Currently, there is a humorous quip drifting through e-mail inboxes across the UK. The joke goes something like this: “Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV. And the most British thing of all? Suspicion of anything foreign.”

It does ring true, in many senses – we already occupy a fully globalized society. Yet, it also has a tone of semi-seriousness about it precisely because, given this front of a globalized human community, British people have tended to cease questioning what it does mean to be British. In agreement with the New Labour hogwash, there has been a considerable lack of concern over the reinvention and demarcation of modern British citizenship. Only in the panic over terrorist attacks has the Labour government sought to magic a new idea of citizenship; incidentally, it has offered a model which most of the UK happens to disagree with.

Given the current status of mass immigration into Britain, coupled with concerns about national domestic security and the national ID card crisis, where does the case for citizenship in the United Kingdom now begin? More importantly, is it now the case that since we have all averted our gazes towards the truly New Labour liberal-stateless paradigm, the only remaining representatives of citizenship in modern Britain spring from the far right?

In Britain, the BNP rouses such an unwarranted blind visceral hatred in the general public, it is terrifying. It might be said that the hatred that the BNP themselves have is, comparatively, less terrorizing. The BNP are no longer such a strange breed. The nationalist ethos will become ever popular as the number of immigrants into the country rises, their skills being increasingly redundant, the immigrant cultural input becomes notably vacuous and hostile while their overall economic value falls. All of a sudden this picture could lead to a catastrophic set of circumstances, characteristic of the disengaged Muslim immigrant populations in the Parisian suburbs in France or the scattered isolated Muslim immigrant communities in the Netherlands. So, for the electorate, nationalist responses do offer a solution of sorts. Unlike the traditional bi-party split of Labour and Conservatives (shadowed by Liberal Democrats), different nation-oriented parties offer a direct response to the issue of living in anxiety according to European-styled disengaged programmes of multicultural governance.

The New Labour government is only content at propagating the disarray it has already created – it has helped to build the EU Empire on the stilts of multicultural programmes fit only for dogs, on the flotillas of Eastern hussies in the search for a public theocracy, and on the brigs loaded with unrecorded immigrants by their millions. It seems more apparent than ever that the case for citizenship which prevails in modern Britain needs to be re-examined if deep-seated tensions between immigrants and domestic citizens are not to reach new intensive heights.

Where does the solution lie to reawaken the case for citizenship? In my view, it begins with abolishing the duality between nation and allegiance. That is to say, immigrants must affirm an allegiance to a nation and what that nation represents – even if that nation-state is fettered by a monarch (for Brits), a wealthy set of wealthy oligarchs (for Russians), or the devilish interventions of its own people (for the French). If you are to be a British citizen, then there must be some basic condition of allegiance to a sovereign power. It is too fundamental a point for “allegiance” to be merely implicit in a nation – it must be spoken and evoked in a common national constitution. A proposal for creating this primary condition of citizenship – an allegiance to a national sovereign power – would not be a new idea in Britain.

Recall the reactions of the shadow Tory government to post-war legislation on the democratization of the Commonwealth countries. In 1948, following the year of India’s achievement of independence and the establishment of self-governance by the Colonies, the British government was left with a bizarre constitution in which all those individuals born under the Dominions of the Crown were held within allegiance to the Crown. The introduction of the British Nationality Bill fell upon Parliament. It was in a discussion on the British Nationality Bill, that the Conservative politician, John Enoch Powell – with extensive military experience in India – was asked to pass scrutiny as one of his parliamentary duties. The British Nationality Bill was pushed through by the Labour government and calmly ignored by the Conservative party. However, the 1948 Bill, as Powell made clear, created a dual form of citizenship: on the one hand, those who lived in India and Pakistan would become simply ‘Commonwealth Citizens’ whilst those under the rule of the British state would be considered citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. With this dual citizenship, all being recognized as British citizens of sorts, this not only opened up the doors to unrestricted immigration, but enabled the United Kingdom’s subjects to be denied their traditional citizenship and therefore disrupted the citizens’ allegiance to a nation.

It was not because the Empire had been disbanded that Powell so openly deplored the British Nationality Act (as many socialist commentators have claimed) but because it created a dual nationality, it enabled the free flow of immigrants into the United Kingdom, it placed the rights of the individual and the flow of immigrants outside of the hands of the British government and it presented the laurel of citizenship upon those who had strayed from, or never had an allegiance to the nation.

The newly independent, self-governing territories, in Powell’s case, were awarded different shades of international citizenship under the one Commonwealth, the Head of which was the King. Although the citizens all belonged to the Commonwealth, they strangely held no allegiance to the Sovereign power. Of course, in today’s world, there are a plurality of citizenships – so many in fact, one can almost buy a passport since the terms “Britain” and “British” have become so elastic. There is no allegiance. Nowadays, Powell may well be turning in his grave. Since it is not necessary for immigrants to assure an allegiance to the sovereign power, they are unable to experience this power as if they were a member of a family.

As with a family, a feud can be contained and over a period of time, resolved. So, when things go wrong, and groups in society conflict over book burnings or Middle East politics, free speech activists or judicial rulings, the consequence should no longer be more bombings or sacrificial acts of bloodshed. In London, I still think of my co-workers as fortunate for experiencing only one series of bombings on the 7th July 2005. Citizenship creates the conditions of the game. It must essentially be a democratic game – the sovereign power presides over the rulebook of the established rule of law, in which all are protected. To step outside that allegiance to the sovereign power is to renounce one’s citizenship. If there is no established programme of citizenship, the game is not recognized, and the experience of immigrants will be of ever-deepening tensions. If a government is not interested in clarifying the conditions of how citizens might provide an allegiance to a sovereign state, then I would expect the visceral hatred and urban fury to continue; but for now, I must assume, as Enoch Powell did, that for Britain, this “‘teeming womb of royal Kings’, as Shakespeare called it, wishes now to be anonymous…”. Britain declares itself a nation but does not know why it exists, who it includes, and where it is located – those are clearly the tasks for an engaged programme of citizenship.