http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/02/immigration-and-language

Interesting discussion! I think the whole debate has precious little to do with actual language competence (and in that sense pointing out that 99.5% of UK residents speak English is probably not actually going to convince anyone …). If it’s possible to ignore that many of those exhorted to “speak English” are actually “native speakers” of English (such as the Yorkshire-accented suicide bombers), then that’s obviously a strong indicator that this debate is not about linguistic competence but about belonging and about the political desire for a homogeneous national space.
Deborah actually has a pithy quote for the ways in which ‘language’ has come to stand for ‘race’ (or other forms of otherness) elsewhere: “Linguistic bigotry is among the last publicly expressible prejudices left to members of the Western intelligentsia.”
@Kerry & @Ingrid: In my view, the view of language as property (as in “my mother tongue”) is actually a part of the problem because it makes it so much more difficult to analytically distinguish between language competence (the red herring in this debate) and belonging (the political imagining of the nation as a homogeneous space).
@Agi: I’ve written about the political work that the English-language news reporting about Merkel’s speech was doing in the English-language contexts into which it was inserted without attention to the German national context here.

Thank you, Deborah. Yes, politicians talking about language should certainly not be treated as a homogenous group, I agree. Re Pickles, I am surprised that with the phenomenon of world Englishes, the myth of the native-speaker is still so strong – I mean ignoring the fact that native speakers do have varying degrees of proficiency just like non-native speakers and some NNS’s may even achieve better results on a language test than certain NS’s. But I’m not too familiar with British political discourse, I have to admit, nor with Eric Pickles.

This was a very informative piece indeed: I used the “multiculturalism has failed” speeches by Angela Merkel and David Cameron in one of my classes last year to talk about (language) ideologies but this writing provides the bigger context.

On the other hand, rights always come with responsibilities, and I think it might be right that if you want to be English, you should speak English. Would anyone be prepared to pay the taxes it would cost, even if possible, to provide every service the British Government provides in all 6000+ languages that immigrants could conceivably speak? Or is someone suggesting that some immigrants are more important than others?

Here is a better solution, offer all British services (including language induction classes) in English or Esperanto because Esperanto is 5-10 times less burdensome to learn than English, depending on your linguistic background. This puts less burden on the disadvantaged, will reduce expense to the community as a whole and will provide a more equitable welcome for immigrants.