How Britain Gave up Learning French

The vast majority of immigrants do learn English, and while immigration discontent can be fuelled by the language issue, as in Catalonia, where migrants tend to learn Castilian, our tongue is hardly under threat. English is so all-powerful in fact, that it has even replaced Arabic as the lingua franca of jihad, and recordings of foreign fighters in Syria show Chechens, Turks, Arabs and Brits communicating in the language of the King James Bible. Isis has even opened two English language schools in Raqqa for the families of foreign fighters. So it’s on the same page as the prime minister, in that regard at least. I’m much more worried about the number of people learning the other historic language of England; the language used at the first parliament, spoken at Runnymede in 1215, a language that still features in much of our legal system and which, until 1858, was the only one on British passports: French.