said...
7 Jul 09 at 12:28 pm
In addition to ambiguity, some of the questions and answers are simply wrong.
I got “In what year did a married woman get the right to divorce her busband?” with various options in the nineteenth century. Married women have always had that right in England (usually via the canon law), on the basis of adultery, cruelty and heresy (but they could not remarry afterwards – they needed an annulment, or divorce a vinculo, for that). And it was only in the twentieth century that simple consensual divorce became available.
Unsurprisingly for this country, if you are well-informed, we don’t want you here! You might think, even ask questions. Gordon couldn’t cope with that!
Charlotte Gore said...
7 Jul 09 at 12:36 pm
How very apt that all they’d care about is that you give the answers in the official book rather than what’s actually correct.
patently said...
7 Jul 09 at 12:40 pm
Labour would rather I left, it seems
You have failed the practice citizenship test.
Questions answered correctly: 17 out of 24 (71%)
Mark Reckons said...
7 Jul 09 at 12:55 pm
No, no, no, you’ve failed the test!.
Sorry but I love that sketch.
Psi said...
7 Jul 09 at 1:35 pm
I’ve believed, since the tests were first suggested, that one question would identify if someone fully understands the British attitude/way of life.
Q: What do you think of this test?
A: Bollocks (or responses to that effect)
Jake Motta said...
7 Jul 09 at 2:10 pm
Communal tyranny a jail that bleeds our wrists
Measured said...
7 Jul 09 at 3:43 pm
If the government under Prime Minister Brown adopts the policy of a ‘Citizen Test’ would they
A) draft it poorly
B) include irrelevant material
C) try to score so political points when promoting it?
Yes, you have all passed.
Bill Quango MP said...
7 Jul 09 at 11:01 pm
Failed dismally. I have always always lived in the UK and just won the Pub quiz price this weekend with 89/100.
Yet only got 54%.
Mark Wadsworth said...
7 Jul 09 at 11:21 pm
I got 15/24 in 3 minutes 2 seconds.
kandastoney said...
8 Jul 09 at 12:11 am
manged to fail with 12/24, however I’ve only been resident since birth 48 years ago.
Possibly one of the reasons I “fail”, is that I’ve never worked for the state or claimed benefits, too self reliant to know the answers, not a suitable “client” obviously.
Roger Thornhill said...
8 Jul 09 at 12:19 am
If you want to know if someone is thinking in “Common Law”, which to me is an important issue, then some form of comprehension should be demonstrated. That requires prose. New Labour supporters would probably FAIL that (as would Code Napoleon Fanboiz in the LD).
Still, how can we expect our State to produce decent tests when the GCSE is now appalling and a feast of multiple choice or, worse still, “match, eliminate and guess” questions?
p.s. Rote learning is Authoritarian.
hellblazer said...
8 Jul 09 at 6:18 am
Native Brit, fairly well-educated, though with a poor memory for Practical Facts and Figures. 15/24 in 4 minutes 40 but quite frankly another 30 minutes would have made no difference.
Agree that it’s obviously just a question of rote memorization and — even if you believe countries should impose this kind of general knowledge test on prospective immigrants — has some bizarre/moronic/wrong questions.
Joe Otten said...
8 Jul 09 at 9:35 am
Well I got a bare pass. 18/24. Woohoo. Get out of my country you bunch of whiners.
Mostly I think it was due to guessing the right unimportant statistics. That makes me British, in the same way I guess that memorising railway timetables is a British thing to do.
Frank Davis said...
8 Jul 09 at 1:47 pm
I got 12 out of 24. But some of the questions didn’t show the full range of answers. e.g. in question 8, Brussels wasn’t included in the list of places where the European parliament met. It turned out the Brussels only showed if I maximized the screen. Otherwise it wasn’t there.
Jonny Oates said...
8 Jul 09 at 2:31 pm
My partner is due to take the test this month and is busy trying to learn what he needs to know from TSO’s rather over priced books. Every five minutes (at least so it seems to me) he looks up from a particularly stupid question and says ‘What is wrong with you people?!’ To which I have no answer…
The Nameless Libertarian said...
8 Jul 09 at 7:33 pm
That test is obscure, difficult and deeply obtuse. The answer to most questions, if you put them to a British national, would be “who cares?” Which is the tragedy, really. We could end up putting off immigrants and end up with a country of Mail reading morons. Which is pretty much my idea of hell on earth.
Bryan said...
9 Jul 09 at 12:48 am
Well I passed – just – mostly by guesswork on a number of questions. Frankly, this shook me rigid. Nobody in this country with a GCSE in anything would pass this, let alone a highly qualified brain surgeon from (say) South Africa. Just what the fuck is going on here?
Heresiarch said...
9 Jul 09 at 1:17 pm
Thanks for this. I got 20/24, in slightly under two minutes, which I think is a result. And I’ve never had a “citizenship” lesson in my life. But that doesn’t stop me thinking the whole thing is a complete waste of time.
By the way – forty-five minutes?
FatBigot said...
9 Jul 09 at 2:37 pm
This test is simply bizarre.
Two questions did not contain the correct answers (Brussels and ACAS were not on the lists I saw and I was using the maximum screen size I can). More importantly, the number of questions of the “I know my rights” genre is terrifying. It tells us so much about what our current government thinks is important.
Euan said...
15 Jul 09 at 7:19 pm
Hmmm… I failed too, achieving 17 out of 24.
The ones I got wrong tended to be the numeric ones – i.e. I didn’t get the number of constituencies right, I knew it was either 646 or 664 but guessed wrong.
Crazy isn’t it? But I think your conclusion that it’s an attempt to appease Daily Mail readers is spot on. Hateful rag.
Left Outside said...
7 Dec 09 at 11:03 am
Deport me Nick Griffin: UPDATED…
I have just taken the Life in the United Kingdom Citizenship test. This is a test which people must pass in order to become citizens, and is also mandatory for those who want to extend their visas. As they say themselves: This practice test is presente…