Education: Languages

Lord Harrison Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harrison]

My Lords, this week we have been celebrating the life and work of Baroness Daphne Park, herself a doughty defender of the United Kingdom but also a brilliant linguist. She told me once, knowing of my son’s interest as a Russianist, that when she was a raw recruit in Moscow she had said to an old Muscovite, “I like to have a good swim every morning before going to work”. Unfortunately, the verbs “to swim” and “to spit” are cognate and what she actually said to the recoiling Muscovite was, “I like to have a good spit every morning before going to work”—a matter of great expectoration, as I said to her.

In speaking in today’s debate, I should like to thank another doughty fighter for modern languages, the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, who has single-handedly led our modern languages group and has highlighted the lamentable and deteriorating levels of language learning and acquisition in this country. However, I will concentrate on Baroness Park’s concerns with the defence of this country. There is an important role to help the British Armed Forces to accomplish their task, as the UK military operates throughout the world, either as UN peacekeepers or in assisting in disaster zones.

Two factors make language skills very much sought after. First, there is the fight against terrorism—monitoring and interpreting information coming to us—but there is also the winning of hearts and minds in conflict zones. It is not sufficient just to have a passing knowledge of Afghan Pashto or Dari; we need to speak them fluently and sympathetically enough to win hearts and minds. The armed services dedicated training centre, the Defence School of Languages at Beaconsfield, is important. Have languages featured in the recent defence review? Has the defence school been affected by departmental cuts? What is its capacity? Does it need expansion? What are the recruitment patterns? I point out that 70 per cent of linguists coming out of university are women, whereas men predominate in the armed services. Does that cause a problem? Will the Minister think about the Territorial Army, which I should have thought was good ground for increasing language knowledge within the Army?

The head of language engagement at GCHQ, the Bletchley Park of language code breaking, said recently that GCHQ is obviously affected by the parlous trend of the take-up of language learning in the United Kingdom. Indeed, so challenged has it been that it is now going out to schools and universities to encourage recruitment. I am not sure that it should be doing that, but there we are; it has to because we need those young people. How does GCHQ work? Typically, most recruits come with French and other European languages. Then at GCHQ they are taught languages that are needed for intelligence—typically, the languages of the Middle East, the Near and Far East and Africa. We are told that languages are not taught as they are in typical language classes:

“In the Albanian ab initio training course, we effectively train linguists to speak Albanian badly”.

We need more linguists to speak badly, if badly means that that they understand the stream of consciousness language—sometimes grammatically illiterate—which they then have to interpret and from which they need to draw the intelligence that is so badly needed for the defence of this country. Will the Minister say whether the prohibition on non-Brits working at GCHQ could be lifted if they were properly vetted?

As to the scandalous racism, which leads to the fact that the top 60 senior civil servants at GCHQ are all white, we need to tap into those black and ethnic British who want to defend our country. We should do so because they have the first-hand knowledge of languages that we badly need in defence and security.