Goldsmith’s oath is meaningless and divisive

Lord Goldsmith (the former Attorney General who provided Tony Blair with the legal figleaf to invade Iraq) is now suggesting that 16-year-olds, on leaving school, should swear allegiance to the Queen. Such a collective affirmation of loyalty would, he argues, make us a country with a tighter sense of identity.

Somehow or other, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, sub-continental immigrants, republicans (and there are several million of them), and the Groucho Marx tendency - strong in Britain - of people naturally suspicious of all-embracing clubs, would become more cohesive if they put their hands on their hearts and committed themselves to Queen and Country.

Goldsmith is living in cloud-cuckoo land. He is looking abroad to very different societies for a model to implant in Britain's rugged constitutional soil, akin to importing native American trees and expecting them to flourish in our national parks.

I'm all for new arrivals taking an oath to the country they have chosen to make home, but to insist that the rest of us make a dubious commitment to the Queen would prove meaningless at best and divisive at worst.

Such an oath would be a sign of weakness. Is it a strong family that has to ask its children to tell mummy and daddy how much they love them?

I have reported from countries where newcomers do make declarations of what amounts to membership, and it can be very moving. At one Australian ceremony new citizens were each presented with a native tree; and I watched several thousand 'Latinos' swear allegiance to the US flag at a huge ceremony at a baseball ground.

But in the European context, showy declarations of loyalty by people whose forebears have lived in the same country for many hundreds of years smacks more of an uncertain regime. ·