When I am lawyering, I am reading. When I am not lawyering, I am also usually reading. Away from the office I am not, as a rule, reading about immigration law. My holiday reading runs to fantasy lands and sci-fi futures. It is a rare day when the hobby reading strays into my area of practice, but that day came recently on holiday, when I picked up Sylvain Neuvel’s The Test.
At 110 pages, the novella is a mercifully light read for someone in our line of work. It follows Idir Jalil, a polite dentist and Iranian national, sitting a Life in the UK test at some unspecified point in the near future of Britain. As an immigration lawyer labouring under the spectre of the 2025 white paper, a document containing proposals such as ‘We will also conduct a refresh of the Life in the UK test and how it operates’, and ‘We will introduce reforms to citizenship to align to earned settlement reforms’, it is difficult to read this story without seeing the shape of something familiar.
It also struck me that it might be a bit of fun holding The Test up against our current rules and what might be coming, to see how well this fictional future would balance against our human rights. Not very, as it happens.
The Test as reality
It opens with our protagonist telling his own story as he queues up to sit the Life in the UK test. He came to the UK with his wife. He has two children, one born in Iran, too young to remember the old country, and one born in England. The family accompanies him to the test centre, where we are given his entertaining thoughts about life in Britain. One touching passage worth sharing about his son:
He loves Halloween. That is probably his favourite thing about England.
He sits down to the test and works through the questions typical of the test we are familiar with: questions on British history, on morality, on the civic ethics of a nation that thinks well of itself. The questions offer a relatable insight into who the man answering them actually is:
The Battle of Bosworth Field was fought in 1485. I am positive. That is the answer. I wonder who writes these questions. How will knowing this make me a better member of British society?
I was particularly fond of the moments where the test brushes up against his real experience of the country:
We have been asked why we hate freedom, told to go back to the desert many times…but not once has anyone asked me about famous battles of the fifteenth century. Maybe I should bring it up.
If you can forgive me for one more quote, I would offer this passage where Idir tells us why he believes the entire test should be about football:
Our neighbour took me to the pub a few weeks after we met. I was hesitant at first…but when the Gunners scored, this hulking giant of a man grabbed me by the shoulders and squeezed me like a sponge. It was the first time I felt like I belonged, like I was truly welcome.
The Test compared with the Life in the UK test
It is worth setting the fiction alongside the fact. In order to qualify to naturalise as a British citizen in the UK, one must usually sit and pass a citizenship test unless they are over 65 years of age. Typically, a migrant will have already secured this test pass as a pre-requisite to their application for indefinite leave to remain.
The real test runs for forty-five minutes and contains twenty-four questions, drawn from the information set out in the Guide for New Residents book published by the Home Office. The subject matter is varied, to put it mildly. Candidates may be asked who the first people to arrive in Britain during the Stone Age were, or when Britain became permanently separated from the continent by the Channel. I wonder how many of our readers could answer either question with any confidence. The answer to the latter is not, in fact, 23:00 GMT on 31 January 2020.
On this point, The Test gets the tone exactly right. Our protagonist answers a series of questions about long-dead monarchs and footnotes of English history with the same weary precision of a real-life candidate. Whether the Life in the UK test questions bear any resemblance to authentic life in the UK is debatable, though more compelling to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee is the accuracy of the test answers. An aspect of the upcoming reforms on which the Home Secretary was recently questioned:
For example, King Knut was not the first Danish king, it was Sweyn Forkbeard. And it is not true to say that the highest value of the UK note is fifty pounds, when if you go to Scotland you can get a hundred-pound bill.
For any Scots reading this, I’m sure you will be as delighted as I was to once again have our legal tender questioned in England. Anyway, back to the story.
A gunman enters, shoots one of the other applicants, and takes the remaining test attendees hostage, forcing Idir to choose who will be shot next. What had read as a soft satire of the naturalisation process became a thriller, until the following chapter takes us out of Idir’s head almost entirely and into the room next door.
The Test as science fiction
In the control room next door we find a bank of screens, each one showing the horror Idir believes he is experiencing. A row of government employees quietly administer the British Values Assessment, or the ‘BVA’.
It is revealed that the Life in the UK test is an artificial simulation. Idir is lying unconscious in a medical suite nearby, fed the environment through some sci-fi tech. He does not know that he is not a test attendee, but a ‘subject’, and it was somewhere around this point that the human rights lawyer in me felt his Article 3 instincts begin to twitch.
Each time the gunman moves to kill again, he demands that Idir choose the target. In the control room, the BVA decision-makers steer the gunman, forcing a series of life and death decisions out of a man who sincerely believes that these are real people. If he chooses correctly during each kill, he will be granted citizenship. If he fails, his memory is wiped and he is placed on a plane with a one-way ticket to the country of his birth.
One of the more interesting suggestions in The Test is what a future Britain might actually be testing for:
The goal of the values assessment is not the selection of model human beings, but of model citizens. This means the test should favour homogeneity, not atypical attitudes, no matter how commendable they may be. Subjects are more likely to successfully integrate into society if they share its core set of beliefs than if they perceive the most widespread attitudes to be stupid or reprehensible
The Test and the Human Rights Act
The unsettling question is how a test of this kind would sit alongside our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Home Secretary announced on 30 June that she intends to ‘reform’ and ‘tighten’ the human rights protections available to those without permission to stay in the UK. Read narrowly, this is the routine noise of politics, common to each Home Secretary at some point in their tenure. Alternatively, one could argue that Mahmood’s announcement hints at a future treatment of human rights as negotiable rather than fixed, potentially setting a precedent for deciding which rights survive contact with immigration policy. And which rights do not.
After finishing the story, I considered how the relevant human rights articles would sit alongside the dread-inducing British Values Assessment.
Article 3 affords an individual the right not to be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment. I would not be confident that a non-consensual simulation providing authentic suffering would sit easily alongside this process. Whether this process is Article 4 applicable is debatable, but certainly worth considering. Whilst I couldn’t come up with an argument for whether Article 8 applies, I am satisfied that Article 9, the right to freedom of thought, would apply most damningly.
None of this is analysis that a court would need to trouble itself with, of course, if there was no Human Rights Act left to apply it to. That was, in my reading, the muffled joke tucked under The Test. I’m off to Greece in September. I think I’ll pack something lighter this time.