Strangers in a strange land

WITH the best will in the world London is never going to be the easiest city to make a living in.

Barmy bus drivers and a sooty Tube can make it a job just getting to your job. But if we Brits find it tough, spare a thought for the thousands of foreigners who come here to work.

At the last count there were 914,000 foreign nationals working in Greater London. That's one in nine of the capital's workforce . Yet there can be few cities so hellbent on sapping the pluck of even the even the toughest globetrotter . Take, for instance Herve Rouach, a 33 year-old French journalist who works for news agency Agence France Presse. "Everything was different here, "he says. Worse still, he found that foreigners usually find themselves at a disadvantage especially at work. "It's not easy to work with the British Government when we're getting stories together," he says. "We get the call, but often very late in the day." Other newcomers sometimes find their chances of promotion are much worse in the UK than at home. One antipodean accountant with a big City firm, said he would stay in this country "if I thought there were as many opportunities - foreigners don't get a look in, while they do back home the two most recent partners are English." No one likes this kind of Little Englander attitude, but it's not as if run-of-the-mill Londoners are making any friends either. It appears that we're not renowned for an effusive welcome - quite the opposite in fact. "The Brits are much more insular than Australians," says one foreigner of his City firm, who did not want to give his name. "It takes longer to get accepted in the UK; there's less fraternising with work colleagues and people don't say what they mean." Jens Roennberg, 41, a German at Pricewaterhouse Coopers, agrees. "The English find it difficult to accept foreign influences; they only focus on their own culture and therefore have problems dealing with others." So says the man who caused cultural meltdown with his Burgundy shoes - a continental habit, it turns out. "A lot of English people wear a business suit even if it looks awful," he says, "so I continue wearing my Burgundy shoes - my excuse is that I'm a foreigner." While the red shoes are always going to be a problem for us po- faced Brits, we could make our Continental cousins feel more welcome, by taking them to the pub perhaps (Germans have been known to go thirsty in British pubs expecting waiter service). But even this has its pitfalls, says Priscille Rousseau, a French 27-year-old working for Eurosport. She says she "fell in love" with London from the off, but nothing prepared her for the drinking. "One of the most important things I've learned is how to drink five pints of Guinness on Friday night." She makes us sound like a bunch of drunks, but she has a point: "In the beginning I was very scared of having to go the pub and watch all the sport with work- mates - we just don't go out with colleagues in France. My { F r e n c h } friends look at me as if I'm an alcoholic when I go back. But when they come over here they love it." If the drinking is a shock for foreigners, there are more than enough reasons for them to stay. For a start, London is one of the best places around to learn the lingo and be paid to do it. Granted it costs a fortune to live here, but hey, New York is much worse. And, unlike Wall Street, which is full of US banks and little else, London's firms are far more multicultural, so they will always have a job for anyone who can make money for them in as many languages as possible. No wonder the big London firms look like the UN. J P Morgan admits that it employs people from more countries than it can remember, but thinks that 50 is about right. London is home for 33 international communities numbering over 10,000, says Hans Pieter Ickemeyer of London First. Four of those, the Italians, Germans, French and Spanish, number more than 35,000. "If you're looking for 50 Vietnamese who speak Finnish," he says, "you'll find them in London." It's a sentiment endorsed by Nello Pasquini, a 46-year-old Italian lawyer working in London. "Italians, he says, "are delighted to be here; they find life in London stimulating and it is the only real international city in Europe. If they had their way they would stay." This sounds a lot like a man who wasn't on the Tube last summer, but a lot of Italians feel the same way, he says. Life is so good here, he continues, that a lot of his banking friends change jobs just to stay here. But life in this rainbow city still presents problems for a lot of newcomers. One is the excessive workload a lot of them find over here. Most cite unworkable deadlines in a city full of companies overreaching themselves, while others grin until they can bear it no longer, and then return to the land of time-management and reasonable work ethics. In fact, many Londoners feel they work punishingly hard, but we're part of the problem. A lot of foreigners say they are only in this country because they have the training that Brits do not, thanks to our overspecialised A-level system. It's a fair point. A-level critics say that the exams make students specialise too soon, making them forget valuable skills (like adding up) which they need when it comes to getting a job. Perhaps the new International Baccaulaureate - where pupils can study a mix of arts and science subjects - will help British students compete with the rest of the world. Until that happens, however, Brits are under-achievers in the eyes of the foreigners who recruit them. "The problem in this country is that you recruit musicians to be accountants and ask them multiple-choice questions, "says M r Roennberg. No prizes for guessing where he gets his accounts done then. In Germany, and to a lesser extent in France, he explains, school-leavers are put through business school before studying a specialised course at university, so there's no need for any of the wet-nursing that goes on over here. The flipside to all this is the liberal attitude to careers which prevails in the UK. If classics graduates want to be accountants, they can. (At least this explains why there are 100,000 British acccountants and only 7,000 in Germany). "It's this can-do attitude which attracts business," says Ickemeyer. If there's a lesson here for us Brits, it is simply that learning a bit of anything in addition to English would help the cause, as would a maths refresher. But there's no need to panic. Through some fantastic piece of luck, doing business here is something a myriad cultures want to do, no matter how lacklustre our workforce may be. If this means shipping in thousands of better-skilled foreigners, then so be it. In the meantime, we Brits could do worse than make an effort to catch up. IF you're a foreigner in London and you want to learn some English there are a few options. For a start, ditch any ideas about answering that flyer you saw in the local library advertising trendy coffee mornings with a mother tongue speaker - unless you happen to have a lot of things you need to get off your chest to a complete stranger. By far the best plan is to pester your employer and gulp - go back to college. London is so competitive, even in education, that most colleges will happily tailor their English courses to suit you. But it will cost you. Vivienne Ward, at Ebury Executive English College in Belgravia, says the majority of her clients are 45-plus "and haven't been to school in ages". She explains that her clients are professionals and their partners who need help learning how to deal with anything from press conferences to an invitation to dinner at Mansion House. Bespoke courses like those above cost from GBP 300 to GBP 500 a week and are by no means the most expensive in London. Look for those listed in the British Council's English in Britain pamphlet for a full guide. * Useful information: British Council brochure helpline: 0161 957 7755, or visit the Internet at: http://www.EnglishinBritain.co.uk

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