Fatuous Labour idiot Chris Bryant wants us to learn Arabic - not useless French

Chris Bryant, the Labour MP who served as Europe Minister under Gordon Brown (my God, what a fatuous job!) says Britain needs people who speak modern foreign languages – but “not just the useless modern foreign languages like French”. Apparently, Britons should all be learning Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. Of course, that would be right if the aim of education was simply to boost trade and “diplomacy” – i.e. sucking up to foreigners -  and if our sixth forms and universities were to be seen as nothing more than glorified technical colleges. But surely the primary aim of education should be to produce well-rounded, civilized human beings rather than cultureless “workers” toting a kitbag of disparate, economically useful skills into adult life? 

In his 1978 novella, 1985, Anthony Burgess has dissident schoolchildren – criminals, actually - reading samizdat versions of Latin classics at the back of the class while dumber contemporaries are force-fed sociology and Worker’s English. I’d much rather children went on being taught French, German, Latin and Greek so they can understand the cultural underpinnings of our civilization, which, in turn, might help them add to its almost inconceivable richness, rather than mugging up on a few Chinese phrases to help them negotiate deals for producing yet more plastic crap. Besides, surely companies can pay to send their employees off on language-learning courses? 

But the real question is, why are left-wing politicians so dismissive of their country’s cultural roots? They can’t all be philistines, surely! (Well, okay, but let’s pretend the answer’s negative.) Why are socialists so bizarrely keen on severing our connection with the history, languages and cultures that have made the British people what they are today (or would be, if the state got off their backs)? France’s history, culture and language have intimately interwined with our own for a millennium (and I don’t just mean that the British have regularly duffed them up; although, of course, they have). True, we have history with the Arabs and the Chinese, and have produced many distinguished Arabists and Sinologists over the years - but relatively little of their language or culture has fed into ours.

Interestingly, the near-future dystopia Burgess conjured up in 1985 included the rapid Islamification of Britain: another delightful development – in addition to the airbrushing of our cultural heritage - for which we have left-wing politicians and their public sector stooges to thank.