Politically correct London becoming more nutty by the day

If Boris Johnson becomes British PM he will surely challenge a profound ideological movement.

British Conservative party MP Boris Johnson. Picture: AP

If Boris Johnson does become British prime minister next month, he will surely challenge one of the most profound ideological movements in Europe today, and one which flowers in Britain perhaps more fully than anywhere else in the world. I refer, of course, to political correctness.

Britain, or rather, more specifically London, is surely the political correctness capital of the world.

I have been here a mere couple of weeks and I am positively dizzy from the blizzard of intersectional offence-taking, speech clipping, thought controlling, verbal over -regulation.

The loss of Christian belief seems to have resulted in the imposition of the most excessive version of psychologically damaged pseudo-religious scruples.

Let me offer you a few examples of PC purity, from the trivial to the ridiculous.

A GCSE English exam included a short passage from a 1935 novella by HE Bates.

The passage was unexceptional. But later in the story, not in the passage examined, a girl in domestic service is exploited and raped by her employer.

A Twitter storm erupted saying the examination paper should have had a trigger warning, and objecting to students being subjected to a story which included rape.

Rape is a serious and tragic business, but like other crimes it has often figured in literature. In any event, the popular culture is, to its vast detriment, saturated in stories of rape. There were at least a dozen in every series of Game of Thrones, which was watched by millions of Brits. Therefore it was not really a question of anyone actually being offended by anything, it was a question of people searching out an offence against political correctness.

And of course the exam authorities duly apologised for any distress they caused.

Another exam, a maths paper this time, asked students to calculate the number of calories someone had consumed in a breakfast the paper described. The paper was roundly condemned for potentially causing distress to anyone who had struggled with body shape issues.

Again, the hypocrisy is spectacular. Weight control programs are advertised all the time. But more than hypocrisy is the sheer psycho-silliness of the whole business.

Comedy legend John Cleese recently issued a low-voltage tweet saying London did not seem to him any longer to be really an English city. He thought the city he grew up in was a bit nicer than the London of today.

Now, as it happens, I’m more or less on the other side of this argument from Cleese. I like diversity. But Cleese’s calm, modest, perfectly lame tweet was condemned as though he had called for the slaughter of the innocents.

There are many episodes far more serious than these. Some people lose jobs, others are silenced by fear. Jordan Peterson, the great Canadian writer and speaker, was about to undertake a fellowship at Cambridge to research the Book of Genesis. Somewhere on social media a photo was found of a fellow in a T-shirt with the logo “I’m an Islamophobe” who had draped his arm around Peterson’s neck. There was no serious effort to inquire into the degree of Peterson’s complicity or otherwise in such views as the T-shirt conveyed. His fellowship, however, was dropped.

Distinguished philosopher Roger Scruton lost a government appointment because of an outrageous misrepresentation of things he’d said in an interview with the wretched New Statesman. The whole point of the interview was to entice Scruton into saying something that would get him into trouble. The allegedly offending words, that Chinese people were robots, were misrepresented in the journalist’s report. Scruton had criticised the Chinese government for trying to control its people.

But the allegedly conservative government of Theresa May sacked Scruton without even the most cursory inquiry into what he had actually said. I don’t think an Abbott, Turnbull or Morrison government would have done that.

Often, too, there is a sinister political double standard to political correctness. A comedian on the BBC mocked demonstrators for throwing milkshakes at Nigel Farage and said they should use battery acid instead. This is genuinely shocking. It is a rare example of the kind of speech — incitement to violence — which should indeed be outlawed. But the BBC defended the comic, saying obviously no one would take the words seriously. Can you imagine a similar reaction if the object of the proposed acid attack were not a right-wing bogeyman but a member of some designated victim group?

Sometimes London is just a bit ahead of us in social trends. Are we going to be as nutty as this one day? Many people think the PC stuff will get worse if Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister. I’m not entirely sure that’s right. London isn’t the whole of Britain. The Brexit rebellion was cultural as much as political. And the Conservatives would likely be braver in opposition than they have been in government.

They could hardly be less so.