Gordon Brown is ruling that medium-skilled migrants from outside the EU must speak and understand English. The “highly skilled” already have to; the unskilled, it seems, may remain uncomprehending. The Home Secretary adds enthusiastically that it will help integration if we “expect people coming through the skilled and slightly less-skilled route to actually be able to speak English”.

Well, duh! This is good news (though met with whingeing from employers who fear for their cheap labour, and from Tories who find it not fierce enough). It would be even better news if there were some mechanism to put the same onus on EU citizens who plan to stay, but since that is impossible we could at least refrain from gratuitously featherbedding them by putting up diversion signs in Polish to prevent lorry drivers “coming into conflict with road workers”.

The idea that residents and workers in a country should understand its language is hardly startling, nor is it innately right-wing. This present move, announced to the TUC, has a deliberately protectionist edge to it, but it need not have had. Linguistic cohesion is more important than “British jobs for British people”. Mutual understanding is a deep, vital necessity for any society. The wonder is that for so long, perhaps for the kindliest of reasons, governments have shied away from saying so.

Perhaps it is post-colonial guilt, perhaps an uneasy awareness that we ourselves, as tourists, are chronically bad at foreign languages. Either way, we have connived at a situation that promotes waste, confusion and mutual suspicion. Ignoring linguistic incompetence just extends alienation. It is not really kind at all; it has gone on for too long, and the whistle needs blowing.

It was in December that the BBC revealed the £100 million cost of translation services routinely provided by local authorities, courts and the NHS. It became clear that we do not translate only for tourists and asylum-seekers (which is obvious, courteous and kind). Settled residents too are not expected to understand us: in Peterborough refuse collection leaflets appear in 15 languages, and in many boroughs it is routine for all council services to be multilingual. In Islington the NHS provided a Turkish woman with one-to-one counselling, in Turkish, to stop her smoking. She had lived here for five years. A Bangladeshi woman, speaking through a translator after 22 years, memorably said: “When you are trying to help us you are actually harming. Even before we ask, all we have to do is say hello, they are here with their interpreters. We just sit here doing nothing and we don’t need to speak in English at all.”

Trevor Philllips, formerly of the Commission for Racial Equality, huffily insisted that this is globalisation, and that translation is “not a disincentive” to learning the host language. Yeah, right. Any seasoned tourist knows perfectly well that it is, even if you are only there for a week. I feel the usual sneaking British shame at not speaking Spanish, though I have been there a dozen times; but finding myself in a small central town with a healthy resistance to ignorant Brits, I learnt more Spanish in 24 hours than ever before. It was the only way to get food, drink or a train ticket. If you have to struggle into a language, you will. If “Habla Inglés?” suffices, you won’t. And if your “community” of Turks, Poles, Bangladeshis or Brits abroad is geographically tight, you can live 20 years in surly ignorance.

The other day I heard a consumer programme complaining, in righteous PC tones, that not enough banks in Wales offer Polish language leaflets and onsite translators. It made the reasonable point that this would be good business for the banks, but went beyond that into an implication of entitlement, a sense that the Polish arrivals had a “human right” to open accounts without speaking English.

I couldn’t see it. As a tourist I humbly hope for consideration as I battle through some jungle of Croatian consonants or Russian script. But if I went to live and work in a foreign country, I would assume it was my job to grab a phrasebook and limp bravely through the administrative processes. I would not assume it was their job to accommodate me. Most Poles I meet speak good English. Those who don’t – after decades of free BBC English By Radio broadcasts – should find their own translator.

Asylum-seekers – frightened, weary and poor – need special consideration: they have complex cases to make in a country they never wanted to end up in. But we are not talking here about refugees and victims, but about people who work and thrive yet sometimes have so little interest in where they are, and who we are, that they can’t be bothered to speak to us. The assumption that services must be delivered in their own language, as of right, for years on end, needs overturning.

And no, it is not racist to say so. I love those proud school signs saying “32 languages are spoken here”, provided they all speak English too. I feel just as scornful and puzzled about British expats in Southern Spain who can say only “sangria”, and about those bygone colonial memsahibs who in half a lifetime learned nothing beyond a few scolding words of kitchen Urdu. I admire the Turkish cab driver who makes conversation to improve his English, the Polish backpacker who demands “tell when I mistake”, and our Romanian friends who crossed Europe in a rusty Trabant after the fall of Ceaucescu, speaking four languages learnt off the radio and not daring to stop because a round of sandwiches in Germany would cost a month’s salary.

Migrants are often the cream of the human race, hardy and adaptable. We should not insult and emasculate them for the sake of our own liberal angst.

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