In late April and early May 1999, nail bombs went o in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, homes respectively to London's black, Asian and gay communities. Three people died in the last attack, and dozens were injured in all three. Organisations on Britain's politically insignificant far right claimed responsibility for the bombs, but the perpetrator turned out to be a lone young man, consumed by an all-encompassing hatred. The sheer horror of the attacks forced intellectuals, journalists and policy-makers to think about a subject to which they generally accord little attention: British citizenship. Speaking before Sikh leaders, Tony Blair passionately defended a pluralist, tolerant vision of his country's citizenship: `The true outcasts today, the true minorities, those truly excluded are not the dierent races and religions of Britain, but the racists, the bombers, the violent criminals who hate that vision of Britain and wish to destroy it. In [defending this vision], we are doing more than bringing killers to justice. We are defending what it means to be British.' Those paid to consider such questions do not share the Prime Minister's view. Scholarship on British citizenship, almost without exception, is robustly negative. To quote an oft-cited article tracing the origins of immigration control in the Commonwealth, `integral to the [controls on black migration] was the development of a racialized construction of Britishness which excluded and included people on the grounds of ``race'' de®ned by colour.' Overseas observers of Britain have echoed the charge. Kathleen Paul, in a recent book on race, immigration and British citizenship, citing Enoch Powell's claim that a West Indian could not become English through birth in England, concludes that the quotation `re ected the perceived communities of Britishness which had guided policy makers' understanding of British nationality since at least 1948'. This article considers this now standard scholarly indictment of British citizenship through a consideration of its evolution since 1945. Focusing, though not exclusively, on citizenship as a legal concept, I suggest that the condemnation that is common currency in the migration and citizenship literature is untenable. Any national citizenship should be judged against two standards: the way in which it is granted automatically, and the means by which it is acquired. Against both standards, British citizenship stands out as among the most generously granted and easily acquired in Europe; indeed, it compares favourably with even the United States. The contradiction between the facts of British citizenship and their interpretation is dicult to account for, but the article closes by suggesting some explanations.