‘Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.’ 

Thus P.G. Wodehouse, magnificently summing up everything about the British attitude to foreign languages – unconfident, half-hearted, apologetic and a bit guilty, all of which are reflected in the fretful handwringing that has greeted recent news of the continuing decline of language learning in UK schools and universities. 

Having dropped like a stone since the Labour government jettisoned obligatory language learning in schools in 2004, annual exam candidates now number in the single thousands for French, Spanish and near-extinct German, while more undergraduates study PE than languages spoken by our nearest neighbours. Fewer than half our universities, and none outside the Russell group, boast language departments. Just 20 per cent of Brits say they can speak a foreign language, and only a much smaller proportion can do better than Wodehouse’s rightly nervous hero.

None of this is because the British are congenitally less able to learn languages than others. It’s because they don’t bother to. For which thank the grossly inflated assumptions they hold about the benefits of speaking ‘the language of Shakespeare’. True, enough people speak English that you can make yourself understood in much of the world, but the value of that is wildly overestimated and about to disappear anyway with the AI instant translation apps that are burgeoning on every other smartphone.

The fact is that being Anglophone isn’t a blessing. For Brits, the English language is a kind of cultural resource curse – a one-time advantage that we have failed to notice has long-since decayed into its opposite – a monument to the UK’s sloppy penchant for taking the easy option without thinking through the consequences.

Language is about far more than mechanical translation. The great polymath George Steiner compared it to vision: while with one eye you can see, two gives perspective. The same goes for language – as anyone suddenly struck by their own country’s eccentricities from the vantage point of a sojourn abroad will attest. ‘A different language’, summed up filmmaker Frederico Fellini, ‘is a different vision of life.’

This matters. For the monolingual UK, English becomes a one-way filter that screens out everything else. English is the basis of London’s cosmopolitan appeal, a lingua franca layered over the capital’s brew of 300 other languages – and also, incidentally, an important reason why the country is so attractive to migrants. But under its surface nest enclaves and communities whose culture and habits remain hidden in plain sight behind the linguistic filter. Think of radicalisation or the belated and wholly inadequate institutional response to the grooming gangs phenomenon, for example. Or would we have been quite so obsequious in our embrace of Russian oligarchs, and quicker to acknowledge Russian involvement in the Leave and other political campaigns since, if we had had a little more linguistic intelligence to apply to proceedings?

Again, consider the UK’s much prized ‘special relationship’ with the US. As the last two presidents have demonstrated, the current one most cuttingly, very far from being equal, the transatlantic relationship consists of little more than a shared language and the application of a flattering layer of royal pageantry (‘I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap,’ was Harry S Truman’s aside about Winston Churchill). 

The shared language, meanwhile, is accompanied by serious downsides. It makes us more susceptible to US economic and management ideas than European ones, and its American weaponisation as a tool of political and cultural imperialism is now unashamed and blatant. Just as bad, the Walter Mitty illusion of a shared language equating to shared destiny has helped to sustain the vacillation between the poles of European and US influence that has dogged UK politics ever since the second world war – and still does. Forever tugged between the two, Britain has never made up its mind whether it is a buccaneering US-style free market (the Brexit or Liz Truss vision) or a European social-market economy, as a result getting the best of neither and often the worst aspects of both; while the idea of relying on the US for security has never looked more naively fanciful.

So we plod on, wilfully unaware of how post Brexit our political and economic choices are still being shaped not by market opportunity but our insular linguistic traditions. Take, for example, our export performance, which faithfully reflects our self-imposed need to sell to foreign markets in English rather than their own language. While for Anglophone markets such as the US, Australia, Ireland and India, the UK exports more than it imports, the reverse is true for Germany, France, Italy and Spain, our European trading partners that together account for nearly three-quarters of UK exports. The telling case is little Denmark – population 6 million, almost all of whom speak English – which accounts for as much UK trading volume as all central and Latin America (population 670 million) put together.

There is a similar lop-sidedness on a personal level. As state funding has shrunk, many British universities have become dangerously dependent on the outsize fees paid by foreign students, two or three times higher than those charged to Brits. But part of the price is paid by home-grown learners, particularly in humanities. As university teachers are quick to testify, foreign students arriving with two or more languages have a built-in advantage over their monolingual UK counterparts. With double the cultural reference and more sophisticated perspectives to draw on, they are simply better equipped to benefit from their UK-provided university education – and the gap often widens during their studies. 

Projecting forward into the world of work, other things being equal, why would an employer, even a British one, not choose a candidate with double the cultural capital and savoir faire over a monoglot Anglophone, even one less caricatural than Wodehouse’s silly asses? It is surely deeply ironic that our cash-strapped higher education sector should be devoting a substantial part of its effort to creating better-qualified foreign graduates for top multinational jobs that are effectively closed to UK nationals because they haven’t been taught a second language.

Commenting on this year’s dire language exam figures, a prominent educationalist described the Blair government’s decision to drop compulsory language learning in 2004 as ‘quite clearly… the worst educational policy of this century.’ Even Wodehouse couldn’t make a joke out of that.