As the global lingua franca, Christina Julios alleges, the English language has been unduly understudied and underrated by historians as a forger of national identity. Its lingual influence is explained as a syndrome of the British Empire and its residues and of U.S. power (today 70 percent of English speakers are living in U.S. territories) since the cold war and through technologies from film to the Internet. By looking at minority experience comparatively—the Puerto Rican community and legal precedents dealing with race, education, and language in the United States, for instance, take up a large part of chapter 3—the context for exploring a multicultural, multifaith, and multiethnic Britain is set up. So apart from dealing with English as a second language and the other languages of English speakers, language operates here as an ideological tool of nation shaping. This linguistic turn was notably apparent when the 2002 Nationality, Immigration, and Asylum Act made language proficiency a test of citizenship.
As befits her ambition to bridge academic and policy debates, Julios is most sure-footed when treading in more contemporary debates—from the urban riots of the early 1980s, but also touching on the Stephen Lawrence case and the Sangatte “refugee camp” in France, through to the 2007 Big Brother fracas and Jack Straw's comments on his unease at Burka-clad Muslim constituents. This is particularly the case with language and education policy, which are the author's forte and the book's centerpiece. Julios argues that language teaching is a key site on which the shift from a multicultural approach allowing for diversity (from the 1960s) to one stressing integration and cohesion (through fears of social separatism and fragmentation since the 1980s) took place.
The 1966 Local Government Act was the apex of the multicultural approach, funding local authorities with large immigrant populations to maximize equal educational opportunities. By 2004, when foreign modern languages (not English or Welsh and Gaelic, which remained compulsory) became optional for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) students, the numbers studying languages from GCSE to the degree level fell significantly. Julios describes this as constituting “an ideological shift from a multilingual educational approach to a predominantly Anglocentric model” (126) but also admits that this was a complex process. Uncertainties were rife in government policy, and the longer-term shift was facilitated by the differentiation between “core” and “other foundation” subjects introduced as early as the 1988 Education Reform Act. Or, to take another example, the Runnymede Trust's The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000) was less ready to see diversity as at odds with social cohesion and urged consideration of “equality” as a unifying factor. The emergent focus on the English language as a key binding of Britishness sat uneasily with the European Union's multilingual vision of citizenship, not to mention the New Labour rhetoric of inclusiveness and global competitiveness. But the paradox Julios does effectively convey here was that the globalization of English simultaneously permitted a more insular conception of national identity.
As a compendium of a wide range of legislation, government and think-tank reports on education, and race relations (from 1985's Swann Report through Nuffield Foundation and PEP reports and to the Cantle [2001], Tomlinson [2005], Dearing [2007] reports and Bernard Crick's role on the Advisory Board on Naturalisation and Integration, to name but a few), the book is very useful. But what emerges from this is a relatively familiar chronological narrative (1905, 1948, 1962, etc.). It describes more than analyzes this deluge of official reportage and formal discussion prompted by mass immigration since the late 1940s. Its use of these and of the media as sources is rather uncritical, skimming over the role of the media itself in these debates. There is little sense of policy learning or exchange, and the focus on elite discussions leaves migrant voices themselves silent in these debates—something Joanne Herbert's study of Leicester in the same book series does introduce. Nor is there much sense of ever-evolving popular conceptions of Britishness or the role language has played in this (e.g., in holidaying or school exchanges or, as recent histories have explored, in food, character, or flags). The fluidity of national identity has not prevented Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from extolling a plural, public, civic vision (whatever the trajectory of policy) in an effort to resolve its elusiveness. But here, surely less palatably fixed visions of Britishness, such as that of the British National Party, warranted discussion. Historians will also be surprised at the absence of key commentators such as Tom Nairn, Krishan Kumar, or Paul Gilroy and will likely find the book insufficiently embedded in the copious academic literature on national identity over a broader stretch of time that has been generated in this same period. The referencing, an inconsistent mix of styles, is messy; the index is unreliable, and the numerous typos, whether the responsibility of author or publisher, impede the reader and inspire little confidence. This is a pity because the book has some original qualities but can definitively be said not to be the last word on the topic.
