Mind your language

It looks as though Stuart Allen may have been endowed with greater foresight than we realised when we watched, albeit with some embarrassment, Mind Your Language in the late 1970s. How ridiculous, we thought, to watch a class full of adult foreigners try to learn English with humorous results. Now we read that "English a minority language in 1,300 schools". The Daily Telegraph article continues "The figures show that in a total of 1,338 primary and secondary schools - more than one in 20 of all schools in England - children with English as their first language are in the minority. In 600 of these schools, fewer than a third of pupils speak English as their first language."

That's a third, a third of pupils who speak English as their first language. Is it any wonder that our schools are turning out so many people who are functionally illiterate.


The article contains this line "Teachers' unions said educating a single non-English-speaking pupil could cost as much as £30,000 a year."

Do you think that that cost or even a part of it is included in the calculations that lead this government to claim that immigration has a net benefit to the UK economy?


"In the borough of Newham, nine out of 10 schools have a non-English first language majority. The same is true of a third of schools in Leicester and in Blackburn, and a quarter of schools in Birmingham."

Is anybody surprised?


"Many of the pupils without English as their first language are the children of the 600,000 eastern Europeans who have come to Britain since the European Union's eastward expansion in 2004."

Odd I thought we were told that 14,000 workers would be coming and that if more did come they would not be bringing their families and would not be settling here. Ever get the feeling that you've been lied to?


"Official statistics last week showed that one in five births in Britain last year was to a woman from overseas."


Changing the subject, but only slightly, I have got builders and plumbers in at the moment. The builders are a team of four, three of whom are Polish of whom only one speaks English well enough to understand my concerns or his foreman's instructions. The foreman also does not have English as his first language but is fluent enough. These builders are just taking down a couple of ceilings, surely there amongst the eight million economically inactive UK citizens there are some who could be trained to use a hammer and chisel and a saw and to clean up afterwards. I am sure there are any number who could drink tea and eat sandwiches every hour.


This government's open borders policy has changed the fundamental nature of the UK and whilst the economy stayed in reasonable health it was possible for this experiment to work. However, I fear that the coming economic recession will leave many people more than a little angry at the state of their country and I foresee trouble between the indigenous population whether Anglo-Saxon, of Caribbean or Indian sub-continent extraction and the newer migrants from Eastern Europe and non former British ruled Africa.