Speak my language

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced stricter English language requirements for immigration admissions to his country. "If you want to live in the UK, you have to speak English. It's common sense," he tweeted on Monday. premier. Depending on how it was done, it made me think a little about the album title. Speak English or die, from the Stormtroopers of Death (SOD), an eighties punk/bite/trash metal band with ties to the American far right.

Keir Starmer then tweeted: "Our government is taking back control of our borders."is controlled against our borders": let us remember that"let's take back control" was one of the rallying cries of Brexit, a nationalist operation as conspicuously absurd as it was counterproductive, for the European Union but above all for the United Kingdom).

In short, these are gestures made by a premier British Labour party that wants not so much to please the center-right Conservatives as to try to hold back the impetuous wave of the far right led by the Reform UK party, led by the unctuous Nigel Farage. Both Farage and the far-right party (which previously had another acronym, UKIP), seemed to be on the verge of disappearing years ago, swallowed up by the powerful inertia of the British two-party system, but are currently favorites in all kinds of polls. This, of course, has set off alarm bells among the Tories, but not only of the Tories: From a Labour Party much more based on traditional social democracy than on the transformative left, Starmer also attempts to put a stop to the hard right by integrating parts of its discourse and proposals. It's a tactic replicated throughout Europe by moderate centre-right and centre-left parties, and judging by the results, it's wrong: the parties of the system They end up offering a watered-down version of the far-right's proposals, leading many voters to opt for the original and supposedly authentic.

As for language learning, now that we've also talked a bit about it here, naturally the goal should be for immigrants who settle here to learn the language and make it their own. But this isn't encouraged (quite the opposite) by having them start with a B or C level, but rather by making it as easy as possible to learn the language, while simultaneously creating the need to speak it. What doesn't work is demanding a level of language proficiency from those who arrive that we are incapable of demanding from ourselves.