Brexit: Foreign Language Teaching and Public Service Interpreting

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the first two speakers, and I thank my noble friend Lady Coussins for launching this debate. This is a subject that is seemingly not big on the horizon, but actually it is crucial. I thank her also for the marvellous work she has done over the years as a chairman of our All-Party Group on Modern Languages, which has achieved great things. The emotional, marginal nature of foreign languages in Britain—which is really a curse—might suggest that we would not have very frequent meetings, but we do. We have interesting and varied meetings, full of content, with lots of outside participants, such as members of the Institute of Linguists. It is a very inspiring group. I am therefore grateful that today’s debate has been led by my noble friend Lady Coussins, and for what she said to raise the alarm on this issue.

We are dealing here with yet another miserable piece of Brexit legislation, and what a sad time this is for the country. One has to speak broadly about Brexit, because it is the background to all these matters. Today, in Committee on the Trade Bill, things were dealt with that would not have been necessary if the Government had handled the events subsequent to the election on 8 June 2017 more intelligently, in a way that would have led us to a different and more constructive channel of recovery and a rethinking of the nightmare that is affecting this country. It has made people thoroughly miserable. Youngsters feel fed up and have lost their morale as a result of what the senior citizens in the Government and politics have done, seemingly on their behalf but potentially causing only damage and destruction. This may seem a small segment of the Brexit background, but it is a very important one.

In recent years, the language background in Britain has been depressing. It is good to see the expansion of Spanish and Mandarin in British state schools and others, particularly for younger children, and to see how well and intelligently they deal with it and what they achieve. Learning Chinese is very difficult for older people, but children can cope with it. Other languages, however, are now in decline in universities and schools—German is a good example of this—but there is absolutely sacred evidence of their importance.

Years ago, I went to Dusseldorf to speak to the 50 officials at the British trade office who were promoting UK exports. Their first grumble—a familiar one in this country, which is spoiled by English being the dominant international language—was that so many British companies would not produce their pamphlets in German because of the extra expense, saying, “Why bother? Aren’t the Germans good at speaking English?” Many years after that visit, specific research showed that 9% net of business was lost by British exporters in Germany because we would not put our documents into German. German has really faded now in this country, and I hope that will not be so in the future.

I am spoiled by providence and my origins of birth. For some reason, I have always found languages very easy: I enjoy speaking and reading European languages, as well as Russian, but that is rusty because I have not used it in recent years. Due to finding it easy, I have a natural enthusiasm for language learning and teaching, which does not affect the ordinary citizen. I quite understand that. I am not criticising the ordinary citizen in this country for not feeling that way or for supporting the idea that they do not need to bother because “they all speak English”.

If it is unfair I will apologise to him immediately, but I was told on good authority that the previous Prime Minister, David Cameron, could just about manage to say “bonjour” and nothing else when he was at the Council of Ministers. But look at what our foreign friends in the EU can do. Some years ago, I had the great privilege of visiting the European Parliament, which has become increasingly important now. I heard the then President Barroso make a speech in five different languages, with several paragraphs in each. We could do that as well. There is no reason that British people should not be intrinsically just as good at foreign languages as anybody else, if they put their minds to it. I have spoken on this at great length because I wanted to focus on the background and on how this curmudgeonly attitude in Britain about languages has affected government policy.

On the Immigration Act, I was very impressed with the two documents, by Nicola Newson and James Goddard, that we in the House of Lords were given. They were very helpful in giving us the background on this. The second paragraph on page 72 of the first one deals with how this all started. It says:

“The shortage of teachers is not limited to a few subject-specialisms as in the past. The ASCL survey of January 2016 asked about the subjects found to be difficult. As might be expected the existing shortage subjects of maths and science head the list, but they are now joined by significant numbers of schools having problems recruiting teachers of English, modern foreign languages”—


which is the subject of this debate today—

“geography, history and other subjects”.

Later in the same document we get a Written Answer from the Minister, then Nick Gibb. He said in September 2018:

“The Government has commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee … to provide independent advice … to help develop a future immigration system. The Department welcomed their interim report in March and the contribution it makes to the immigration debate. Their analysis is incomplete and it would be wrong to pre-empt their final report. The Government will take account of the MAC’s advice when making decisions about the future immigration system”.


As my noble friend Lady Coussins quite rightly mentioned, the salary figures are usually below the threshold anyway, so the problem is intrinsic and it has to be tackled. I hope that will be so, because the Immigration Act is only a part of this. Regulations will follow later when the second stage of this exercise gathers momentum, and I am very sceptical about the Government getting it right.

I will refer briefly to the second document, Foreign Language Skills: Trends and Developments. I mentioned earlier the damage that is done, particularly to younger members of our society, if these things are closed down, reduced, not properly funded and so on. On page 9, paragraph 4, I was struck with the definition of “multilingualism” in the EU. Let me remind everybody of the idea that all 27 sovereign countries in the EU are happy with sovereignty and happy working together as a club in a succession of treaties. Why cannot Britain be the same? The definition states:

“Under the subsidiarity principle, member states of the EU are responsible for language rights and education. However, the EU is empowered to promote language learning and linguistic diversity among its members”.

That is one of the great attractions of the EU and another reason why we should stay in.