I was interested to hear George Osborne pronounce that "if you are not prepared to learn English, your benefits will be cut", as part of yesterday's comprehensive spending review: in the future, non-native speakers will be forced to attend English language classes as a condition of claiming benefits.

I'm sure George Osborne's famed real-life experience puts him exactly in the right position to judge the motivations of migrants who claim benefits, but for what it's worth, I'd like to throw my modest experience into the mix as well. You see, when I'm not pontificating about one thing or another on Comment is free, I do community work for Unite the Union, part of which is signing up migrants living in the London borough of Tower Hamlets to Esol classes (English for Speakers of Other Languages), provided by Unite's education department. Admittedly I'm no chancellor, who – we all hope – is informed enough to make evidence-based judgments on how to handle benefits, but I must say that I am yet to encounter the kind of reluctant pupils that Osborne's speech evokes.

Actually, I have so many people asking me about Esol classes, sometimes I'm too overwhelmed to know what to do with them. I know of other organisations working in the same area as me who have put signs in their windows reading "no Esol here" because they're inundated with requests from people desperate to learn. In fact, I am always surprised to meet people whose English is not good enough to hold a conversation, but who have learned the sentence "I want to learn Esol" and can also recite the different levels of Esol classes available.

At this point you might be thinking, "Great, migrants want to learn! Go forth and furnish them with Esol classes!" But herein lies the rub – the government (yes, this government: the one that is about to "crack down" on non-English speakers) cut Esol funding in 2011. So in the vast majority of cases, those who want to learn Esol simply can't because the classes are just not there. As Judith Kirsh from the National Association for Teaching English and Community Languages to Adults said at the time the cut was announced: "We think that this change could mean that about half of all Esol students in some cities will be shut out from attending lessons."

At Unite, we're attempting to circumvent funding issues by piloting an online Esol course that is free, and we're already becoming oversubscribed. In fact, other Esol providers in the borough – far from being threatened by the presence of a new teacher on the block – have approached me to say they're relieved Unite is in the borough because it might help them cope with overwhelming demand. But don't just take my anecdotes as gospel, have a look at the evidence. Yesterday Channel 4's FactCheck blog examined Osborne's announcement and found that Labour's Esol scheme was so popular it had to be reined in. FactCheck noted that according to House of Commons library research from 2011: "Under the Labour government Esol arguably became a victim of its own success and expenditure on Esol increased significantly." If Osborne really is serious about forcing migrants to learn English (a rather punitive act in itself), perhaps he could put his money where his mouth is by committing to a similar increase in ESOL expenditure. Personally, I won't be holding my breath.

The other thing I've observed in my work promoting Esol is that the demographic most in need of it is women who have fled violent relationships. For these women, their inability to communicate left them totally reliant on their partner. Language to them was not simply about communication; it was about control and subordination. English to these women does not mean grocery shopping is easier; it represents a total emancipation from a frightening and violent past. In 2011, 50,000 of London's 68,000 Esol students were women. What is Osborne planning for them? To take their route out of abuse away and then punish them because it's gone?

Since the coalition came to power in 2010, it has methodically redistributed income from the people at the bottom to those at the top. How does a government do that without substantially angering the people it is supposed to represent? Easy – it makes stuff up. It pretends that the biggest problem is not that the superrich are just carrying on as normal while living standards fall, it's that your life is getting worse because lazy migrants are wasting your taxes. And conveniently, the very group it has chosen to scapegoat can't answer back. No doubt our politicians won't pay much heed to this policy announcement in the grand scheme of things, but the next time a woman comes to me asking to learn English so she can escape abuse, I'll be asking myself: what sort of government does this?