Why are Goodwin, Farage and Lowe so terrified of me?

What the data on English as an additional language actually shows - and how it’s being distorted into a story of national decline.

Picture by Abu Ayyub - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 from Wikimedia Commons

I have to apologise again. This was supposed to be out yesterday, but I have been completely overwhelmed with new work - getting my head around things and getting used to the pace of things - and have not had time to sit down and do a proper catch up. It’s been a good week, though.

I did make it up to Birmingham, though I can’t claim to have seen much beyond the NEC and a Travelodge that, for reasons still unclear, did not believe in running water in the shower. So I’ll reserve judgement on the city for now.

Aside from that, things have been chugging along quite nicely here. Life is getting back to normal after a pretty insane February and March with my dad passing away and flying back to South Africa. I’m looking forward to getting back to a more regular schedule. In terms of the news this week, it has been the same - war, the orange dictator lying, the usual thing - but something did pique my interest, which was political, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. That was the book Suicide of a Nation, published this last month, written by Matt Goodwin. There’s a lot of controversy around the book, not particularly around the contents so far, with most of it being focused on exactly how it was written.

Those are perfectly understandable critiques. I don’t disagree with them, but there is something else about the book.

Full disclosure: I have not bought it.

The last thing I’m going to do is put a couple of pounds in Matt Goodwin’s pocket. I bought Liz Truss’s book, I bought a bunch of books written by right-wing ideologues, and I always regret it because they’re always just a bit shit.

They’re always the worst polemics that are badly sourced and just not worth the pounds. I have not read the book. I am not going to read the book unless someone can give it to me for free, in which case I’ll grudgingly sit my way through it. But one of the standout bits in the book that has come through is the discussion around language, and very specifically, English as an additional language.

In Goodwin’s book, he makes the point that civilisational decline is partly going to be brought about by people who do not speak English anymore. It’s not as simple as that. I’m sure he does add some nuance (or at least someone does). But the long and short of it is that he brings out a statistic that one in five children in the UK speak English as an additional language.

That is an indicator for him of an imminent civilisational collapse, the “suicide of a nation”. But I have noticed that there is a theme in it.

First things first though, let’s start with the definition of what EAL is.

According to the Department for Education:

“a pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English. This measure is not a measure of English language proficiency or a good proxy for recent immigration.”

The emphasis on “exposed to” is important here. A child is assigned EAL status based on a parental declaration made at school registration - typically in the first week of nursery or reception year - stating that the family uses a language other than English at home. Critically, that’s not an assessment of the child’s English ability at the point of EAL coding. The coding is household-based, not child-based.

What this means is that the following categories of child are all automatically classified as EAL regardless of their English fluency:

• A child born in Birmingham to a second-generation British Pakistani family who grew up speaking English at school with friends and in daily life but whose grandparents still speak Punjabi at family gatherings - that is exposure, that is EAL.

• A child born in London to a French diplomat whose first language is English, but whose parents speak French at home.

• A child who arrived at age three from Poland and is now fluent in English at the age of fourteen.

• A child who arrived at the age of thirteen from Syria and cannot yet read English.

All four children receive the same binary EAL coding in the National Pupil Database. No distinction whatsoever is made between them at the point of classification.

Looking at some of the critique that has been levelled, Professor Steve Strand - a leading academic when it comes to language - has explicitly said in the Times that Goodwin

“is totally misunderstanding what this measure of EAL is. He keeps talking about English not being young people’s first language, but you could be recorded as EAL and still be totally fluent in English. So he’s not understanding the question that underlies the data.”

This is from the expert. We all to an extent like to think we are experts, and Mr Goodwin certainly does - but this is a massive category error on his part.

The way that it is explained, that twenty-odd per cent of children who have an additional language, gently makes it sound like one in five kids cannot speak English, but this is not the case. That is not what’s happening here. The official data is about 21.4 per cent and in primary schools, it was 23.4 per cent.

But what are people actually scared of? Because if this were about schooling, we would be looking at other things. We would be looking at:

• Support in schooling

• Staffing in schooling

• Assessment catch-up

• Translation in specific cases

• How schools help newly arrived children flourish

But that’s not the register that Matt Goodwin has chosen.

The emotional centre of his argument is that the mere existence of language signals loss, dilution, weakness, or betrayal. All of that leads to the apocalyptic messaging coming through from a lot of the right - that we are being infiltrated and infested, we’re being taken over by people who hold another language in their head, and that there is nothing more terrifying than that for them. Which is pretty revealing.

Now for my second disclosure: I myself am not an English first-language speaker.

You may not be able to tell it, but I am an Afrikaans first-language speaker. I speak two languages fluently (though according to my mother, I don’t speak Afrikaans fluently anymore, but that is beside the point).

I think in English most of the time, if not all of the time. English is what I work in, it’s what I write in, it’s what I’ve been writing in for several years now. English is not endangered in my mind because it lives alongside another language.

This is the thing that confuses me the most.

Most of my friends either are not English first-language speakers, but we all speak English to each other. All of them can speak additional languages, except for one friend from New Zealand who can only speak English, which is perfectly fair enough.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

But there is this feeling that people like me, who have two languages living inside my head, create this threat to people, the foreignness of it. My God, that man can think in more than one language - must be the Antichrist. But I pay my taxes. I live here easily. I’m not a particularly controversial person - though I’m sure that people like Matt Goodwin and Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage will disagree. There’s no threat. I don’t understand the threat of it.

It might be because of my background. I’m from South Africa, in which twelve different languages are official languages - everything from Afrikaans to English to Sepedi to Sotho to Xhosa to Zulu. There’s a lot of different languages being spoken, and that exposure has made me not scared of someone speaking French in public or hearing Arabic on the tube. Why are people so scared of it? Is it the foreigners, or is there a political point to this?

Farage himself recently made comments to the effect that one million people living in Britain don’t speak any English at all, and he previously claimed that four million people living in Britain don’t speak very good English. This was apparently based on census data, but according to Full Fact, this isn’t what the 2021 census said. It found that:

• 880,000 people in England and Wales could not speak English well

• 161,000 could not speak it at all

• 4.1 million people said they could speak English well or very well, but not as their main language

So these are again those people committing the massive crime against the UK by having more than one language sitting in their head. Rupert Lowe has been on a crusade against anything that’s not English for years now. He wants a crackdown on translation services in the NHS and public sector.

It all comes down to insecurity in these people. There’s this fragility about them that I struggle to understand.

You’ve got these staunch patriots walking out telling everyone Great Britain must be great again, look how far we’ve fallen. But the things they point to as having fallen are a woman who can speak English and Gujarati, a child who might have a French mother but a British father. They point at all these innocuous things that point towards a global world. Yes, there is a lot of non-English being spoken in London, and in Westminster that’s due to the fact that most of the tourists aren’t English but they are spending their tourist money here.

But that’s always been London. And even in other parts of the country, we have a whole country with a different language to English. What exactly are their thoughts on Welsh people? What are their thoughts on people who may speak Gaelic? How incredibly sensitive you have to be to be that terrified of hearing not English spoken. I shudder to think what the reaction must be when they have to watch a show on TV with subtitles on.

This is a drama about nothing. A lot of these kids that are being villainised as not having English as a first language or having English as an additional language are going to grow up British. They’re going to be British. Some of them are going to be brown and British. As terrifying as that can be to people like Matt Goodwin and his little cohort, what the Goodwin-Lowe axis exposes is not just statistical mishandling - though it is that - but a politics so brittle that it experiences multilingual life as a threat. They’re not frightened by children failing to learn English. They’re frightened by children learning English and keeping something else alive alongside it. They’re afraid that someone having the capability of speaking not just English means that they are somehow less patriotic and less loyal to the country. This is why the panic sounds so feverish to me and so absurd.

It’s not about communication. It’s about control, purity, ownership. If me speaking two languages fluently and butchering another two is enough to terrify them, Duolingo notifications are ruining their bloody day. The true threats to our country are not being brought in by immigrants. We are looking at an economy that is faltering from external influence from certain geriatric game show hosts sitting in the White House having little incursions into the Middle East.

We have public services that have been failing for many years and still don’t feel like they’re being fixed. The NHS is yet again on its knees as it has been since at least 2016. There’s trade friction with our nearest neighbour. There are so many things that are genuinely wrong. The problem is that you can’t point at immigrants to blame that on. This is where the right seems to fail to make their argument. There is no argument. All that we have is finger pointing at someone who dares to speak Arabic, finger pointing at someone who has the temerity of not being born in the UK or being born to people who weren’t born in the UK. It achieves nothing except dividing.

We need to learn to ignore the Goodwins of the world. It is hard. They are being forced upon us by things like social media and algorithms. But for the most part, we need to ignore them, whilst also pointing out the absurdity, the complete and utter nonsense of it. I’m grateful to Andy Twelves, who has taken up the crusade against not just the methodology behind what Matt Goodwin has done, but also the alleged making up of quotes. I watched some of the debate with Matt Goodwin on GB News, so you wouldn’t have to. All I could see was Matt sweating and getting very defensive and becoming very conspiratorial as they do.

What I want to end this week on is this: Don’t look at someone who can speak more than one language as a threat.

Recognise that people are different and people are going to live together, and someone speaking Dutch in public or Gaelic in public or Welsh in public is not the reason that you can’t get a GP appointment. They’re not the reason why the energy prices are going up.

Look up.

That’s where it’s happening. It’s not happening next to you day to day. It’s happening in boardrooms, in conversations that we’re not part of. Keep our frustration and anger where it belongs, not directed at a child who lives in a house that speaks more than one language.

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You can listen to my chat about this subject if you’re so inclined at the link below:

Not a Podcast: Why are Goodwin, Farage and Lowe so terrified of me?