"I swear by Almighty God that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors according to law ... I will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen."

A number of issues were raised in the controversy that followed the publication of Goldsmith's report: for instance, some commentators suggested that certain religious groups, particularly Catholics, would be offended at the idea of pledging allegiance to a monarch from an exclusively Protestant Royal Family; others suggested that such public declarations of allegiance to queen and country were in fact quite 'un-British', and as such only served to defeat the purpose for which they were proposed.

However, no one, to my knowledge, took issue with what I consider to be the main bone of contention regarding this issue - the wording of the oath itself.

The oath featured in the Goldsmith report is woefully incoherent. On the one hand, it contains a pledge of allegiance to an unelected, privileged, hereditary head of state, to an elitist institution the very existence of which helps to reinforce inequality.

On the other hand, it features the straightforwardly contradictory promise to maintain Britain's democratic values, values necessarily founded on the notion of equal rights and responsibilities among the nation's citizens.

As a result of this incoherence, it is not actually possible for a person to utter this oath of allegiance truthfully; and since an oath must be uttered truthfully in order to have any value at all, it follows that this so-called 'oath' is nothing more than an empty, meaningless gesture (a fact all the more disturbing when you consider that this is the 'oath' currently employed in citizenship ceremonies, as a 'solemn and sincere' declaration of allegiance on the part of the new British citizen).

Of course, the real issue here is not the oath's logical shortcomings, but the reason for those shortcomings - namely, that the monarchy, with all its privilege and elitism, is completely at odds with a democracy founded on the notion of equality. Contrary to the opinion of Lord Goldsmith, it is not possible to assent to one without undermining the other.

And so we have a choice: either we pledge allegiance to an elitist institution that reinforces division and social hierarchy; or we pledge to uphold democratic values such as fairness, inclusiveness and equality of opportunity. The sooner people like Lord Goldsmith realise that they cannot have it both ways, the sooner they will do the right thing and swear an oath of allegiance to democracy.