Lost In Translation

The Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article755994.ece) and the BBC have both described how the UK spends around £100m per year in translating and interpreting for British residents who don't speak English.

The costs broke down to: £25m spent by local councils, £21m spent by the police, £10m spent by the courts and £55m (a conservative estimate) by the NHS. One community centre funded by the Home Office offered its services in 76 different languages.

Why?

It is against our interests to have people living in this country but unable to speak our language. It encourages seperatism, keeps people of ethnic backgrounds in secular ghettos, and acts as a drain on our resources. Surely we'd be better off spending the money teaching people how to speak English so that they could then interact with the rest of the population and do simple things like help their kids with the homework or get jobs. Because, lets face it, unless you're able to ge a job as a chef in an ethnic restaurant where you don't have to interact with the customers, its highly unlikely that you'll be able to get a job, so up goes the unemployment figures and up goes the number of people living on, and dependant on, benefits.

As the Times article says: "The evidence is plain to anyone who visits Brick Lane in the East End of London. In the Bangladeshi community... English is a foreign language. Restaurants, shops and doctors’ surgeries all cater to a population that speaks Bengali or Sylheti. Even the street signs are in Bengali. The language barrier is reinforced by multiculturalists whose zeal to translate everything has given people a disincentive to speak this country’s language.

Every year Bangladeshis sit at the bottom of rankings of educational achievement. Their society persists in economic stagnation that locks many people into the catering industry. Drug abuse and crime are on the rise in the East End. Functionally illiterate young Bangladeshi males, with no hope of employment, can choose between extremists in the mosques or the gangs in the streets."

By pandering to the ethnic populations of Britain and making it easier for them to get by with little or no knowledge of the language, we are, in fact, making things harder for them. How can they possibly embrace life as a British resident if they don't interact with the rest of the population? How can they be made to feel a part of a society that they are unable to contribute to?

Far from creating a permissive, multi-cultural society, all Blair managed to do was create a number of micro-societies, each unable to communicate with each other.