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> Doesn't this give you more disadvantages than advantages? No real disadvantages. Being a British citizen means I can live and work in the UK if I want. As I said, I’ve never been there-but you never know what the future holds. Pre-Brexit, it let me live and work anywhere in the EU-not that I ever did that either. But I thought about it. My brother actually did it for a bit. Maybe one day Scotland will become independent, and I’ll trade my British citizenship for Scottish, and then Scotland will rejoin the EU and I’ll get my EU citizenship back. A man can dream. One drawback, is as a dual Australian citizen, the Australian constitution says I’m not allowed to run for (federal) Parliament. I doubt I’m ever going into politics, but if I was, I’d legally have to renounce my UK citizenship before nominating as a (federal) candidate. By contrast, the UK doesn’t bar dual citizens from Parliament-in fact, it even lets Australians vote, and run for Parliament-and I mean sole Australian citizens, who aren’t UK dual citizens. > I'm surprised it's even possible; in other countries you have to have lived there for around 7 years or so until you get citizenship. Due to the UK’s colonial/imperial history, its citizenship laws are insanely complex-arguably more complicated than any other nation on earth’s-full of all kinds of obscure complex exceptions-I’m one of those. You see, my mother was born in Scotland. My younger siblings, they inherited UK citizenship from her at birth. However, I was born when the old (pre-1983) law was still in force, which said legitimate children could only inherit British citizenship from their father (whereas, illegitimate children could only inherit it from their mother.) Since I was legitimate, and it was my mother not my father who was the UK citizen - no UK citizenship for me. Until, in my 20s, they changed the law so people in my situation could apply for citizenship by registration. Registration is legally equivalent to naturalisation - the ceremony is the same, the legal consequences are almost identical - the difference is, no residency requirements. So that’s how I got to go to my UK citizenship ceremony without ever having stepped foot in the UK in my life |
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/09/news/boris-johnson-us-citiz...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61044847