Britain: on the outside looking out?

During my time working as a financial journalist, I worked with a lovely woman who had moved to Birmingham from France. Having her around was brilliant fun – quite aside from being nice and friendly, we were always pressing her to help us turn our stilted secondary school French into its natural, conversational counterpart. Not that it worked, but there you go. I remember one day we were talking about cultural stereotypes ‘les rosbifs’ and so on, and I asked her how French people (at least, from her view) saw British people in reality. This was some time ago now, but the gist of her response was that we were seen as modern, free-thinking…but detached, perhaps a bit arrogant. How we laughed.

This came back to me when Nicholas Sarkozy blasted David Cameron during negotiations last week. He was certainly wrong about one thing: Britain needed to be involved in those negotiations. But a Prime Minister who had to be shamed into attendance by the Leader of the Opposition was not exactly putting our best foot forward. He could have been a different species from Gordon Brown – who responded to a global crisis with global actions. Our reticence to engage with this crisis just reaffirmed Britain’s standoffishness when it comes to not just the EU, but also to Europe and the wider world. Sarkozy wouldn’t have been the only one thinking what he said.

Part of that obviously the physical separation of being an island. There certainly seems to be more to this than dissatisfaction with the deal we get from being in the European Union. We are better-placed to overcome spatial displacement than at any point in our history, but instead of embracing the opportunities that that brings, we seem to be entrenching. In September, it was revealed that the number of British pupils gaining a GCSE qualification in any foreign language has fallen by 45% percent. As a nation, we’ve long since had a reputation for being reluctant to learn foreign languages, so to see a decline now suggests that we might not care.

This is a cause for concern that goes beyond the Eurozone crisis. Aspiration is a complex thing, but in the world we live in, it would make sense if more British people were pursuing their aspirations across borders, and in different tongues. I’m not going to extrapolate my own experiences to cover thousands of people – but my sense is that there are a more people at the other end of the scale with tiny, neighbourhood-sized worlds. It’s not always a bad thing, and certainly not always born of ignorance of other possibilities. But where it is, it’s pretty alarming: small changes in small worlds can be writ pretty large.

Aside from improving the uptake of foreign languages, I’m not sure I know how willing politicians can bring Europe and the wider world closer to British people. In my view, tackling the big issues like unemployment and low pay will certainly help – people find a use for their interest and compassion much closer to home than they would like when times are hard. But unless we think seriously about how we engage with other places, and focus on developing our abilities to do so, we will come to regret it when we are left outside.