Our kids should be learning Arabic not French

Even the French know the game is up, says Rod Liddle. What’s the point in us teaching their language when, in the end, it will be as obsolete as Cornish

It’s a strange thing. Once they have been relieved of office, they start talking a modicum of sense. First we have Ed Balls suggesting that all foreigners should go home because the River Tiber is beginning to foam with much blood, just like Enoch — a Labour supporter himself for a while, remember — once advised.

And now we have the former minister Chris Bryant telling the French that their language is absolutely pointless and that nobody should bother learning it, not even the French. Teach the kids Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic instead, he said. The Tories, suddenly ennobled by power, insisted that this was ‘insulting to the French’. Yes, sure — and your point is?

It is about time someone got to grips with our French obsession, our determination to foist this absurd agglomeration of bastardised Latin verbiage coupled with histrionic tics and shrugs upon the nation’s schoolchildren. There is a move, in some recidivist quarters, to bring back proper Latin in our schools — I don’t see the point, I must admit. But rather that than persist in teaching children a language which is of no consequence whatsoever beyond the borders of France itself, a handful of desperately hopeless countries in West Africa and nine chippy Canadians.

At least Latin has history behind it and a certain logic to its construction. It is true, that as Bryant conceded, French was once the language of diplomacy — but that was more than 100 years ago. It is now the language of nothing, other than the French, and it is time our schools recognised this.