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Hello again Pete,

Ego? No pal. 10+ years within a system you talk garbage about.

No need for ego. It's not about me.

It's about the impact on the world that ill-informed people have if others listen to them and take on their ill-informed views that maybe, on first listen, make sense.

It's those views that are formed by stories in the press about the cost of interpreting in our public services and on the face of it, it always probably sounds scandalous. That's why these newspapers publish shock stories about how one NHS trust or one Police force spent £100k, £150k, £500k, £1.6m or whatever and the readers in a collective knee-jerk reaction all go "Bloody foreigners, costing us a fortune" and then moves like cutting interpreting services appeal to those with the arrogance - perhaps from their own big egos - that if they went abroad, they'd learn the language.

And so when the government announces they're going to save £15m by outsourcing the service - which they have miserably FAILED to do - they then have the people onside - people who boldly make claims about how unnecessary it is using hackneyed arguments about why someone learning the language equips them to understand the intricacies of the justice systems of the country whose language they speak.

Ego? I've already said I'm a fully qualified interpreter but I'd be out of my depth in a Spanish, Portuguese, Braziian, Angolan or Ecuadorian court - that's the other way round. I know my limitations. You don't.

It isn't ego because I'm not taking you on one-to-one for the sake of scoring points.

It's so that what you've said on this public forum doesn't go unchallenged because these comments could be read by a lot of people for a long time whenever anyone refers to articles about this scandalous contract.

Let's have a wager shall we? Get a completely independent law professor from any reputable university to read your comments and my comments and ask them whose words they would encourage a young law undergraduate to read in order to get a feel for this issue.

Bet you an hour's pay as per whatever Capita's Tier One rate is now. Just to be on the safe side, y'know.

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