Smalltown girl

A big thanks to the members of Abingdon European Society who welcomed me so warmly to their meeting on Saturday. I was there at their request to talk about recent developments in the European Union. I had quite a moment when the chairwoman introduced me saying I would talk for “about an hour”, knowing that I had a very short slideshow and a tough challenge to make the EU an interesting topic for as long as it would take to show that, never mind an hour! I already felt I was on a losing wicket, being up against the final match of the Six Nations and a concert of Russian music in the nearby church. But it seemed to go very well. I kept the presentation very light – no-one’s looking for an in-depth exposé of the co-decision procedure on a Saturday night – and there was a good range of questions. A bit of a discussion got going on the whole issue of measuring the wealth and state of a nation: our shorthand is “Beyond GDP“. Maybe they should consider having a separate meeting on that, as it really is a fascinating issue. A lot of interest in the whole situation regarding language-learning in the UK and its knock-on effect on UK influence in the European institutions, as Brits are on the whole lacking the required language skills to get in. Several people said that Britons are at a disadvantage: they don’t need to learn foreign languages as so many people speak English. That argument is debatable: Cardiff Business School research suggests that the UK loses £9 billion of business a year due to our poor language skills. The other problem we face here is that people who speak languages tend to study languages – what we are lacking are the multilingual lawyers, scientists and administrators that come out of other countries’ education systems.