Armed Forces: Foreign Language Speakers

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Wilson of Tillyorn (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for raising this subject, a very important one indeed. I declare an interest relating to one language at least: Chinese. I am president of the Scotland China Education Network, which, under the energetic leadership of Dr Judith McClure, promotes the teaching of Chinese in Scottish schools.

I do not know how many noble Lords here this afternoon have read a 1950s book by Eric Newby called A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush; there are some who have read it. It is the most wonderful account of a journey to the Hindu Kush, the formidable mountain range between Pakistan and Afghanistan, by a very amateur group that included Eric Newby and one Persian-speaking young diplomat. At the end of their expedition, as they are coming down, they meet, coming up into the mountains, that very great traveller, Wilfred Thesiger. He insists that they should stay and have supper with him. In the exchange, Thesiger says, “Slight problem here. I can’t speak a word of the language. Still, it’s not really necessary”. Then he turns to the cook, who has only just been employed that morning and has never met another Englishman in his life and certainly does not speak English, and says in a loud voice, “Make some green tea, a lot of chicken and rice—three chickens”, and it is done.

I suggest that there are two morals to this story, which is a caricature of that very great traveller, Sir Wilfred Thesiger. He was a real expert. He had twice crossed the Rub al-Khali—the Empty Quarter—in Arabia. He travelled in the country with the Marsh Arabs in Iraq; he travelled extensively in north Africa. He really knew the Arab world. But the second moral is: it is no good if you are outside your area of language comfort, relying on speaking English in a loud voice. It does not do, as has just been said by the noble Earl, Lord Attlee.

As the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, has said, an interpreter has to be used on some occasions but an interpreter is not enough. It is not simply a question of whether your interpreter is having a different conversation from the one you want him to have; it is that only by knowing a language do you really have an understanding of the culture, the history and the customs of the people you are dealing with. That is key. It seems that in recent conflicts in Iraqi and Afghanistan that sort of expertise and local understanding was badly needed, and surely it is equally true of the highly complex situations in Syria and Libya that we need real expertise and understanding. That is as true for the intelligence services and GCHQ as it is for the military.

Unfortunately, as has just been said, we are increasingly bad at teaching foreign languages in schools, and we seem to have taken it as perfectly normal that we should reduce the amount of effort that goes into learning foreign languages. There are one or two bright spots, thank goodness. I mentioned the Scotland China Education Network. Two weeks ago I went to a meeting of that body at a school in Perthshire, and every person in the entry year was learning Chinese. They did not have to go on doing so but they did have to go on learning at least two languages throughout their time there. It was giving them an introduction to a difficult foreign language and its culture, which is as important as it is to learn the language itself. We need much more than can be taught at school. We need, in our intelligence services and our Armed Forces, experts in the hard languages that are never going to be taught in our schools.

We had a debate earlier this year on the funding of the Foreign Office in which I asked the Minister, the noble Earl, Lord Courtown, to give me figures, which he later gave in writing, about the number of people who had studied hard foreign languages in the Foreign Office. The figures he gave were very interesting; they were slightly better than those given by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. For instance, 14 people were studying Mandarin and the Foreign Office had 44 registered speakers of it, while 34 were studying Arabic, with 51 registered speakers. That is encouraging, and with it comes a greater concentration in the Foreign Office on local expertise and taking it seriously. It would be interesting to know whether that is true of the Armed Forces as well.

It would be useful if the Minister could give figures, perhaps afterwards, for some of the key hard languages. The ones I am thinking of that are going to be needed over a considerable period are Afghan Persian, or Dari, and Pashto, the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan, and Arabic. I do not think we can legitimately ask for the figures of those in the intelligence services who speak hard languages, but it would be useful to have an assurance that having a sufficient number of people in command of those key foreign languages in the intelligence services is seen as essential.