The Government wants migrants fluent in English – pity the rest of us can barely speak it

Telegraph

10-05-2025

It was an almost tear-jerking culture clash. I was on the train reading Raising Hare and, if you can read and know others enamoured of this skillset, I beg that you do the same. It's the most beautifully written story about a woman who, during the pandemic, adopts and shelters a leveret and how the animal changes her life and her understanding of nature.
While a couple of seats away were some young men, joshing and discussing films. Or rather playing jarring videos from TikTok or some such and yelling things like, 'Oh my days, you gotta see dis, bruv'. And then some exclamatory swearing, which was the least offensive, harking back as it does to the romance of Latin and its evolution with English and, possibly, German and ancient French.
The youth, I noted, were white, although they spoke in this strange faux Jamaican patois. If you want a great example of this, or rather an excruciating insight into this most gruesome affectation, look up someone on Instagram who goes by the name of 'hkvibing'. Watch as he takes viewers on a tour of his accommodation at Soho Farmhouse. He's a middle-class boy, clad, of course, in a hoodie, walking around the exclusive and chic confines of a private club in Oxfordshire often emitting a noise that sounds like 'aye', which I believe derives from the words 'all right'.
'It's sort of like Cotswold vibes,' he says. ''Here's where you put your wellies out and s--t, not gonna lie.' A highlight is when he presents the bath, or as he puts it: 'C'mon bubble baff ting'.
God help us if his old English teacher, from, no doubt, a very expensive private school ever sees this. They would, as you will, despair and feel the need to seek out this chap and then whack him as hard as possible over the head with a heavy collected works of Shakespeare. Because 'hkvibing' and his ilk are doing their level best to destroy the language of English as we know it. Armed with that fatal weapon of the mobile phone, they will not countenance the idea of reading a book and would swerve any possibility of the cultural and mental enrichment that might follow.
The language of these 'bruvs' with its cornerstones of 'should of' and 'kind of' and laced with that major, speech-defect of a word, 'like', and with 'yeahs' not 'yesses' and 'nahs' not 'nos' seems all the more painful as we commemorate VE day. Watch the extraordinary documentary Britain and the Blitz on Netflix and you'll weep as you see the way we dressed 80 years ago.
You'll appreciate the successful descent we have made into full slobbery in fashion and tongue.
And while I'm not suggesting BBC presenters revert to wearing black tie when they're reading the news, our national broadcaster doesn't exactly set an example.
Take the charming Amol Rajan, presenter on BBC's Today programme, clad in his t-shirt and never missing an opportunity to deftly dodge a consonant. I'm still recovering from the time he interviewed the then-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, setting out the stall for the ensuing interview and asked him, 'Are you cool with that?' or maybe it was 'wiv dat'. At least he didn't add the proverbial 'innit'.
The sum total of this ignorance-promoting, culture-crucifying abuse of the English language being the statistic that nearly a fifth of adults in England have literacy levels that fall below those expected of an 11-year-old.
And what is the Government's latest plan regarding the English language? To ensure that people have a clear grasp of the language to the equivalent of an A-level. That is if they're migrants. A white paper to be published next week, designed to tackle record levels of net migration, posits that to integrate into society, those who apply for a UK work visa must be able to produce clear, well-structured and detailed texts on complex subjects and speak English 'flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes'.