Workers' Liberty

If you haven't heard about this already you might like to look at this article.

Its about a Tory councillor and prospective Parliamentary candidate, Ellenor Bland, sending a horrendously racist poem around the office. She says she recieved it from her husband, who is also a Tory councillor. This just gets better.

I've read the poem before as my grandfather decided to show it to me. He knows my politics and thought it might be fun to see my reaction to it. He also likes to ask me when I'm going to leave for China. He's a card. Anyway, the poem basically attacks immigrants as lazy and accuses them of cynically living off the welfare state. Its not a new idea, and neither is it new for Conservatives to be voicing it. What is remarkable about the whole thing is the response of Mrs Bland to the scandal.

Mrs Bland is claiming first of all that she's not a racist, even though the poem refers to "the white race". After all, she says, she didn't write it. She did, however, choose to forward it with the subject heading "Oh Yes!" though, which hardly displays much scepticism about the content.

She also has claimed, in a move that sets my teeth on edge, that this is an example of "political correctness gone too far". I absolutely hate this idea, and not because I necessarily want to identify with everything considered political correctness, but because it seems to me that this case provides a good example of how the term is used these days. When was the last time you can think of someone using the term "political correctness" favourably? It has become a concept everyone opposes, although usually in quite a non-specific way.

What is "political correctness"? What did it used to mean and, more importantly what does it mean now? Also how can it go too far? How can you have too much correctness? It's like being told 2+2=3 is mathematically incorrect, but that 2+2=5 isn't incorrect, it is instead too mathematically correct. Surely political correctness gone too far, or political correctness "gone mad", if it really exists, is simply incorrectness in a different way. But we can't call it that, as the racists and bigots want to be able to use the term "politically correct" to attack any and every measure to label them as the bigots they are. To be able to do that its meaning has to remain ambivalent and contradictory. In other words being wrong is now being too correct, and as such correctness is tainted with wrongness, if that makes any sense.

No one wants to be called too politically incorrect as it seems to imply that you can't take a joke. The irony of this is that middle England, middle aged, middle class, white Tory councillors set themselves up as the defenders of the great British sense of humour. Yet they're the first ones writing in to complain at any program by Chris Morris, or the Jerry Springer opera. The list could go on and on.

Its strangely appropriate that this scandal happened on the week Borat was released. The message of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" is that we now live in a society where, for the most part, people are aware that racism, sexism, and homophobia are bad, and that they're not something that you can admit to agreeing with. However, given half a chance people will open up to this idiot from Kazakstan confronting them and show how none of these ideas have gone away.

There's a particularly brilliant, and shocking, scene in the film where Borat hitches a lift with three frat boys across California. Almost from the word go they begin to explain to him how hard white men have it in America, how the minorities control everything. As Fry put it much more succintly in Futurama: "The less fortunate get all the breaks!". The idea that, against the vast array of statistical evidence to the contrary, ethnic minorities control everything and keep white people from speaking out seems to me to be at the heart of this idea of "political correctness" stifling political discourse and humour. What these students actually want, what they mean by their desire for "equality" with minorities, is made all too clear when they start explicitly bemoaning the fact that slavery is no longer legal. And they aren't joking. They're drunk, but they're not joking.

Anyway, that's probably a really long winded way of getting to the conclusion that what these kind of idiots, like the American frat boys in Borat or the racist Tory councillors, really want is to stop the inroads made on their own supremacy. It's not a particularly daring conclusion, but I'm worried, if not surprised, by it's absence from a lot of mainstream commentary.