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Peter Piper - your point about what YOU would do is the typical blinkered comment and I've held back from saying this but it's Daily Mail BTL-style comments the world over.

What YOU would do is what YOU would do. YOU are not everyone else. The circumstances of others are different - it isn't one size fits all.

What a Portuguese veg picker, an Angolan refugee, a Spanish truck driver, a Colombian drugs mule, a Dominican mail-order wife, a Venezuelan girl who came here because she thought she'd be coming here for a job. Some people arrive here in a whirlwind of circumstances that don't allow them to. Some people are in circumstances so desperate they pack overnight for an offer of a job in a hotel or on a farm. Can you seriously expect them to learn English when they then spend 12 hours a day in a kitchen or in a field?

The majority of these "I bought a house in the Dordogne and I went to a conveyancer and a doctor and had to pay for my own interpreter" stories you get under some articles are just smug, blinkered English middle-class ignorance because the circumstances people often come here in are nothing like that.

And because YOU say you WOULD learn the language. Have you ever ACTUALLY done that? Have you put your theory to the test? I think your bold claims would come crashing down if you did try it and then got arrested.

At the risk of repeating myself, I actually did learn a language before going to live in both Spain and also time spent in Brazil and even with some pretty strong Spanish and Portuguese, I would not have felt confident in a legal situation, making decisions in another language on legal concepts that let alone having a scant understanding of my own legal system due to thankfully not really having had brushes with it - civil or criminal - I certainly would struggle if I had moved to Brazil or Spain and had any kind of legal situation.

If you take your reasoning to the absolute extreme, basically we have things in our country that I was proud of and the interpreting system was one of them. The reasoning that because in another country doesn't have something doesn't make it something to aspire to.

By the way, picture this: you meet a woman from another country, fall in love, have a child. Her English is conversational. The relationship breaks down. She wants to move back to her country. You don't want her to take the child away. You know what the purpose of the interpreter is in CIVIL (Family) court?

It's so that when a judge makes a court order for that child not to be removed from the country, the interpreter is there to cover the court's back and ensure that she doesn't then remove the child and then play innocent of what she's been ordered to do and not to do. That's what an interpreter is for.

You know nothing - so do us all a favour: shut up and listen to informed people who know what they're on about. Just show some humility and accept we know the real reasons why a good strong interpreting system needs to exist. Your arguments as to why it doesn't need to exist may come from a deeply-held belief on your part but that isn't good enough: they simply don't stand up to scrutiny that people like me can put it under.