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Keir Starmer says migrants should learn English to integrate. Is he being fair?
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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UK Politics
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As much as I disagree with the policy.
Your argument is not a good one. English is required to be tought to all UK school children. And is the only language that meets that minimal requirement through out the UK.
So as this is claimed to be about integration. (It's really about winning prejudiced voters).
English is the only language that has that ability.
Honestly. The fact you had to provide a translation. Is the best evidence that English is the language that integrated the UK. Even if the history is a little/lot shitty.
This important issue. Is this makes things harder for genuine asylum seekers and refugees. And is Def against the intent of the Geneva conventions banning on rules for such immigration.
I get you, but English is the only language required throughout the UK because of similarly xenophobic policies in the past.
My argument isn't meant to be the final gotcha and suddenly Keir will reverse policy, it's to give another perspective, another point of attack, another reason on top of all the others as to why this is a bullshit policy. A reason not likely thought about by monolingual English speakers.
Gaelic was exterminated through various government policies. Yes it was slowly, naturally, losing to English anyway but instead of allowing a bilingual society to thrive it was stamped out through force, both at the end of a gun and at the end of a belt in classrooms.
Cornish, Welsh, Irish, are all as native a language to this island as English. Why does English get priority? Because of colonial oppression. And this is another oppressive policy. More authoritarian policy from a supposed left wing Labour party. More pandering to racists like Reform.
As you said. All the reasons you said above. Mean no other language is practical for a today government to require.
Any Lang has issues and it's not fixing an existing problem.
But if our shitty past did not exist. We would have several different nations all choosing their own Lang. And still no real integration. Sorta why English was winning in the first place.
Honestly if any other Lang speaking subgroup of the UK had been the best at being shitty. We would still have a history of a single lang forcing itself on others. No historical UK tribe was pacifists. And muct of what you think of as English now was Normondy/french in origin replacing Saxon English.