Mad, Mad World



Hugo Rifkind pokes fun at political correctness and the antics of UKIP in this recent article for The Times and he's right, you know.

The problem with Mike Read's ridiculous Calypso song isn't that it was offensive, but that the song and the singer were both lousy and unfunny. 

My Jamaican voice is just fun. Mike Read’s isn’t

By Hugo Rifkind - The Times

The outcry over the Ukip calypso wasn’t ‘political correctness gone mad’. It was about not being crashingly rude

On a Sunday when I am hung-over (which is rare, Mum), and it’s my turn to get up with the children (which is less rare, wife) my mornings follow a routine. First I make porridge. Then, as a “special treat”, I stick on CBeebies. Then I slump, somewhat, until Rastamouse comes on. Then I perk up and sing along in my best Bob Marley accent, with gravelly gusto. And I will not, at this point — and this is rather the crux of this column — be anything like Mike Read.

Rastamouse, for those who don’t know it, is an animated kids’ show about a reggae band of mice, who solve crimes for the President Of Mouseland. And poor Mike Read, for any of you similarly in the dark, is a former BBC DJ, who this week released, then withdrew, a song entitled Ukip Calypso, in which he bemoaned the horrors of immigration and the EU in a cod Jamaican accent. Now, there may be some who don’t regard what I do and what Read did as terribly different. But they are wrong.

Granted, his is not the biggest crime in the world. It’s not even the biggest Ukip crime of the week. That honour goes to its decision to team up in the European parliament with a bunch of Polish Holocaust deniers. But it is, though, a slip very much of the moment. And each time, the process — silly transgression, fuss, tokenistic apology — seems to divide Britain into two rival camps. One drops its jaw; the other stiffens its neck. One thinks, “unacceptable”, the other thinks, “political correctness gone mad”. And in a way both are right.

Anyway, the difference between me and Mike Read. Admittedly, neither of us is Jamaican. This may surprise anybody who has heard me singing the Rastamouse theme tune (no podcast, digital guys, so don’t bother asking) but it is undeniably true. So when Rastamouse comes on and there aren’t any actual Jamaicans around, as is invariably the way at 7.45am on a Sunday in my kitchen, I suppose it’s important to understand my inner thought process. “Hmm,” I’d imagine I say to myself, “I wonder. In the past, say in the 66 years since the docking of the Windrush, has a crass association with dapper, crime-fighting rodents been something by which people of Caribbean descent have found themselves particularly beleaguered?” And then I suppose I think: “No”.

Had Mike Read asked himself this about, say, open borders and illegal immigration, he might have come to the opposite conclusion. Clearly, though, he didn’t care to. As a result, he was crashingly rude.

Rude, you’ll note. Not offensive. Or at least, not to me. Were I Jamaican it might have been different, but as I said, I’m not. Sing about, ooh, payday lending in the voice of Topol from Fiddler on the Roof, adding a slight Scottish burr, and I daresay that might give me the hump. But this? Not my place. What we seem to be losing in this country is awareness of the difference between observing offence being given to others and taking it ourselves. When people talk about “political correctness gone mad”, I suspect this is often what they are driving at.

Certainly, there are those no more Jamaican than I who will have heard Read’s silly song and been as offended as anything. Perhaps without really knowing why. Although if they did know, then they would probably be thinking to themselves something along the lines of “this song is an assault on my value system” and “it’s very existence is thus abhorrent and a blasphemy” and things like that.

These people are broadly right, but they are also prigs, and it’s fine to mock them. Some weeks I will. (Seriously, come back and see; it’s a scattergun approach.) Only, the way we should mock them — and this is crucial — is not by being Jamaican at them all the more, or by blacking up for Hallowe’en, or by sneakily muttering “yid!” or “wog!” or “slope!” in their hearing, whenever the opportunity suggests itself.

This is what I’d call the Top Gear approach. It’s not racist in primary motivation and it does very effectively enrage the pious, lefty liberals that are its true targets. But it does so by having so little regard for the people used as weapons that it ends up being quite definitely racist.

Political correctness is not always mad. Nor is it inherently bad and oppressive. It’s just shorthand for not being a terrible berk. And one flip side of this is that those who value it must be more forgiving of those who transgress without meaning to. Some old dear uses the word “coloured” when she means “not white”, because she has done since 1923? Give her a break. Cherish a golliwog because you’ve always had it and haven’t really thought about what it represents? Merely blinkered. But cherish one in a spirit of defiance because all the people you don’t like say you shouldn’t? Different. Dodgy.

We shall all fall foul of this sort of thing eventually. One day, I suppose, my daughters will be older, and thanks to the quirks and trends of progressive thought, even Rastamouse might make them wince, and wonder just what sort of racist bastard I used to be. Or, similarly, we’ll be discussing homosexuality, and I’ll say “gay” and they’ll say: “Gay? Gay! Gay? What is this? 2013?”

And I’ll stammer a bit, and feel a fool, and argue that “gay” is a fine word with a proud tradition of referring to gentlemen who like other gentlemen and I’ll be damned if I’ll let them tarnish it with these new-fangled associations of sexuality-neutral mirth, joyfulness and so on. But if I continue to mutter “gay” regardless, cantankerous old bastard that I am, that will be me deliberately using a word people who are whatever “gay” is called by then have deemed offensive. Thereby displaying that I care less about offending this sizeable minority than about scoring a point off my superior and perhaps quite irritating daughters. That’d be pretty rude, too.

In a way, I feel rather sorry for Mike Read. When PC goes mad, though, it’s important to recognise precisely where the madness lies. We are allowed to stare, open-mouthed, at a man who adopts Caribbean beats and patois in order to ridicule Britain’s immigration policy, and a party that celebrates him doing this. Of course we are. True PC gone mad, though, is to issue a baffled, tokenistic apology, without seeming to take even a moment to consider what you’ve actually done wrong. People should think more, that’s the big lesson here. Really, it’s the solution to almost everything.

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