Mind Your Language

Only one in five comprehensive schools now requires a foreign language all the way to 16. Any guesses, or more than guesses, as to how they are filling up the curriculum time instead?

But eighty-two per cent of pupils at private schools still learn a language all the way up to the end of compulsory education (when very few of them then leave, but that is another story).

I think we can safely say that the London Oratory, or William Ellis, or Haverstock, or Camden High School for Girls, or anywhere like that, falls firmly within the one fifth, not the four fifths. In that way, at least, the schools that educate the next generation of our ostensibly left-wing nomenklatura resemble the comprehensive schools that they affect to be. But in no other way. Of course.

Meanwhile, Oliver Kamm writes:

"A cosmopolitan and polyglot society is a wondrous development in Western civilisation. It involves a single category of citzenship [sic] and equal rights under the law for everyone, regardless of national origin or race or creed."

Well, Oliver, Britain was like that long before she became "cosmopolitan and polyglot", and has become less and less the former while she has become more and more the latter. However the word might have been used there, the Soviet Union was in point of fact thoroughly "cosmopolitan", as well as being extremely "polyglot".

Let people in North Wales speak Welsh, let people in the Western Isles speak Gaelic, and at a push let anyone in Northern Ireland speak Irish if you can find anyone who really wants to other than to make a political point. But they can all speak English as well, as they must in order to participate in the full range of economic and political activity.

To deny children English would be to restrict their future economic and political opportunities, which is why nobody does it. Instead, we see the restriction of the economic and political opportunities of the English-speaking majority in Wales. The overwhelmingly English-speaking majority in Northern Ireland will be next (perhaps they could move to the Republic in order to escape from this supposed Irishness, which is as fake as the supposed Britishness of marching behind a Union Flag while wearing a bowler hat?), and then the massively predominant English-speaking majority in Scotland.

"It couldn't happen?" Why not? A Welsh-speaking oligarchy now controls even parts of South Wales where nobody (apart from the oligarchs, of course) speaks Welsh. Publicly funded schools are being set up in Northern Ireland for the children of the new Sinn Fein elite to be taught in what is practically a dead language, which they will never speak in the street except to each other, thus to exclude everyone else present.

For that matter, how many non-white people speak a Celtic language? The language of Afro-Caribbeans, and of most Africans in Britain, is, like the language of African-Americans, English. A language spoken absolutely fluently by every Welsh-speaker outside Patagonia, and by every Irish or Gaelic speaker anywhere.

And then there is the increasing treatment of foreign languages as indigenous in parts of London, the Pennines and elsewhere, guaranteeing lucrative employment at public expense. Just as we stop teaching the languages that are the other repositories of our Biblical-Classical civilisation, we start in our urban centres (and elsewhere) effectively requiring for economic, social, cultural and political advancement languages that pass on, and which presuppose for their proper understanding, systems of thought fundamentally at odds with that civilisation.

We are becoming Babel.

Babel became Babylon.

And Babylon became the Baghdad Caliphate.