In this age of crippling political correctness almost everything spoken about Britain's ethnic minorities is shoved under the spotlight and thoroughly probed for the most subtle whiff of controversy and racism.

Let's hope this is not the case when dealing with Chiltern District Council's decision to reject the proposed expansion of a language support service.

This new increased service would have given non-English speakers 24-hour access to interpreters to help them claim benefits and take advantage of social and educational services.

The new scheme would have cost Chiltern £47,000 and councillors felt this was too expensive. They also said a sizeable local network of language support and translation services were already doing a good job.

But the leader of the council, Cllr Don Phillips (Con, Little Chalfont) said: "I think we should not ever do anything that will perpetuate language barriers."

Surely the most worrying and disturbing possible consequence of increasing the use of interpreters is that non-English speaking British nationals may never feel the need to learn English at all.

No truly tolerant person would ever suggest that Pakistanis, Kurds, Poles or Africans should be banned from speaking their 'mother tongue' while living in Britain but it doesn't help anyone if English isn't learnt in addition.

Racism and bigotry are exceedingly ugly human traits and the last thing anyone would want to do is encourage them.

But if language barriers do end up being perpetuated as the result of some kind of misguided venture into so-called philanthropy, this is exactly what we will end up doing.

There are no reasons why our schools shouldn't teach our children languages like Urdu or Punjabi they would be a lot more relevant to today's Britain than French.

But what we don't need are non-English speakers going about their everyday business flanked by an army of translators at the expense of the taxpayer.

If multi-cultural Chiltern, and Britain as a whole, is going to work everyone has to be able to speak to each other.

Without the smooth operation of language there's no understanding and without understanding our future looks decidedly bleak.