If you are an immigrant who has been given citizenship and you speak no English, life must be frighteningly limited.

How can you talk to your doctor, social worker or seek a job? How can you shop or travel safely?

How can you use your vote? How can you begin to understand the human, let alone the political issues? The questions are endless.

The one answer to them all, of course, is you live in an ethnic ghetto. You only mix with your own people.

You never go anywhere and you have absolutely no comprehension of what is going on in the rest of the country you have chosen to call your own.

The result of so many people living precisely like that is the fear, ignorance and segregation at the heart of tensions in places such as Bradford.

It is such a crystalline truth that immigrants wishing to be given UK citizenship should be required to speak English.

Learning the language should be a necessary part of the process of becoming British.

What a spin it put officials in when Lord Rooker, Home Office immigration minister, suggested learning English could become a mandatory part of the naturalisation process.

Sensibly, he pointed out it would be a way of ensuring, for instance, ethnic minority women would not be denied their civil rights by their own menfolk.

He echoed the view of Labour MP Ann Cryer who had already caused mayhem in the party by suggesting too many Asian Britons had failed to learn the language and this was effectively 'importing poverty'.

A panic stricken Home Office official immediately claimed Lord Rooker had not really meant it. He really had not.

The poor spokesman, sweating in the August heat and desperate not to offend ethnic minorities, attempted to suggest it was just a broad debate about the way existing immigration laws worked.

The Government would never consider changing the law to force anyone to learn English. Oh dear me, no!

Within hours, in the finest pantomime tradition, Dame David Blunkett, the Home Secretary himself, was saying 'Oh dear me, yes!'.

He confirmed compulsory English lessons were being considered. Ann Cryer said that learning English could help overcome 'massive under-achievement' in Britain's Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities'.

Any changes will certainly be discussed at New Labour's annual conference here in Brighton next month.

What is so unutterably depressing about all this is the bigoted response from some of the minority leaders.

A former president of the Bradford Council for Mosques said compulsorily learning English would infringe the rights of British born Asians and not solve any problems.

The chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants bizarrely described mandatory English as 'linguistic colonialism'.

There is even talk of such a law being contrary to the Human Rights Act.

Such dispiriting nonsense is straight out of the Mad Hatters' Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland.

Yet we are expected to take it seriously.