David Leask: Erasmus debate shows we need to stop thinking languages are just for toffs

The fictional hotel manager had just been told the gag by a guest, a man whose shirt was unbuttoned beyond his navel, revealing a hairy chest covered in golden medallions.

Watching, irritated at the flirting, was her on-screen husband, John Cleese’s snobby Basil Fawlty, who got many of his own laughs by butchering Spanish as he tried to boss around his hapless lackey, Barcelona-born Manuel.

So the “Pretentious? Moi?” joke may have had more resonance for Sybil – who was endlessly exasperated by her man’s linguistic affectations – than it would have for most of us.

Yet the line was funny, as the saying goes, because it was true: some of us really do think speaking other languages is more “la-di-da” than “ouh là là”.

We have some real hang-ups about learning to talk or understand “foreign” in these islands, too many to detail in just one column.

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But in recent weeks there has been a lot of worryingly foolish “lingos are bougy” patter. Why? Because the UK Government first scrapped and then announced a substandard alternative to Erasmus+, the EU’s educational exchange programme.

For critics, Erasmus is not for working people; it’s a publicly-funded jolly for poshos.

Earlier this year commentator Kevin McKenna, right here in The Herald, delivered a perfectly paced putdown to SNP politicians fighting to keep the scheme.

“No one actually gives a monkey’s for the distress of affluent middle-class students now denied the opportunity for a year-long jollification in Europe which they’ll flog as a life-changing experience on their CVs for corporate law internships,” he quipped.

The Tory MP David Johnson, writing in The Spectator, the in-house magazine for London Conservatism, made the same point, albeit with less panache. Johnson, who ran a social mobility charity before being elected in 2019, stressed that the Erasmus replacement, the cheaper Turing scheme, was for the whole world, and not just Europe. (To me, the “whole world” is Tory code for English-speaking former colonies.)

For Brexiteers – for whom smashing Erasmus+ had a political objective – this can be pitched as enabling overseas study for working-class anglophones, including those of colour with heritage in the old empire.

“Where taxpayers’ money is being spent,” said Johnson, “we should see more working-class young people getting their first experience of being abroad, not just the affluent getting their latest experience of being abroad.”

The MP had numbers to back this case. The share, he said, of Erasmus students from professional or managerial backgrounds was 50% higher than those whose parents were in working-class jobs.

“Quelle surprise,” as somebody we see as pretentious might say. It is hardly a secret that middle-class youngsters are more likely to go to university than poor ones. And this is also true for those studying languages.

So critics are not wrong when they say Erasmus students are more likely to be middle-class than the general population. But that is true of pretty much everybody at unis.

Yet there is also a huge problem with criticism: real toffs are not going to stop studying languages because Erasmus is scrapped; the fee-paying schools in Salamanca or Florence are full of them.

No, the students who are going to be excluded are working class, youngsters like Declan McLean.

The 23-year-old studied law and French at Strathclyde University and did his Erasmus at Angers in France.

“My family didn’t go on holidays abroad so the idea of spending a whole year in a different country was unimaginable,” the Glaswegian said. “But Erasmus gave me the resources, the knowledge and, crucially, the financial support to do so.

For McLean the decision by Boris Johnson – who is said to conceal his own excellent French with a faux bad accent – to scrap Erasmus was “state-mandated disadvantaging of the least well-off”. Those in power, he said, don’t get it: after all they can afford gap years for their kids.

McLean went to All Saints in northern Glasgow, a comprehensive every bit as multi-cultural as the most chi-chi private school in the burbs, but a lot poorer.

Gillian Campbell-Thow used to teach there, McLean was one of her students. “Speaking another language should be the norm,” she said. “The longer we have the narrative that language learning is only for certain people, the longer we sell ourselves short.”

Campbell-Thow – despite her double-barrelled name, she jokes – is also from a housing scheme. “Je suis SIMD 1,” she often adds, referring to her background before doing Erasmus in France and Spain. “You don’t need to be posh or have a posh accent to learn another language,” she said. “We need to stop telling people they can’t do it.”

Lots of us do this. Lots of us squirm when somebody pronounces foreign words correctly. Some of us mock kids who come home from school with a foreign language oozing from every pore as if they were putting on airs and graces.

For me, there is something about the banter about Erasmus being for the wealthy that is particularly worrying.

We seem to treat studying languages as essentially an accomplishment for nicely brought-up young ladies; not the acquisition of skills any society needs to function. Yet without a cadre of specialists who can understand the rest of the world, we are doomed.

So we need linguists, just as we need engineers or lawyers. And to get linguists, you need schemes like Erasmus.

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For many students a year abroad is when they really “click” with the culture and language they are learning. Without it, many will never reach proficiency.

Imagine for a moment that we got upset with funding for part of medical studies because – shock, horror – wannabe doctors were often from middle-class homes.

Imagine if we actively campaigned against a scheme which enabled working class young people to be medics too?

Well, that is what is happening with criticism of Erasmus. Just like Manuel in Fawlty Towers, we need to drop the baggage we are carrying.

Talking foreign? Pretentious? Mais non.

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