The ground hyrax lives on the ground, while the tree hyrax, logically enough, lives up trees, something not normally associated with the elephant. But African legend recounts that the two know that they are related.So you can just imagine the conversation at breakfast: the mother hyrax telling her young to eat up their porridge because one day they might just grow up to be elephants, and elephant mothers telling their offspring at dinnertime to eat all their greens, “else you’ll grow up to be like your Uncle Hyrax, won’t you?” Every family has its Uncle Hyrax.I believe that people can be divided between the hyrax and the elephant in their attitude towards languages. This was well illustrated recently by the cab driver who said to me: “Ooh, I wish I knew how to talk foreign.” Then there was the celebrated enquiry we had once at the start of the academic year: “Now, I want to be bilingual by Christmas. What do you suggest I do?” Well, the elephant response would be to take care to have lived abroad for 10 years, or to have gone to a bilingual school or to have spoken two (and preferably) three languages at home.

The hyrax response would be to brush up on that rusty GCSE, sign up for a few courses – and go and see a travel agent.Despite alarmist headlines about the death of languages, I would say that linguists as a breed are far from becoming extinct. Though if we do not take steps, they could become an endangered species in certain habitats. There are areas of current growth, like the number of students enrolling on courses in university language centres, or the 12,000 or so who now spend a year on European exchanges.Then there is the number of young people who speak something other than English. This heritage language might be through their families, an early opportunity to travel, an international style of schooling or even a holiday home on the Costa del Sol. Twenty-five per cent of London schoolchildren now speak a language other than English at home More than 300 languages are to be found in London schools.

The list includes the languages which are seen to be most viable in commercial terms. That in turn provides London with new horizons and new challenges, as I see when ashen-faced undergraduates return from job interviews having been asked, “How many languages can you offer?”There is, even so, another breed of animal that inhabits the fringe of the linguistic jungle which is vulnerable to predators, and that is the ostrich. You can try sticking your head in the sand, but however much some people might wish, language proficiency, language skills, the language world, are not there to be ignored.. The report of Lord Phillips’s inquiry into the handling of BSE crisis, when it is published today, will do more to expose the inner workings of government than any document since Sir Richard Scott’s inquiry into the Arms for Iraq affair.

As such, and allowing for the gruesome reasons which led to the inquiry, it is an entirely welcome event. Its 16 volumes are expected fairly mercilessly to point to the culprits in a saga that saw government repeatedly put the best possible gloss on the scientific and other evidence available on the dangers to human life of eating meat contaminated by BSE. The report of Lord Phillips’s inquiry into the handling of BSE crisis, when it is published today, will do more to expose the inner workings of government than any document since Sir Richard Scott’s inquiry into the Arms for Iraq affair. As such, and allowing for the gruesome reasons which led to the inquiry, it is an entirely welcome event.

Its 16 volumes are expected fairly mercilessly to point to the culprits in a saga that saw government repeatedly put the best possible gloss on the scientific and other evidence available on the dangers to human life of eating meat contaminated by BSE.
Whether it will of itself lead to changes in one of the most pervasively malign aspects of Whitehall culture is much more doubtful That aspect is official secrecy. It will be interesting, to take a single example, to see what Lord Phillips’s report will say about evidence given to the inquiry team by Professor Roy Anderson, the eminent epidemiologist at the Wellcome Trust Centre about the repeated formal requests he made between 1989 and 1991 to the Ministry of Agriculture for access to their main BSE database to carry out an independent inquiry into the incidence of the problem and the enforcement of precautions against it He was denied such access. But when he got it several years later he was able to establish that the failure to enforce regulations covering the use of meat and bone meal to feed cattle had had a serious effect. So much so, he told the inquiry, that if the information had been available to him when he asked for it, he could have been in a position to urge steps which would have meant that the epidemic might have been smaller by around 250,000 cattle.This merely illustrates the point that if we had known a quarter of what we now know, let alone of what we will know by the end of today, a great deal of anxiety and damage might have been avoided At least some lives might not have been put at risk. At this point enter the Freedom of Information Bill, the legislation which is supposed to shed light on the dark corners of government and empower the citizen to find out what is really going in areas which concern him. But will it do either? Not to judge by an interesting little exchange which occurred in the House of Lords late on Tuesday evening, during the committee stages of the Bill.Lord Falconer, the minister, was asked by Lord Brennan a simple question: if such an event [as the BSE epidemic] was to recur “many of us are concerned that… the public would have no means of finding out about relevant policy considerations until the disastrous events had happened? Can the minister reassure us that such fears are not justified?” The Minister’s answer, while benignly expressed, amounted to no.