Imagine being an immigrant who comes to the UK and doesn’t speak much English. Heeding the call of politicians and various right-wing commentators, you’re determined to get on with life in this country – starting with signing up for lessons to improve your English. Imagine your surprise when you find out your class is now the subject of protests from some of the very same people who might have grumbled about your lack of integration in the country.
In Glasgow and Aberdeen, anti-immigration protesters have been picketing schools hosting ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) lessons aimed at parents of students and asylum seekers.
The protests in Scotland follow the decision of Renfrewshire Council to pause classes hosted at a local primary school after a social media backlash. The numbers attending these demonstrations are small – only around 50 people showed up to the one in Glasgow – but their rationale remains largely consistent.
They want the classes to be moved because they’re worried about the safety of children at the school due to “foreign-born adults” at the classes, as a report from the Glasgow Bell put it. Their concerns have been largely fuelled by right-wing YouTubers like Craig Houston and “paedophile hunter” Alex Cairnie, who set up the self-styled anti-grooming Spartan Child Protection Team despite having, in the words of The Times, no professional knowledge of child protection.
The result, as far as anyone can see? Four mothers who had signed up for the class in Glasgow were needlessly harassed when they showed up for lessons, including one who was intimidated out of going entirely. In Aberdeen, children were pulled out of school – not because parents were scared of immigrants, but because they worried the kids would be targeted by the protesters themselves. Well done to everyone involved. That’ll show those criminal grooming gangs.
Immigrants and asylum seekers themselves tend to agree that learning English is crucial. There is huge demand for ESOL classes, but years of underfunding and cuts have left the sector struggling to keep up.
Immigrants are demonised for not speaking English, but now they are demonised for trying to rectify that. Another example of how anti-immigration discourse is determined to move the goalposts for integration.
If some of the most shocking images of 2025 came from migrant hotel clashes between police and protesters and the 110,000-strong demonstration organised by Tommy Robinson, these school pickets are proof of how conspiratorial thinking about migrants has infiltrated the smallest and most everyday corners of British life. Even the school run isn’t immune from the misplaced belief that immigrants pose a threat to the country.
I’m an immigrant who speaks, thinks, works and dreams in English. In fact, many of us speak English perfectly well – over 90 per cent of migrants living in England and Wales do it without difficulty, according to the Migration Observatory. So what accounts for the idea that immigrants somehow are incapable of speaking English?
Let me hazard a couple of guesses: It could be that monolingual Brits perceive those speaking other languages around them as being monolingual too, or that speaking accented English is somehow understood to disqualify you from understanding. All of this adds up to the stereotype that immigrants don’t understand – or want – to speak English.
One of my earliest memories of moving to London is standing outside King’s Cross when a middle-aged Englishman asked if I knew whether the number 19 stopped there. I suggested he look at the next bus stop instead. He stared at me like I’d just sprouted another head and said: “You speak better English than I do!”
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English, according to the late Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, is one of the finest languages on the planet. “To laugh off, to dream away – those things can’t be said in Spanish,” he once said. But English would not exist without people from other cultures.
We use “foreign-born” words every day – we shampoo our hair (from the Hindi word “chāmpo”) and take our tea (from the Malay word “teh” or the Chinese dialect “te”) with sugar (from the Arabic word “sukkar”). This country birthed an infinitely flexible, ever-changing language that millions around the world speak every day.
Being this resistant to those learning it isn’t just a sign that we are growing worryingly small-minded by the day – it’s also a betrayal of the story of the English language itself.
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