Sunday 9 September 2007

Mind Your Language

Tomorrow, Miami will host a bilingual debate among contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Admittedly, it is unlikely that anyone from the traditional white or African-American working class would ever have made it as far as participation in any such debate, just as it is that anyone from the traditional white or Afro-Caribbean working class would ever be a contender for Leader of the Labour Party.

But what if someone from the former background really had made it that far? This enforced bilingualism, a product of the “free” market’s need for unrestricted immigration, would have been the end of that. What has been done in eighty per cent English-speaking Wales, what is being done in areas with larger than average (but never remotely majoritarian) Asian populations, and what is being done where the Poles are now most concentrated (though, again, never remotely in the majority), is being done to the United States on a nation-wide basis.

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