I did French for three years, and never got further than telling people my name, how old I was, and how many brothers and sisters I had.
Thing is, we don’t need it. We go on holiday to a tourist trap, all the locals know enough English for us to get by. We import TV and movies, pretty much all in English. We go online, it’s mostly English, and anything that isn’t is a click to translate.
It’s the real Esperanto.
Living and working in a big European country (e.g. France, Germany, Spain or Italy) would be a pain without knowing the language, and our lack of language skills is probably to blame for Brexit because most of us have never even considered moving away.
Edit: Plus we’ve stolen enough words from our neighbours that if you’re reading something, there’s probably the odd word you can recognise in there.