If you think America has a problem with immigrants who don’t want to
learn English, pity poor Britain. From a typically good <a
href=”http://wwwtelegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/08/27/do2701.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/08/27/ixopinion.html”>column
by former Telegraph editor Charles Moore today:
Language is, in a way, our best-shared, most flexible
institution, containing what is common while enabling what is
individual. Not to be able to speak English well is to be cut off from
almost everything else that composes Britishness. David Cameron, who
wants to be the next Conservative leader, made a good speech this week
about Islamist terrorism, in which he pointed out that many of our
citizens cannot speak it at all. He quoted a Home Office figure that
only 26 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis here are fluent in
English (the equivalent in America is 68 per cent). If that is true,
it is terrifying.
I’d wager that the fluency level among such immigrant women is much
smaller. As Theodore Dalrymple keeps asking, where is the feminist
anger at this?