People of Glasgow won’t let Nigel Farage turn children into targets

To every multilingual child in Glasgow and beyond, bravo. Growing up with more than one language sharpens attention, flexibility and problem-solving. Glasgow needs more multilingual children, not fewer.

Nigel Farage is deliberately targeting the children of people of colour and of refugee or immigrant backgrounds. It is harmful and it is dangerous.

READ MORE: I’m a bilingual Glasgow refugee. Here’s my response to Nigel Farage

Speaking more than one language is a huge advantage. Targeting migrant children, in a climate where racist abuse is already a daily reality for many, is another deliberate dog whistle and a disgrace. Reform’s rhetoric mirrors the transatlantic far-right’s fixation on monoculture and manufactured panic about diversity.

Glasgow is a proudly multicultural city over generations with a strong tradition of protest. It has Gaelic-medium schools where 1400 children speak Gaelic as their first language. It has children who speak Urdu, Polish, Arabic or Romanian at home. But his outrage has nothing to do with language. It is about which children he thinks are allowed to belong.

It should not be forgotten that Farage is also facing detailed allegations from former classmates and a teacher that he used racist and antisemitic language throughout his school years. He built his Brexit platform by stoking fear of immigrants and he is doing it again in Scotland.

This time he is being called out. People in this city, of every colour and background, will not let him turn our children into targets.

Robina Qureshi, CEO
Positive Action in Housing

NIGEL Farage’s latest intervention – claiming that Glasgow is being “culturally smashed” because many schoolchildren speak another language at home – rests on distortion, not fact.

Scottish Government statistics on English-as-an-additional-language pupils do not indicate a failure to integrate, still less a threat to the city’s identity. Education Scotland, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Commission all take the same view: multilingual classrooms are routine in modern cities, and children typically achieve full English proficiency through schooling. Diversity of languages is not the erasure of culture – it is one of Glasgow’s oldest strengths.

READ MORE: John Swinney responds to Nigel Farage’s ‘racist’ Glasgow attack

Farage’s claim that “nobody voted for this” is equally misleading. For more than two decades, Scottish governments of every political persuasion have openly pursued policies to encourage inward migration in response to demographic and economic need. These choices were debated, scrutinised and endorsed through the normal democratic process. Suggesting it has been imposed in secret is simply false.

His framing also echoes a familiar pattern identified in political-communication research: isolate a statistic, strip it of context, and recast it as an existential cultural threat. UK courts have repeatedly refused to treat multilingualism or the presence of asylum seekers as evidence of social harm when such assertions have been tested. Evidence, not alarmism, is what stands up under scrutiny.

Targeting schoolchildren and asylum seekers may be useful for manufacturing grievance, but it offers nothing to Scotland’s real policy debates – on education funding, housing, or asylum processing. Glasgow’s culture is not being “smashed”; it is being lived, renewed and expanded by the very families Farage would have us fear.

Peter Macari
Aberdeen

I KEEP reading about us Scots being put down for the way we speak. It comes down to the class thing, whereby the uppers seem to think that the way they talk is proper English when in fact it certainly is not.

They have great trouble pronouncing the letters R and U. They miss them out all the time. Bunker becomes bunka; par becomes paa; murder is mede; mayor sounds like the sound a sheep emits, drawer changes to draw, etc. And yet drawing mysteriously becomes drawering, sawing becomes sawring. An R suddenly appears. When a U and an R come together in a word like curve they pronounce it ceve, both the U and R are silent. These are just a few examples of the southern slang English spoken.

READ MORE: Working-class students are being failed on accent discrimination

At least in Scotland we pronounce these letters when we need to. It’s a bit like playground speak and classroom speak. We Scots are used to speaking properly in class.

When we speak to a southern English person we feel obliged to drop our dialect and speak proper English. The same is not reciprocated – they speak proper English, you see.

Instead of feeling inferior, we should fight back. When they say one of these words wrongly we should say “How do you spell that? Is there not an R in that word ?

So, Mr Farage, and all those other poshies, have a think how you speak the English language before crying down the Scots. Incidentally, it is often said that the best English spoken in the UK is in Inverness.

Eric Morris
Crail

THIS week we have seen nuns in court and convicted of appalling abuse, we have seen a teacher in a residential school sentenced for appalling abuse but now we find out that the police at Hillsborough where 57 were killed will not face justice since they are retired. I am utterly shattered by this news. People are being convicted for terrible things that happened many years ago. These policemen have had 30 years of freedom they should never have had, and have walked away with their full pension. The bosses who made policemen change their statements and lie should be harshly dealt with. This is not justice, it is Yet another cover-up by the establishment.

Winifred McCartney
Paisley