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807   4 September 2003   

And the global acceleration of all meeja connections has transformed the speed with which images are spun, created and destroyed.  “The public” is like a gigantic stadium crowd, watching partly the live game, partly the big screen, partly the Action Re-play – and partly the pundits predictions of what is to happen next.  

Truth to tell, this phenomenon has transformed the entire exercise of power, whether public or private, in all societies.   When the Archbishop of Canterbury visited my home village of Mumbles recently, he came with a meeja “minder” who never left his side.  All major corporations now spend heavily on public relations, and train all their senior executives in media management.   Dr Kelly had been schooled in the skills of being interviewed, as I was, when a Senior Manager for Sainsburys.   And for Labour, it was Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell who first grasped the significance of this change in the character of modern politics.  David Hill, trained in the public sector but recently working for the corporate sector, now returns as a hired-gun to the political arena.

The task of all those in power is to negotiate those rapids.  They have no choice. The rapids are not of their making, but their fragile canoes must negotiate them.  For a Labour Government, the challenge is acute, because most of the piranhas are Tories. I suspect that this imagery would be accepted by Friday's Guardian assessment, by Polly Toynbee.

(1)   Set hares going anonymously – if you want to get a new vortex started, there’s nothing better that “a Government source” or a “a source close to the Minister” for that purpose, because ordinarily neither party has any interest in contradiction or disclosure – and you have the convenient self-serving doctrine of the secrecy of journalistic sources to protect your back. 

(2)   Avoid direct reporting – always use grammatical structures which reveal your position in relation to the reported event – makes the situation infinitely more complex than a straightforward report, and leaves you free to fish in troubled waters, to whip up the vortex still further – this way, you are increasing your own influence without seeming to do so -  

808  4 September 2003   

We are all outraged by the loss of “biodiversity” within the natural world, when it concerns newts and rare orchids and species of squirrel.  GM crops are castigated for their decimation of biodiversity.  Yet, with the increasing global dominance of “English”, we are witnessing the emergence of a linguistic monoculture which will dwarf those other losses. 

I must confess to bias.   My own intellectual abilities have all been honed in the study of language, and languages – I even regard “law” as an exercise in the deployment of language.  My entire education was linguistic, from the age of 14 onwards – French, and German, and Russian – until I had had enough of languages and switched to History and Economics at Cambridge, at the age of 21.  I regard my understanding of the theory and practice of language, of the relationship between concept and word, of the diversity of means of expression from language to language, as a key factor in the development of my general analytical abilities.  My brain was effectively trained through a study of languages.  I am weak on maths, weak on science, weak on art – but when it comes to languages, I am in my element. 

And so the steady UK decline in the study of French, German and Spanish is a matter of real personal regret to me.  Future generations may never experience the intellectual excitement and perceptions which language studies bring.  The decline is now likely to accelerate, with the removal of foreign languages as a compulsory GCSE subject.  We face a decline in our resources of foreign-language speakers, and in the numbers of teachers. 

Does this matter?  Well – No and Yes.  I am certain that the world needs a lingua franca, and I suspect that will turn out to be English.   English is well-suited to that role, evidenced by its success as the language of the United States.  Demotic English (Coronation Street English, Sun English) is a simple, unsophisticated language, untroubled by gender, with simple plurals, the simple declension of verbs, with great flexibility of sentence structure, widely comprehensible across dialect barriers. It is far better suited to globalisation than French, or Spanish, or Russian or Chinese.  So in that sense, No it does not matter.  We may properly take advantage of our speaking the world’s leading lingua franca. 

But Yes, it does.  In the process of globalisation, English is likely to coarsen – and to lose much of the expressiveness that it currently possesses.  If the human spirit is to flourish, far greater diversity must be retained than is possible with a globalised “pidgin” English.  That is why I am still working to improve my Welsh – and why next month I shall be travelling to Brittany (Hennebont) to develop a new Brittany/French twinning link, for my Welsh/English community of Mumbles.    

• The study of foreign languages should be seen as an embellishment of the human spirit – like music, like art, like the appreciation of all great literature.  The same study is also a great cradle of logic and clear-thinking, as with the classical study of Latin and Greek grammar.   

So in one sense, it does not matter.  English is destined to be the workhorse language of the world, its bread-and-butter.  That die seems to be cast, more surely with every passing year: you can click through from my Homepage to the China Daily (in English), the Shanghai Star (in English) and The Hindu (in English).  Rejoice in that, for your English gives you incomparable access to the news of the world.   

But please explain to your children and grandchildren that man does not live by bread-and-butter alone. Two languages are better than one – even if the second is the English of the classics, High English, destined for demotion as demotic English rises.  Encourage them - without being under any compulsion to do so - to immerse themselves in different cultures, different ways of thinking about life, different insights, different experiences.   

• For language is music.  It is the music of the mind.

What do you think?  Drop me a line

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