This is a link to an article about Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, which describes how he told Italian reporters that English was losing its importance, and then proceeded to make a speech in French. The Italian journalists present, all people with jobs, laughed politely, but for an awful lot of young people in Italy and, even more especially, Spain, there is no hope of employment in their home country for the foreseeable future. Nothing that their governments or the European Commission are willing to do, is going to help the situation.
Things aren't really that much better in France, and the favourite to win Sunday's Presidential Elections, Mr Macron, has made it clear that he favours "reform" of the European Union, solely in the direction of intensifying the very factors leading to high youth unemployment in most Eurozone countries except Germany and Holland.
For victims of Spain's 50% youth unemployment, the only two viable options are: learning German and going to work in Germany as a migrant (competing for minimum wage jobs with the millions of migrants that Mrs Merkel is importing from outside the EU) or learning English and seeking work in the United Kingdom, something which may become very difficult to do if Mr Juncker persists in his attempts to extract ransom payments from the British taxpayer and the Spanish government similarly persists in trying to blackmail the United Kingdom over Gibraltar. Learning French and seeking work in France would be an act of desperation, similar in nature to throwing oneself in front of an approaching train.
The situation for Italy's unemployed youth is a little bit better, in that their government is not engaged in deliberate, systematic attempts to offend not only the British government, but the British people. Italian jobseekers in the UK are more likely to get a sympathetic hearing than Spanish ones. There also exist several opposition parties determined to get Italy out of the Eurozone, which, frankly, is the only way to free the Italian (or Spanish) economies up, so that they may once more create sufficient jobs for the young. In Spain, there appears to be a political consensus for staying in the Eurozone, even if that means that half the country's youth must become exiles or accept that they will never hold paid employment in their lifetimes.
Those zealots who fondly believe that the United Kingdom will (or should) rush back into the European Union at any price (and that price would include joining the Eurozone at a minimum, something that many of them actually want), are ignoring the fact that Eurozone membership for the United Kingdom would ensure that British youth would also have no hope of jobs in their lifetimes. The Eurozone acts as a system of sacrificial economies around the core German economy, which are then loaded down with all the economic problems that the Eurozone allows Germany to discard. It has no other intended purpose: those commonly advanced by advocates are just cosmetics.
As long as learning English opens up the prospect of a new life in the United States, Canada or Australia as well as the United Kingdom, it will remain the most attractive option for those who are being so foully betrayed by Europe's political consensus.
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