Can a million people in Britain really not speak English?

“LOST FOR WORDS,” roared a headline on the Sun’s website last night, reporting the shocking news that “Nearly 1 MILLION people in Britain can’t speak English, raising concerns over migrant integration”.

It’s a huge figure all right – or would be, were it, er, true. As it is, chief political correspondent Jack Elsom rowed back as soon as the very first paragraph, caveating that almost one million people in England (not Britain, as per the headline) speak “little to no English”, which is not quite the same.

What the figures actually say is that 794,332 people “cannot speak English well” and just a tiny fragment – 137,876, or 1.4% of migrants – cannot speak it at all. That compares with the 51.6% of migrants aged over 16 who speak it as their main language and a further 38.4% who speak it well.

The “concerns over migrant integration” inevitably come from Tory rentagob and shadow home secretary Chris Philp, who fumed that: “It beggars belief that so many people in the country can’t speak English. It shows Labour needs to get a grip on immigration, and fast.” The figures come from the 2021 census, taken at a time when the Conservatives had been in power for 11 years, though Philip did not mention this.

Also weighing in, unsurprisingly, was academic turned right wing rabble-rouser Matthew Goodwin, who took to X to declare: “It should be a basic requirement that everybody who works and settles in Britain learns English. We should stop translation services in public sector institutions and start prioritising our unifying language, identity, and shared values.”

Which might be an entirely fair point – had successive Tory governments not slashed budgets for teaching English to migrants, reducing the amount available for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses by 60% by 2019.