I've no idea whether this proposal is true or not, but (as a non-speaker of German resident in BL), I'm supportive of the idea.

I find it pretty difficult to navigate my way through the bureaucratic quagmire of Basel Landschaft government, taxation, permits, utilities, etc, without at least basic German, and harder still to integrate myself into the local social scene if I expect everybody else to switch to English whenever I'm around.

For those of us from English-speaking countries with large immigrant populations, how many residents of your homeland did you meet who couldn't speak enough English to make themselves understood? In decades of living in Australia, I can recall maybe two such people, and both were very elderly (and seemed a little peeved at being there -- clearly it was purely because their children had decided it would be better for them to be there than in Vietnam). Sure, English is the lingua franca and there's no real need for English-speaking residents of English-speaking countries to speak any other language, since most of the rest of the world learns at least some English at school -- but why should we expect non-English-speakers to speak English in their own countries?

The British Raj is dead and buried.