Becoming a citizen does not have its traditional origins in passing any formal test.1 This naturally raises the question: so why create and require a citizenship test today?

The UK's common law has always allowed the naturalization of foreign nationals, subject to various conditions. One of these is an oath of allegiance to the Crown and a second is possessing a satisfactory knowledge of English, among others. These common law requirements were first put into statute through the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914. While the oath must be performed, there was no set test for knowledge and requirements centred around having residency over a set period while maintaining a ‘good character’. This was changed in the British Nationality Act 1981 which added the requirement that anyone applying for naturalization must have ‘sufficient knowledge about life in the United Kingdom’, but it did not specify how this was to be done.

It was not until the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 that Parliament formally required that naturalizing citizens prove their knowledge of life in the UK by passing a test. However, this required a test to be put together which took a few years to develop. So, that's a brief legal history of the citizenship test's origins. But it does not explain why a requirement to have ‘knowledge about life in the United Kingdom’ became a mandatory multiple- choice test in force today.

Working through the records, the earliest mention in Parliament for having a citizenship test that I have found is by George Buchanan, a Labour MP representing Glasgow who had served in Clement Attlee's government as Under- Secretary of State for Scotland. In a 1935 speech earlier in his career, Buchanan said ‘the test for naturalisation ought to be a citizenship test’. He argued that while various sons of immigrants living in his constituency were able to become British citizens after fighting in the First World War, their parents could not and such a pathway to naturalization should be made available to them. There is nothing to suggest that Buchanan was advocating for a test sat like a school exam. No further mention of this proposal for a test was made in that 1935 debate or afterwards by him or anybody else for another 66 years