I mentioned yesterday a bizarre article in El Mundo, on the theme of identity cards in the UK. My quick translation of this is at the end of this post. If there is anyone who finds the second half of this less obscure than me, perhaps they could let me know what it’s all about.

There was a second article yesterday which rather amused me. The headline of this was “Speaking English ceases to be decisive in getting a job” and the drift was that Mandarin and Spanish have become more important than English. In the text of the article, though, what emerged was that a British Council study had shown that, now that it was taken for granted that each and every candidate needed an excellent level of English, some employers would regard an additional facility in Mandarin or Spanish as a decisive factor. And why not? But it hardly means that the study of English is reducing when every job applicant needs it. Rather more worrying for native English speakers was the finding they are less appealing as employees/teachers around the world because non-native speakers find it easier to understand other non-native speakers. And terrifying was the finding that, for this reason, some Asian companies are recruiting Belgians in preference to Brits and Americans.

My Spanish teacher friends didn’t think much of my theory that it’s the phonetic nature of Spanish [combined with a low level of importance give to oral English in the schools] that accounts for the widespread mis-pronunciation of Anglo names and film titles. They pointed out things are different in Spanish-speaking South America. The general view was that the culprit was the damage done to Spanish culture by 40 years of isolation under Franco.

Here’s the article mentioned yesterday and above……

“Mister Tony Blair has had his first political setback, on the issue of identity cards, which he has tried to implant in that democracy, believing it would make for more democracy, but the natives are rebelling and insisting that an Englishman can’t be two people.

As we well know, because we have suffered, the English are the most political people in the world and this politicisation has a characteristic trait – it is always correct. Now Mr Blair is experiencing the adventure of the identity card. He thought a democracy with a card would mean more democracy but it results in less. To us, it looks similar to Mr Zapatero´s idea of having more identity cards so as to increase democracy. All that is achieved is more bureaucracy.

Now there have been cases in London in which citizens have said that, in order to be themselves, it’s enough to be themselves. Merrily increasing the budget by any figure you like doesn’t give them any more identity and impoverishes what they have, which is a lot.

A man with a bowler hat, The Times, an umbrella and a club is a complete Englishman and there’s no need to weigh down his wallet with more paper as this will probably annoy him and turn him into an Irishman or some other evil. This Anglo-Saxon ‘me-ism’ isn’t a recent thing but stems from the Anglicisation of Ireland, which gave us Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, the poems of Dylan Thomas [sic] and dandyism.

Dandyism was an invention of the Louises, appropriated by Alfred Douglas and others of his gang in order to promote in England another type of Englishman – newer, more rebellious and more inclined. Inclined towards agitation, of course. The English began with the word ‘dandy’ – which sounded nice – and then filled it with content. A dandy is a man who doesn’t need an identity card to differentiate him from the bourgeoisie, from his seniors, from less fortunate people or from homosexuals. A genuine invention which is still with us and which allowed that people to avoid the humiliating need to lodge its soul and style in a foreign nationality.

As has been said, an Englishman cannot be two people. The best example of democracy is not the chap who moves around with a Book of the Family between his legs but the man who needs no more than himself and a mirror to confer identity, albeit one which has been eaten away by sin, that flea which bites even in your club where you are a legend of the racetrack.

England has fleas because England is a damp island and against fleas we see nothing but to give a family card to each flea. Democracy is not panoply of the family or a detergent against fleas. Democracy is to look Irish if you are from London and vice versa. All of this would be applicable to mountainous Spain, where everyone wants to be from his own village so as to throw his own goat from the bell tower. A goat which will never deliver a monologue like Molly Bloom because the Dublin goats are all in Joyce’s herd, waiting for Virginia Woolf so as to indulge in a little lesbianism. What Mr Blair would like is to be a Continental European, just like Zapatero."