Armed Forces: Foreign Language Speakers

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for introducing this debate and for his contribution, which among other things centred on the availability of information. The contribution of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, about local interpreters was very useful. He seemed to conclude that we cannot do more to have our own capability, but I certainly take the view that we should. The noble Lord, Lord Wilson, stressed the importance of real expertise and noted the increasingly bad performance in schools. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, for pointing to the light among the gloom, particularly in relation to the Army, and for making the important point that there is an intrinsic skill in our population, an issue to which I shall return.

The protection of the British people is the first priority of government. We, as the Opposition, remain committed to Britain’s NATO membership and to spending 2% of GDP on defence. We will stand up for our Armed Forces and ensure that they have the best support. That means leadership, equipment and training, and it is a particular aspect of training and support on which this debate centres.

War has changed. State-on-state wars ending with unconditional surrender and unresisted occupation, as in the Second World War, are becoming an out-of-date concept. The Cold War kept the ideas alive for some time, but recent wars or, perhaps more correctly, armed conflicts have been messy affairs. Enemies have been unclear. Sometimes they have been of the people; they have frequently been among the people and indistinguishable from the people. Targeted aid and diplomacy—winning hearts and minds—have been at least as important as the ability to deliver lethal force.

A key barrier to success has been communication and language. Therefore, I ask the Minister to what extent he agrees with my analysis and to what extent the Government have conducted a lessons-learned exercise into recent conflicts. In particular, have they been able to determine the extent to which better local language capability might act as a force multiplier in future “boots on the ground” deployments? Further, would such language capability improve performance if extended to DfID operatives and diplomats working in crisis situations?

To flesh that out slightly, we have an Army, what is it there to do? If it is fighting a tank battle in East Sussex, something has gone terribly wrong. Yes, the Army must be capable of offering a credible conventional opposition on NATO’s borders, but the overwhelming probability of the future is that the Army will be deployed in very messy situations—insurrections and potential civil wars—working in a local environment where English is not the language. Consider the difference in performance between a unit arriving with its own local language capability, compared with all the problems of recruiting interpreters, getting to know them and getting to work out whether you can trust them.

I have to admit, somewhat ashamedly, that I have no residual foreign language capability. However, this has not stopped me thinking about language and the role it plays. I believe that it probably has three roles. The first is direct communication—giving orders and warnings, and seeking simple intelligence. The second is understanding the society and culture in which one finds oneself, and the third—this is the bit that eluded me as a young person—is understanding how people think. At one point I was responsible for all British Airways overseas staff. When I visited them, they would constantly explain to me how the fusion of language and culture would influence local people, officials, diplomats and politicians. Does the Minister agree that, as soft power and foreign aid merge, greater language capability will pay back the investment with significantly enhanced effectiveness?

Teaching a foreign language takes many forms. My own, traditional experience led to a marginal O-level in French with barely any conversational capability. On the other hand, peers of mine went on to do modern language degrees. My charming German neighbour learned her English in the age-old way. She was a young lady in war-torn Cologne who met a young Royal Air Force meteorologist, part of the occupying power. Magically, she learned to speak English and he learned to speak German. They were married for 50 years. I give these examples to illustrate the range of different ways of teaching a language and to make the point that careful analysis of what capability is required, particularly verbal—or conversational—capability, and to whom it is being taught, may lead to more efficient training than traditional methods. Are the Government planning to increase language training, and will they make a careful analysis of available techniques?

The United Kingdom, as the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, noted, enjoys a rich and diverse cultural base. Immigration over centuries has created this. Many recent immigrants whose mother tongues are from areas where problems may arise have themselves struggled to learn a foreign language—English. Most will not have any formal teacher training, but they speak their native language. Particularly, they speak the language of the streets. These may be the streets and fields where our troops and aid workers may need to be deployed in future. Surely, those immigrants and their children should be recruited into any enhanced language training facility. In the longer term, should we not be recruiting individuals with useful mother tongue languages into our Armed Forces, security services and aid agencies? To fully utilise them, the military, in particular, would have to develop a more flexible approach to their deployment, but they would, surely, significantly add capability. The concept of a special reserve corps, where individuals were trained with basic “look-after-themselves” infantry capability and could be deployed in support of overseas deployments, using their native language skills, should surely be looked at as a way of increasing this capability.

This has been an interesting debate about an important aspect of the United Kingdom’s weakness in language skills. Sadly, there is little sign of the traditional methods meeting that need. It is good to hear that the Army, in particular, is making progress. I hope the Minister will find some merit in the ideas put forward by noble Lords and will be able to persuade colleagues in the Ministry of Defence and other departments that change is necessary.