Skip to main content

Political Correctness



Rod Liddle is a talented writer who sometimes wastes his energies on silly irrelevant causes, but I think he has a point in this opinion piece from The Spectator magazine in which he pokes fun at political correctness gone mad, before directing his wrath in the direction of Ofcom and the Press Complaints Commission.    

I was a slut too, Prime Minister, and I think you're giving in to PC nonsense


Another week of witless moral relativism at its most deluding

Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, allegedly used the term 'slut' in 2010 in connection with journalist, Bryony Gordon

Is it ever appropriate to use the word ‘slut’? I always take my lead from the Prime Minister and he has assured the country that it is never appropriate or acceptable, so henceforth I shall desist from employing the term. If, one evening, I come home from work to find my wife, naked, cheerfully and drunkenly providing sexual gratification to the entire first team squad of a Championship-level football club — Wigan Athletic, say, or Norwich City — I would simply remark: ‘How refreshing it is to see a woman unshackled from the oppressive sexist mores of our age and able to express herself in such an uninhibited manner. Would you like a cup of tea?’ The word slut would not pass my lips.

Dave got dragged into a world of sluts as a consequence of his newly promoted Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, having allegedly used the term in 2010 in connection with a journalist, a youngish lady called Bryony Gordon. It appears that Bryony has taken belated offence at this description, which I find a bit odd. Bryony’s most recent book is called The Wrong Knickers: A Decade of Chaos and it apparently details her sexual promiscuity, drug use and drunkenness while working in that notorious pit of moral depravity, the Daily Telegraph. Ms Gordon described herself in those pages as ‘the office scrubber’ — and did not mean that she was permanently on her hands and knees polishing things. Although in a manner of speaking I suppose it could mean precisely that. Is ‘slut’ any worse than ‘scrubber’? They seem to me pretty much synonymous. Ms Gordon’s decade of chaos detailed a time she now apparently regrets; she herself thought that she had behaved sluttishly.

Can you really be surprised if you write about your bad behaviour and someone describes you in pretty much the same terms which you have employ? I don’t think so. ‘I shagged loads of blokes while coked out of my brain, I was the office scrubber, tch how awful of me — now don’t call me a slut, whatever you do.’ You can’t have it both ways; were she unapologetic about her ‘decade of chaos’ (there’s hubris for you) then it might be different.

And so the Prime Minister was forced to consider the word ‘slut’ — and presumably knew right away that he had to bow down before the absolutist PC maniacs and expunge the word from the English lexicon: it can never, ever, be used, and there’s an end to it. This is a sort of witless moral relativism at its most deluding.

I ought to mention that I don’t buy the gender-specific argument, either. I also behaved like a slut, a scrubber, a tramp in my twenties (and part of my thirties, frankly), although not nearly so much as I would have wished at the time: if only I had bumped into Bryony! A lot of us behaved that way, both men and women, and years later are not hugely proud of the fact; perhaps it is the effect of that particularly vile drug cocaine, which I always avoided for sanctimonious ideological reasons, that enables one to be simultaneously self-righteous and yet also faux-regretful. Cocaine leads a person down the slippery slope of utter and complete self-delusion, and towards a dissolved septum.

And so, neatly, we come to that other appalling word, ‘slope’. I think you are still allowed to use the word slope when referring to an incline, or perhaps to describe how, at the book launch for The Wrong Knickers: A Decade of Chaos, you slunk out while you hoped nobody was looking — ‘sloped off’. Jeremy Clarkson is in trouble because he used the word in a punning sense during his television programme Top Gear, deploying it to mean simultaneously a) an incline and b) (derog.) a person of Southeast Asian origin. I thought the joke fairly funny — and so, I would guess, did the majority of Clarkson’s audience. However, the BBC was hit by a tsunami of public outrage. No fewer than two people lodged a complaint with the corporation and it is quite possible that one or the other of them actually watched the programme in question, rather than making their furious objections based upon press coverage after the event.

It almost goes without saying that the bloated bureaucratic quango Ofcom decided that those two people were right and that the millions who had enjoyed the edition of Top Gear with the ‘slope’ joke in it were complicit in an act of racism and therefore perhaps as equally in the wrong as the programme makers. It found against Clarkson and the BBC and it did so because it is an organisation with an absolutist, politically driven agenda, much as is its rightly derided half-witted baby brother, the Press Complaints Commission.

Let us go back to the facts: this particular edition of Top Gear offended precisely two people, perhaps directly, perhaps a little later when they had been told what was said and leaped at the chance of taking offence. Some 99.99999 recurring per cent of viewers took no offence whatsoever — but Ofcom knows best. An organisation set up primarily to protect the interests of viewers and listeners actually does not give a monkey’s about what they might think — it cares only about its own PC agenda. If you doubt that, then try complaining to Ofcom about the BBC’s bias in its coverag e of the latest Israel-Palestine conflict and see how far you get; even if thousands objected, the complaint would not be upheld. But two people complain about Clarkson — hell, they’ve got to be right, right?


Popular posts from this blog

SNP - Conspiracy of Silence

LGB Rights - Hijacked By Intolerant Zealots!