It would not be an exaggeration to say that Britain does not have the most glittering of reputations on the Continent for its ability to adapt to the local lingo. Indeed, when I holiday in France every year, one of the most frequent remarks people make to me is “Wow, your French is very good! We don’t often get many English people speaking our language”. I’m always a touch embarrassed by how poor British people are at speaking foreign languages; it’s become a bit of a national stereotype that les Anglais generally can’t speak the language of the country in which they find themselves; much like far too many British expats seem to think that they will make themselves easier to understand by over-enunciating, gesticulating wildly, and speaking loudly, whilst still speaking English.

I think this is one of the biggest hypocrisies and self-contradictions of Brexit; Priti Patel and the Home Office want all people who come to Britain to work to speak fluent English before they qualify for entry. And yet, that same Conservative government has already got one foot out of the doorway of one of the most incredible opportunities with which language students (a dying breed, alas) can be presented: Erasmus.

So, Priti Patel expects all people who wish to come to the UK to work to be fluent in English, and yet her government is willing to deny British students the chance to hone their language skills, and gain a better understanding of European culture? This, to me, makes no sense. Britain is in the midst of a linguistic crisis; Modern Foreign Languages are not compulsory at GCSE; MFL departments in schools are closing up and down the country because pupils simply do not have the desire to speak a foreign language; language-learning at A-Level is falling, and the number of students taking languages at university is rapidly decreasing.

I would invite the readership to consider this: why, at a time when we stand on the crossroads of language-learning in Britain, should we even be considering ending our participation in Erasmus, and Erasmus+? Holding the Erasmus schemes to ransom in our negotiations with the EU in this way, to me, makes no sense — in making this threat, the government show themselves to be devoid of sympathy for the young people upon whom this county depends for its future.

One of the biggest arguments propagated by Vote Leave and Leave.EU during the 2016 referendum campaign was that once we had freed ourselves of the shackles of EU membership, we would be free to create a Global Britain on our own terms. It seems there is little to no parity between the creation of a Global Britain, and the denial of the chance for students to live, learn, and study in foreign countries.

When I was applying to university after my A-Levels (of which French was one), I was grappling with whether to study a combined honours MFL and humanities degree, or simply a straight humanities one. In the end, the clincher was the chance to study in a French University (or a Canadian one, or a Swiss one, or indeed one in any country in the world that has French as their mother tongue), that I would have if I took the joint honours degree. I would not have been the only one for which the opportunity to spend a year abroad in this way would have been a deciding factor.

The UK delegation must take heed of this as we enter the next stages of our negotiations with the EU; if they are truly serious about wishing to create a Global Britain after Brexit, they need to realise the indispensability of ventures such as Erasmus and Erasmus+. It would be a travesty if we were to lose access to this flagship education scheme, as a result of nothing more than nationalist oneupmanship, and party-political hackery.

* Cameron Molland is a former Politics and French student at the University of Bath. An outspoken critic of Brexit, he is active as a campaigner for Bath and North East Somerset Liberal Democrats. He currently works for Bath’s Lib Dem MP Wera Hobhouse on her leadership campaign.