Good citizens

Out of idle curiosity I spent a few minutes looking at the process for getting UK residency. There is a laughable new bureaucratic test which is, allegedly, designed to test your knowledge and understanding of the UK: it consists of 24 questions, and you have to pass at least 18.


You can take a sample test here.

I did: it took me less than 3 minutes (for some reason you're allowed 45) and it was one of the most mind-numbingly dumb things I've ever experienced.


While clearly I scored so well overall that I probably qualify for several of the new A/S levels, apparently, knowing (as I did) that around 3% of 2001 census respondents said they were Muslim is insufficient -- to qualify as a decent British resident you have to know it was 2.7% rather than (as I put) 3.4%. I have no idea why being a percentage point or so out on this decade-old demographic factoid would disqualify you as a decent British resident, but there you are:


Another question: apparently, you have to know exactly how many months after you've been drawing dole money that, in order to continue to suck at the public teet, you have to go on to some crack-pot scheme called New Deal (which sounds like a game of playing cards but is, apparently, meant to historically resonate with Roosevelt and all that). I guessed 6 months but, apparently, you can't be a decent British resident unless you know the answer is 18 months.


Let's try another: there is, apparently, a dialect known as Ulster Scots, which is spoken by some people in Northern Ireland. I like to think I'm a reasonably well-informed bloke but, apparently, I am not qualified to be a decent British resident because I didn't know this piece of linguistic trivia.


Conversely, there was nothing in the quiz about, say, where human rights come from in Britain: Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights and the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution and the Reform Acts and the abolition of slavery and the right of an Englishman (sic) to enjoy his (sic) castle... none of that is, apparently, necessary to be a good British resident.


Nor is it necessary to know anything about the culture of Britain -- by which I mean, say, anything about poetry or literature or music or visual arts or theatre or cinema or television. Constable, Hitchcock, Dickens, Turner, Shakespeare, Purcell, Gilbert & Sullivan, Powell & Pressburger, The Beatles... no, who gives a toss about any of that?


What sort of fucked-up, bureaucratic, benefits-sponging, illiterate Hell-hole have we created if you need to know the answers to 18 out of 24 of these questions? And you have 45 minutes to do it in.


Interestingly, you are not permitted to download a free pdf of the essential handbook that gives you the answers to all the dumb questions posed by this ludicrous process. No, you have to buy it from The Stationery Office. For £10. On top of the £34 you have to pay to take the test. And the Christ knows how many hundreds of pounds you have to pay to apply for a visa (you can actually download a pdf -- but they charge you: £10!!).


This is beginning to look like another revenue-gouging, hidden tax system to swell government coffers and provide employment for brain-dead bureaucrats at testing centres the length and breadth of the country.


Fuckers. I hate them all.