Monday 14 January 2013

Citizenship ceremony

After a break of quite a few months, I was delighted yesterday to have the chance to speak at one of Liverpool's Citizenship Ceremonies.

These events are the final culmination of the process people go through to become citizens of the UK.

Liverpool's registry office does these on behalf of the Home Office.  People get their actual citizenship certificates at the events.

The organisers try to have a "dignitary" speaking at each event and handing over the certificates.  Yesterday it was me.

I used to make a parallel between being an opposition leader and issues of free speech.  Obviously I couldn't do that yesterday but made some parallels between University graduation and citizenship graduation both being the start of something and not the end.

As ever it was great to see so many happy people and I hope I am "on" again soon.

2 comments:

hazelickes said...

Will this Citizenship ceremony takes place in every calendar year?

Paula Keaveney said...

They are more frequent than that. Not every week but certainly more than once a month.