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employ altogether more sophisticated language and sophistry to make similar points, demand that their right to free speech be respected, what they are really demanding is that their speech be free from scrutiny.
If you didn’t end up here through personal experience, how did you?
‘Political correctness gone mad’ is obviously one of them, and so is ‘eroding British values’ and ‘multiculturalism is destroying Britain’.
Their problem is not that they are in any way prevented from preaching the sort of ignorant hatred Frank espoused, their problem is with people like me – and hopefully you – remaining free to describe it as ignorant hatred and, even more infuriatingly, being capable of proving it.
Think of Sean as a poster boy for people who talk about ‘legitimate concerns’ surrounding immigration and dismiss the notion that this is often just camouflage for some pretty base views.
Nigel Farage’s despicable ‘Breaking Point’ poster
The Liberal Democrat leader, Vince Cable, had opined that morning that Leave voters would start to regret their decision as they saw increasing evidence of how they had been misled.
This refers to Article 7 of the EU Citizens’ Rights Directive.
It’s important to remember that David Cameron and his Home Secretary Theresa May had weaponised immigration electorally with such success that, by the time of the 2015 election, the Labour Party had aped some of their rhetoric. Neither
David, a ‘lay preacher’, rang me after the then leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, had described gay sex as a sin.
‘James O’Brien Asks Caller Same Question On Jesus’s Comments on Gay People 27 TIMES’.
George: It is an abomination for a man to lie with a man as he does with a woman. James: How do you feel about lobsters? George: What? James: Lobsters.
I know Anstruther quite well. Lovely part of the world. Great fish and chips and a thriving seafood trade up there in Fife. How do you feel about lobsters? George: I don’t think I’ve ever had lobster. James: Prawns, then? Or scallops? Or a lovely crab? I only ask because Leviticus is pretty explicit on the subject. Chapter 11, verses 10 to 12. ‘And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you. They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of
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on while remaining so relaxed about people munching their way through a big plate of fruits de mer. By your own rationale, surely they’re deserving of equal condemnation. Leviticus even uses the same word, George. George: The Bible is clear that it is sinful for a man to lie with another man. You can fanny about all you like, but a sin is a sin. James: What are you wearing, George? George: What? James: What are you wearing? Don’t worry, I’m not initiating phone sex. George: I don’t see that it’s any of your business. James: Indulge me, Geor...
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violating God’s law if you ever wear it. You are committing a sin comparable, according to Leviticus, to lying with a man as with a woman. It’s stated pretty clearly that you’re not allowed to ...
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You may already be familiar with some of this. In an October 2000 episode of the White House drama The West Wing, President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, uses such knowledge to completely destroy the Biblical justifications for homophobia put forward by, appropriately enough, a right-wing talk-show host. His brilliant speech was based upon a letter sent to a real-life American one, Laura Schlessinger, that subsequently went viral on the internet. A listener sent me the ‘Dr Laura’
Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988. Introduced by Margaret Thatcher and championed by the likes of Norman Tebbit, it stated that local authorities ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in a mainstream school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.
Disgraced former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie put
change my mind three times. But I think this is healthy. Despite the title of this book, it is refreshing, in an age of increasingly reductionist and binary debate, to recognise the importance of sometimes saying the three most undervalued words in the English language: I don’t know.
On 20 December, the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote an article headlined ‘He’s not only in the wrong body … he’s in the wrong job.’ The deliberate misgendering aside, he wrote with characteristic crassness of the ‘devastating effect’ Lucy’s change in gender would have upon her pupils.
And to you the press, I say shame, shame on all of you. Lucy Meadows was not somebody who had thrust herself into the public limelight. She was not a celebrity. She had done nothing wrong. Her only crime was to be different. Not by choice but by some trick of nature. And yet the press saw fit to treat her in the way that they did.
The Press Complaints Commission carried out an investigation and on 11 March 2013 the Daily Mail offered to take down Littlejohn’s article from the paper’s website, as well as a photograph of Meadows’s wedding to Smith in February 2009. But, of course, as Ruth later wrote: ‘Once online, always online. Our private moment, for me and my family, put out there.’
But I do know that ‘journalism’ like Littlejohn’s is as dangerous as it is despicable and that, for me, the ‘right’ side of this particular argument will always involve being on the opposite side to him and his ilk. At the time of writing, Richard Littlejohn reportedly remains the highest paid newspaper columnist in the country.
Thirty years later, the puppeteer satirists responsible for the seminal Spitting Image TV show had their grotesque latex puppets, which depicted various politicians, screech the phrase ‘It’s political correctness gone mad!’ in response to any suggestion that people might moderate their language, behaviour or manner to avoid causing unnecessary offence to others.
permanently outraged. When were you last offended on somebody else’s behalf? This morning I saw a Facebook post in which the black politician Diane Abbott’s face had been superimposed onto the body of a morbidly obese woman in an ill-fitting superhero bikini-style costume. The ‘punchline’ was ‘Beware of Blunder Woman’ and I took a moment to ponder both why I felt the person responsible, an Irish newspaper journalist in his early sixties, had crossed a line, and precisely where my own moral compass had drawn that line. Would I have felt the same if the target of the ‘joke’ had been white? On
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There was a case in Somerset a couple of years ago where a councillor, who wasn’t a Muslim, reckoned that the Cross of St George’s associations with the Crusades might be offensive to Muslims and it got reported as a shining example of political correctness gone mad. But do you want to know what really happened?
I will be a bit patronising now. It often seems as if this phrase ‘political correctness’ excuses people from thinking for themselves.
James: Right. This is pretty much straight from Wikipedia. The Council’s head of events at the time was a chap called Chubb. According to him, among other things, Winterval covered Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, which was in October, and the Christmas lights switch-on, which was obviously a few weeks later. It also covered the BBC’s Children in Need, a candlelight service at a stately home in the city, Chinese New Year and New Year’s Eve. It was a well-meaning attempt by a council employee to create a festival season that would bring business to Birmingham for a much longer period than
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It’s hardly Plato’s Symposium, I grant you, but Geoff hasn’t lazily swallowed this nonsense. He has been so relentlessly and unquestioningly exposed to it for so long that he has never stopped to wonder what he actually, personally means by words he routinely uses. He was a bright, personable and successful businessman who had simply never been asked to have a proper think about where he’d ended up and how he’d ended up there. We parted as friends. I wished him a Happy Winterval.
If we think of ‘enforced monogamy’ – or, indeed, voting for a presidential candidate who boasts of ‘grabbing’ women ‘by the pussy’ – as being at the peak of Mount Misogyny, then the best way to begin understanding the view of women that spawns such positions is to take a look at how people end up on its nursery slopes.
I used to think it was very clever to point out to women that they drew this line according to whether or not they were attracted to the man doing the ‘complimenting’, the whistling or even the ‘inappropriate touching’. I see now that this involves me putting the responsibility for my behaviour onto them, a process that ultimately led to another female caller, who we’ll meet shortly, ringing in to tell me that it is somehow a waitress’s fault when she gets groped by a diner.
1984, when the Criminal Review Committee rejected the idea that ‘marital rape’ could be a crime. 1984. I was 12. The language is like something from The Handmaid’s Tale: The majority of us … believe that rape cannot be considered in the abstract as merely ‘sexual intercourse without consent’. The circumstances of rape may be peculiarly grave. This feature is not present in the case of a husband and wife cohabiting with each other when an act of sexual intercourse occurs without the wife’s consent. They may well have had sexual intercourse regularly before the act in question and, because a
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objectification. Literally the action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object, when applied to women it provides the key to understanding why I, as a man, have not only a right but even a duty to insist that women should not be ‘free to choose’ to do certain things.
In January, the Financial Times journalist Madison Marriage went to work undercover as a ‘hostess’ at something called the Presidents Club Dinner. Described, inevitably, as ‘the most un-PC event of the year’ and held at London’s ineffably grand Dorchester Hotel, it saw 360 of the country’s wealthiest men, a couple of politicians and a few celebrities being ‘entertained’ by 130 ‘hostesses’ in uniforms of short dresses and high heels. The undercover investigation revealed that hostesses were routinely groped and harassed at a drunken after-party, while one auction prize offered plastic surgery
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(You’ll notice that I’ve started describing these young women as girls. Nobody’s perfect. I told you this was a work in progress.)
#MeToo movement which saw scores of Hollywood actresses come forward to describe the sexual abuse they had allegedly suffered at the hands of an incredibly powerful producer.
The inchoate anger some men feel at not only having to check their objectification but also to accept that only a woman gets to decide when a woman has sex, is one of the ugliest phenomena at loose in the world today. The misogyny and abuse directed at women online is toxic in the extreme, and female MPs routinely receive rape threats. Determination to combat it should be fuelled by the knowledge that it is not new and, until very recently, these men really did have everything their own way. As with every other philosophy built upon the idea that straight, white men are somehow victims of
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commentators and columnists, the company running Formula 1 motor racing announced that they were doing away with ‘grid girls’ – traditionally attractive young women in skimpy and/or national costume who would hang around the race track carrying umbrellas and being ornamental. The new owner of Formula 1, Liberty Media Corporation, almost certainly made the decision in the hope of attracting a younger, more female audience to the sport. It
titillate
intransigence – an abject refusal to answer a question honestly because the interlocutor is bright enough to realise that to do so would paint him in a bad light. I hope to develop new ones.
I want to live in a society that recognises physical appearance to be an intrinsic part of who we are, without supporting the notion that it is the only thing that matters.
‘virtue signalling’,
In academic language, this process has become known as state-corporate harm maximisation.
An essential prerequisite of fascism, the idea that a person’s ‘quality’ is somehow defined by their birth, gets employed here to attempt moral justification of epic inequality.
The ‘nanny state’ is a phrase now used exclusively to describe mostly good and important attempts to prioritise citizen welfare over corporate greed; and ‘classical liberal’ now has nothing to do with Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith. It’s just a fancy phrase that kids who grew up without ever learning how to share use to describe themselves.
so I cannot quite understand how millennials can contemplate their financial situation without despairing.
three ways to halt the runaway train of structural inequality: income tax, property tax and inheritance tax.
First, neo-liberal entrepreneurship in a post-industrial society will effectively involve identifying markets where normal people are earning a decent living in the hope of introducing technology that will see some of that money end up with neo-liberal entrepreneurs and their backers. Second, the risk of launching new businesses is being increasingly passed from the owners to their underpaid, overworked and widely exploited workforce. Because,
