History and policy: discretion and cultural conformity

The recent history of citizenship policy in the UK includes two main periods of legislative activity. Relations with British colonies and former colonies and migration from the colonies themselves drove the first period between 1948 and the 1980s. The second, which began in 2002, has been driven by variations in the concept of integration.

After a long period of incompletely defined UK subjecthood (Dummett and Nicol, 1990; Dummett, 2006; Prabhat, 2018), the British Nationality Act 1948 systematically codified citizenship in the UK for the first time. Promulgated in reaction to the 1946 introduction of a specific Canadian citizenship, the law was strongly linked to relations with the colonies (Hansen, 1999; Karatani, 2003). At the time, the aim was to claim continued sovereignty over the colonial population, rather than managing migration to the metropole. Thus, this law was far more inclusive than those introduced in the following decades. One aspect of British citizenship legislation sets it apart even from other former colonial powers, namely its stratification of (post) colonial status. All colonial powers have used different statuses to coopt part of the colonial population in the government of the colonies, while excluding the majority from full legal rights (see for example Jeronimo and Vink, 2011; Hajjat, 2012). However, most colonial powers have simplified their legislation during decolonization, establishing a citizen/non-citizen dichotomy, while the UK maintained (and still maintains, though with fewer consequences) several intermediate statuses (Sredanovic, 2017). One possible explanation for their persistence in British citizenship is that the UK has been the only colonial power to have white-majority dominions (Canada, Australia and New Zealand). As such, the racial politics of the UK have driven its governments to maintain a stronger legal relationship with former colonial populations. A second explanation is based on path dependence. As the only major power not to follow the French-originated model of dichotomous citizenship/non-citizenship, UK institutions never entirely abandoned the more stratified approach to citizenship (Sredanovic, 2017). After the 1948 codification, British citizenship underwent reforms in 1962, 1968, 1971 and 1981, all in the direction of reducing rights – in particular, the right to move to the UK – of colonial and former colonial subjects.