So I was wrong: Marine Le Pen got 20%

Marine Le Pen: Smiles All Round. Photography: Remi Noyon

Here are the most recent results of the first round (they are still being fully released as I write):
Hollande: 28.8%
Sarkozy: 26.1%
Marine Le Pen: 18.5%
Mélenchon: 11.7%
Bayrou: 8.8%
Joly: 2.3%
Others: the rest...

Would you know it? As I predicted, my predictions were wrong. And how wrong they were.

After all the support that Mélenchon appeared to have, and all the noise being made about him in the media, he must be disappointed with his result. I truly thought that he may catch the protest vote but even then, there was an abstention rate of nearly 20%, particularly shocking when you consider the wide depth of thought within the different candidates.

And then Marine Le Pen received nearly 20% of the vote. Nearly 1 in 5 French people voted for the National Front, a xenophobic and Islamophobic party, entirely against immigration, and a party that claims that it is the "only opposition to the left". Marine Le Pen's new approach has certainly brought in more youth and it is certainly worrying. No wonder there are immigr

Why David Thomas is so utterly wrong about why English students need not learn a foreign language

I was recently directed to a segment of the MailOnline’s website, RightMinds, and let’s just say that I was pretty disappointed by what I read. David Thomas, a journalist and author with a multi-lingual background argues that the 380,000 students in England who chose not to learn a foreign language are being sensible (it gets worse) because English is the second language of 85 per cent of Europeans.

This argument practically gives way to the idea that students in this country should be lazy; ‘Well they’re already doing it so we don’t have to.’ But the joke is not on them, it is on us. It is on those who truly believe that simply because others are learning our language that we should make no effort to learn another.

I struggle to understand the argument in any sense, especially as the journalist essentially nullifies his argument further on in his article by saying that due to writing books set in Germany, he now has “a tiny smattering of German, too”. When writing a book, you conduct detailed research on the area it will be set in, but learning any part of the language is, arguably, unnecessary especially if nearly everyone you’re working with speaks English anyway.

Regardless, Thomas continues to argue that learning a language is handy for proving on holiday “that you’re more sophisticated than the rest of the tourist herd.” What’s more, Thomas claims, “there’s absolutely no need to learn any one particular language unless you’ve got a specific professional use for it.”