Spend no more public money on Welsh Language!

The UK appears to have been forced into 'devolution debate' following the Scottish Referendum "No" vote.  It has made me think about public expenditure which really should be devolved.  Key among those: Welsh and Scots Gaelic.  I contributed feedback to this blog article which was justifying the cost supporting the Welsh language.

Here's my take:

1. In the 2011 census, 8,248 said they speak Welsh as a first language.  There are apparently no figures for people who only speak Welsh.  All the rest are essentially hobbyists.  Sure, for plenty of people there will be a commercial advantage of speaking Welsh, but this derives from prejudice and discrimination, and should not be supported by public money.  If anybody seriously struggles with their communication in English, our investment efforts should be to help them improve their English, not to provide services to them in Welsh.  (I don't say that all such people should necessarily speak English... if they never have cause to communicate in a non-Welsh language environment, no problem!)
    
2. By the count the blogger, public funding of Welsh language costs £150m per year, half of that being for the Welsh language TV channel, S4C.  The channel costs around 209% of Welsh speakers' total license fee contribution (notwithstanding that S4C is probably a small part of most of those users' consumption of BBC services).  And S4C popularity is actually dropping!  It's fine to have a commercially viable Welsh language channel, funded by subscription and/or advertising, and if necessary subsidised by volunteer effort.  But there's no justification for public funding.  And much of the programming seems to be aimed at children, which is to say that its publicly funded propaganda for promoting Welsh language learning.
    
3. So the other £75m is presumably in translation services, additional cost of Welsh language public services, Welsh language signage, etc.  What a complete waste of money for a population which speaks English as its main language!  Of the 8,248 people who claim to speak Welsh as their first language (it would be a reasonable supposition that some may have answered so just to bolster statistics) presumably most speak English satisfactorily as a second language.  And as for the people who only speak Welsh, if I counted the number of those people who seek access to on-line services such as public websites translated into Welsh, would I need to take off my socks to count on my toes?
    
4. Here's the really important stuff: the net worth of Welsh language skill to the UK GDP is surely approximately zero, and yet its cost in squandered resources must be huge.

• Cost of teaching Welsh language (the actual cost of teaching; the cost to pupils' careers and to GDP of teaching Welsh rather than an economically useful language such as French, German, Spanish, Japanese or Chinese)
• The dead weight to the economy of supporting the Welsh language sector.  We can think of it like this: taking the £150m/yr figure: average Welsh full-time pay is £28k.  So that's 5,357 who are consuming all manner of public services but whose jobs are not contributing to GDP.  That effect continues, because assuming 25% consumption of public services (for example), that's 1,339 people servicing the original users, 335 people servicing the servicers, etc.  (Hey, this dead weight isn't unique to Welsh language: think of the Personal Injury Claims Industry, for example!)

You might conclude that I'm anti-Welsh language, but I wouldn't say so.  I just think that almost all of Welsh language activities should be paid for by the people who consume them:

• Welsh language should not be taught in state funded schools
• S4C should be a commercial channel (subscription, advertising or combination)
• We certainly shouldn't be translating websites into Welsh.  Heck, many countries have to tough-out much of their internet experience on English-language sites despite not living in an English-speaking country.  Why on earth are we paying people to translate websites from a language in which they are already fluent?

And its not just an issue for Welsh.  £12.4m is spent supporting the Scots Gaelic channel, Alba.  

Why is my money being spent on this?  For these kind of things devolution was made!