Political correctness

I’d like to say that when I’m low and feel I can’t go on anymore that it’s the thought of a child’s smile or a better future for humanity that gets me through, or maybe one of those inspiring Maya Angelou quotes people were sharing last week: but to be honest, it’s actually that picture of Ed Miliband trying to eat a bacon sandwich. I know that certain Labour commentators are unhappy with Ed’s performance, and many Tories are concerned about him actually running the country, but his visual mishaps do provide such cheer during these dark periods. A friend of mine brought a copy of the bacon picture to

D-Day would have been effected with far less trouble if, at the time, we had insisted on the same rules that pertain in Haworth’s annual commemoration of the event. The Yorkshire village holds what is now called a “1940s Weekend” – don’t mention the war – and people who wear Nazi uniforms, or the SS insignia, have been told that they are not welcome. This is because the uniforms “give offence”. Previously, people turned up dressed as Nazi soldiers and others as allied soldiers – much as actually happened the first time the event was staged, on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. But some people complained about the uniforms

In a blog for the IEA the other day Kristian Niemietz looked at the economics of holding politically correct views. Disagreeing with the idea proposed by Spiked magazine that PC is motivated by a loathing for ordinary people, he argues that such views are in fact a ‘positional good’. A positional good is a good that people acquire to signalise where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them. It has long been clear that expressing

Just to ring the changes, I’ve written about the BBC and political correctness for the mag this week. Yeah, yeah, I know – you haven’t heard enough about that subject. But one of the writers of the 1970s situation comedy It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum has complained that aunty isn’t showing the series any more as a consequence of political correctness. My suspicion is that it isn’t being reshown because it was humourless unmitigated crap, but there we are. The bigger issue, though, is the one raised by the excellent (for a Blairite) Dan Hodges. As it happens, I was invited onto this show and now wish I had accepted.

London has long since lost its allure for me — altogether too many cars, foreigners, cyclists, middle-class liberals and people who, like me, work in the media, as they call it. I was born in London but only feel truly at home in the north-east of England, an area of the country within which the constituents of that list I quoted above are almost nonexistent. But I am thinking now of moving back to the city — it’s possible that I could afford a flat in somewhere such as Brockley, or perhaps Catford — to take advantage of a radical new development in our capital. Because rumbling along the streets

The media seem to be in a pickle over the removal of a blonde girl from a Roma family in Dublin, which followed the arrest of a couple in Athens who had a suspiciously Nordic-looking child with them. It’s a fascinating story because for the first time I can remember the two great hysterias of our age have finally clashed – racism and child-snatching, the Guardian’s obsession versus the Sun’s. It has also pitted the almost immovable object of media taboo against the unstoppable force of the human-interest story. The highbrow media maintains a sort of code of decency about reporting the Roma, so that you will never read anywhere

I’ve been reminded just why political correctness exists: Katie Hopkins of the Apprentice, the TV show that glorifies the entrepreneurial ideal and the psychopathic levels of self-confidence that accompany it. Hopkins is on a bit of a roll with her homespun wisdom. Late last week she criticised ‘lower class’ children’s names, saying: ‘I think you can tell a great deal from a name… I tend to think that children who have intelligent names tend to have fairly intelligent parents and they make much better playdates for my children.’ As well as also having a go at people with tattoos and fatties, she also quipped: ‘Ginger babies. Like a baby. Just so

A State of Fear, Joseph Clyde’s new thriller*, stands out for many reasons. Thrillers only work if they are thrilling, and Clyde’s description of the search for the terrorist who planted a dirty bomb in central London keeps the reader fascinated. The best thrillers are more than just page-turners, however, and Clyde presents a convincing picture of what Britain could look like after law and order breaks down and the economy collapses. Like all dystopian novelists, he takes conflicts in the present and imagines how they will play out in his imagined future. Today’s sectarian divisions and the failure of Britain to deal with them, or even admit they exist,