As we all know, Nanny is very concerned about the level of crime in Britain these days.
She states, on a daily basis, that crime is unacceptable and that she will do everything in her power to eradicate it.
ASBO's abound, and we now have more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world. Nanny also claims that she wants the police to be more efficient and effective at fighting crime.
One measure that she is adopting, to improve the effectiveness of the police, is to set a requirement for all new recruits to North Wales Police to reach a set standard in the Welsh language as part of their training.
A from 2006, the force has added a level two qualification in spoken Welsh to the skills required of new officers.
The level two qualification is a stage below GCSE standard Welsh.
Chief Inspector Ray Hughes said it was important to serve the communities of north Wales in both English and Welsh.
He said:
"It goes back to the Welsh Language Act of 1993 which created two official languages in Wales, namely Welsh and English, and gave them equal status.
We have a Welsh language scheme and a strategy which states that we will give both languages equal status and we are aiming to become a bilingual organisation.
This is to ensure that we are able to provide a service
in the language of choice for those people living in the communities of north Wales."
Adding:
"We are serious about this, we are not playing with it.
We think it's important that we are able to serve our communities in the language of their choice."
The Welsh Language Board said it supported the North Wales Police initiative.
What a load of bollocks!
The time and money wasted on this would be better spent on crime prevention.
Reality check here, everyone in Wales can speak and understand English; whether they like it or not, they will have to continue to learn and understand English if they are to interact with the rest of the world.
This "initiative" is a waste of time and money.
For the first time ever since starting to read your column I actually disagree with your sentiments. There are still some communities in Wales where Welsh is the first language and within those communities there are some people who don't speak or understand English well. These people are rare, granted, but they are still UK citizens speaking a _native_ language. I'd much rather this than ensuring, for instance, that some of them can speak Urdu or Chinese or other _non-native_ languages - working on an assumption that anyone who wants to live here should speak at least one of the native languages.
ReplyDelete"The level two qualification is a stage below GCSE standard Welsh."
ReplyDeleteThis seems to be the key point to me. I have, some obviously out dated, O level French and I doubt very much wether that qualification would allow me to deal efficiently with criminal incidents in Paris.
Surely if Welsh is a living language a healthy proportion of recruits will speak it anyway.
Take it from the Canadian experience - " Bilingual to-day, Welsh to-morrow "
ReplyDeleteC Tully
I have a friend who is Welsh and a Welsh speaker who also happens to be a highly qualified academic. Those in charge of the Welsh language, given that they keep having to create new words for things that have existed for years let alone any new fangle gizmo that appears out of the blue, seem to be always in a tizz about the structure for new words.
ReplyDeleteThey can also be very pedantic about old words and pronunciaitons, in a way that belies that 100,000 estimated head count of Welsh speaker. My friend has spoken Welsh and English for all her life but even she can be pisked up by some of the people appointed to keep the Welsh language as pure as possible, regional variations allowing.
Only this week I have been looking at government web site for various bits of information and it once agan struck me that though hald the british indigenous population probably can't speak English when they leave school we still have to carry the costs of maintaining replica web sites (and telephone back up services and so on)at enormous expense to accomodate about 100,000 people very few of whom could not use the English versions.
On the other hand we have much the same situation for all of the other languages that have come into the country, though Gaelic seems to have been omitted from the indigenous languages - along with Latin and French I suppose. And perhaps Cornish and its associated forms.
It seems like something of a luxury to say the least to have to support an entire language for just 100,000 people. On the other hand many English people moving to Wales are choosing to have their children educated in the medium of Welsh. Which must be quite a challenge in some subjects and may be even more intereresting when trying to win a university place anywhere outside Wales.
The reason for such a choice is the perception that the quality of the education will be better, being more focused than the regular schools and because there is a reputation for teaching quality at Welsh-only speaking educational establishment.
Personally I suspect that the North Wales Police (I wonder if Mr. Brunstrom speaks Welsh?) are doing this less for the needs of providing a service and more as a way to add selectivity tools to their armoury for recruitment. Or they have probably decided that all the Welsh speakers are Druids who can talk openly amongst themselves knwoing that the aveerage beat bobby won't understand a word they are saying - which to a modern chief constable is an anathema severly reducing their ability to command and control.
Can't have that can we!