By IRNA
London : British students may be required to swear an oath of allegiance to the monarchy and country when they graduate from school, according to controversial proposals unveiled Tuesday.
Plans, proposed by former attorney general Lord Goldsmith, include making school children take part in citizenship ceremonies and a new public holiday by 2012 to celebrate “Britishness.”
Changes were also recommended to the current categories of citizenship, for language loans for new immigrants to learn English and for a type of community service to enhance “citizen education.” Goldsmith said his proposals, outlined in a report ordered by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to review British citizenship, would make it clearer what it means to be a citizen and would set up practical measures to help enhance a “sense of shared belonging.”
“My report makes a range of proposals that touch every stage of an individual’s life. My proposals are intended to promote the meaning and significance of citizenship within modern Britain,” he said.
The former attorney general resigned from his post when Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped down last June. He suggested the new national day should be set up by 2012 to coincide with the London Olympic Games or on the queen’s diamond jubilee in the same year.
Speaking earlier on BBC radio, he said he also believed that citizenship ceremonies for teenagers would help improve their sense of what it means to be a British citizen, but denied there was a crisis of national identity.
“Certainly there isn’t a crisis of national identity, but the research does tend to show there’s been a diminution in national pride, in this sense of belonging,” Goldsmith said.
His report also recommended that foreigners who cannot take British nationality because their home nations do not permit dual citizenship should become “associate citizens” of the UK, and that certain types of residual citizenship would be abolished.
But his plans were condemned, including by John Dunford from the Association of School and College Leaders, who said the student ceremony was “a half-baked idea that should be left to go mouldy”.
Lady Kennedy, a civil rights lawyer, told the BBC that she groaned when she heard the proposals.
“I see this as an empty gesture. To ask 16-year-olds to troop into a hall and like Americans put their hands on their heart and take an oath of allegiance is risible,” she said.