It’s a shocking figure: more than £100m was spent in the past year on translating and interpreting for British residents who don’t speak English. In the name of multiculturalism, one Home Office-funded community centre alone provides these services in 76 languages.

According to BBC’s Newsnight last week, local councils spend at least £25m on these services, the police £21m, the courts system more than £10m and the National Health Service accounts for £55m at a conservative estimate.

The financial cost is bad enough, but there is a wider problem about the confused signals we are sending to immigrant communities. We are telling them they don’t have to learn English, let alone integrate. Worse, by insulating them linguistically we have created communities that are now incubators for Islamo-fascism.

The evidence is plain to anyone who visits Brick Lane in the East End of London. In the Bangladeshi community from which I come, English is a foreign language. Restaurants, shops and doctors’ surgeries all cater to a population that speaks Bengali or Sylheti. Even the street signs are in Bengali. The language barrier is reinforced by multiculturalists whose zeal to translate everything has given people a disincentive to speak this country’s language.

Every year Bangladeshis sit at the bottom of rankings of educational achievement. Their society persists in economic stagnation that locks many people into the catering industry. Drug abuse and crime are on the rise in the East End. Functionally illiterate young Bangladeshi males, with no hope of employment, can choose between extremists in the mosques or the gangs in the streets.

Liberal voices seldom penetrate this hermetically sealed world, in which the community speaks only to itself. The extremists, who are very active, have no such problems. It is perhaps not surprising that, according to an NOP poll last August, 45% of British Muslims believed that 9/11 was an American-Israeli conspiracy, and 36% wanted sharia to be adopted in Britain.

Perverse values that are anathema to liberal ideals fester behind the language barrier in the East End. Many men in the Bangladeshi community forbid women from learning English for the same reason that they won’t let their women venture out. I was shaken recently to hear a Bangladeshi woman who had lived here for 22 years say that her golden years had been wasted. If only she had learnt English, she said, she could have spoken to people and discovered other lives.

She said women were not allowed out for fear of being corrupted, of gaining courage or running away. If they learnt English they might rise above their station. Multiculturalists fail to call attention to this, presumably because they are busy arranging diversity training for the rest of us. ()

I have lived in east London for several years and remain a governor of a school in Brick Lane. I didn’t speak a word of English when I arrived in Britain, but I learnt quickly. In a sense I was lucky. My parents were determined not to be absorbed into the East End, which represented a recreation of the country they had left. For years we were squatters just off the Marylebone Road, but my father, then a bus driver, was fortunate to secure a council flat nearby. Later, my parents bought a house in northwest London. A great immigrant story — the kind we should be encouraging .

My parents wanted to learn English and wanted me to do so too. When my mother fed me as a small child, she would tell me about the exciting time I would have at Oxford. Her optimism was absurdly fulfilled: I went to Oxford and Cambridge, followed by Yale and Munich University.

My parents’ aspirations were reinforced by my primary school head, the stern Mrs Beattie, who presided over an old-fashioned, effective teaching regime. It was the mid-1970s and I was a rarity as a Bangladeshi pupil, although my teachers made no acknowledgment of my racial difference. By contrast, schools today seem intent on celebrating differences, I’m not convinced this helps. We seem to have absorbed the idea, almost unthinkingly, that acknowledging our differences is a step towards overcoming them.

“Awareness-raising programmes” are all the rage — we have to celebrate our diversity and raise awareness among those oppressed of their rights. But self-reliance doesn’t come from handouts. You don’t learn to stand on your own two feet if someone is holding you up. Indulging differences can be harmful if it prevents communities from integrating.

I believe we should start to apply some pressure to the system. We should curb the translation and interpreting services, and think about making English compulsory for all citizens.

We should also remedy some of the absurdities in the government’s new citizenship test. If an immigrant’s English is passable, he or she can sit the “life in the UK” test. But if it is really poor you can sit the course in English for speakers of other languages, with absolutely no penalty.

This is a patent absurdity. Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, has maintained that the translation services are not a disincentive but provide a means of “helping people into transition, into integrating into our society”. To give him credit, he has tried to move the debate forward with his critique of multiculturalism, but in this area he is wrong. To live in this country for 22 years — and often longer — without speaking English is not evidence of successful transition.

Public figures are understandably fearful of being labelled racist or fomenting inter-communal conflict. But the greater danger lies in not speaking up. Those who regard my words as dangerous should pause to reflect that they have attributed great power to language. If language is so important, there is much to be gained in getting us all to speak English.