Isabel Oakeshott’s Arabic lesson comes with a hefty dose of double standards

Isabel Oakeshott recently took to the pages of the Telegraph to proudly announce that she is learning Arabic.

“I’m a foreigner in someone else’s country. It’s only polite that I’m learning Arabic,” was her headline, followed by the pre-header:

“Britons who move overseas should not treat places like Dubai as English-speaking platforms for sunshine and low tax.”

The right-wing journalist and partner of Reform UK deputy Richard Tice begins by explaining that she has lived in Dubai for two years, where she has perfected the art of speaking English in a variety of accents, reflecting the city’s population of “about 200 nationalities.”

“Day to day, Dubai conspires with remarkable efficiency to protect its huge expat population from speaking the official language: Arabic,” she writes.

In other words, Dubai’s knowledge of English is why she hasn’t mastered Arabic but “it seems only right to make an effort in their language.”

And there, of course, is the real point of the article.

Oakeshott is not merely documenting her own linguistic struggles. She is drawing a comparison with immigrants in Britain, and she barely bothers to disguise it.

“Nonetheless, there is a principle at stake when living in someone else’s country – one I am always going on about in relation to immigrants to Britain.”

So far, so predictable.

But rather than simply making the case for learning the language of the country in which you live, Oakeshott spends much of the article taking a swipe at Arabic itself.

Its letters, she complains, “resemble a toddler’s random dots and squiggles,” while its numerals “might as well be hieroglyphics.”

“As for pronunciation, getting it right seems to require the kind of guttural noises an Englishwoman would ordinarily reserve for dislodging a fishbone,” she adds.

She then informs readers of her respectable GCSE grades in two foreign languages and explains that she should have learned Arabic long ago, before admitting that her previous attempts had ended in failure.

While there is of course nothing wrong with admitting that learning another language is difficult, or encouraging people who move abroad to make an effort to communicate in the local language, there is an extraordinary double standard with Oakeshott’s piece.

Oakeshott has chosen to live in Dubai, where she acknowledges that English is widely spoken and that she can comfortably navigate daily life without Arabic. Yet she presents her belated attempt to learn the language as evidence of a moral principle that she routinely invokes when discussing immigrants to Britain.

And while making that point, she cannot resist ridiculing the very language she is supposedly making an effort to respect.

There is also an important fact conspicuously absent from her argument: the overwhelming majority of migrants in Britain do speak English.

Figures from the University of Oxford Migration Observatory show that in 2021, 90%, around nine million, of immigrants living in England and Wales reported that they could speak English without difficulty. Just over half spoke English as their main language, while a further 38% had another main language but spoke English well or very well. Only 1% said they could not speak English at all.

That reality rather complicates the familiar right-wing narrative of immigrants supposedly refusing to learn English.

Oakeshott’s argument might have carried considerably more weight if she had simply reflected on the challenges of learning Arabic as an English speaker and acknowledged the effort involved in adapting to life in another country.

Instead, she manages to turn her own difficulty into a lecture about immigrants, while simultaneously mocking the language she claims to be learning.

Unsurprisingly, the contradiction did not go unnoticed.

Truth Against Hate pointed out the absurdity of moving to an Arab country, waiting two years to learn the language and then describing its alphabet as “a toddler’s random dots and squiggles” and its pronunciation as “guttural noises.”

The campaign group also noted another parallel.

“Imagine an immigrant to Britain writing an article about finally bothering to learn English, while mocking the language and congratulating themselves for making the effort. The Telegraph comments section would spontaneously combust.

“Arabic has been written, studied and used to produce extraordinary works of literature, philosophy, mathematics and science for centuries. It doesn’t become primitive because Isabel Oakeshott finds it difficult.”

Another commenter joked: “I assume she’s learned the Arabic for ‘tax avoider’, then.”