Edward has been studying the effects of political correctness
His Queen Mother story caused a furore
 TWENTY years ago most people weren’t aware of the concept of political correctness. These days we hear and read about “political correctness gone
mad” on a daily basis.
It’s a term that covers everything from the outlawing of offensive language to the decision to ban conkers in a playground.
Edward Stourton (right), a former TV journalist who presents the
Today programme on Radio 4, decided to tackle the topic in his new book published last week,
It’s A PC World; What It Means to Live In A Land Gone Politically
Correct.
He found himself in the news instead of just reading it when he recounted in the book a meeting with the Queen Mother in which she claimed the European Union could never succeed due to “all those Huns, Wops and Dagos”.
He dubbed Her Majesty in hindsight “a ghastly old bigot”.
The book will disappoint those looking for list of “political correctness gone mad” stories
as he weighs up the origins, benefits and dangers of political correctness in the modern world. Edward told James Millar The Honest Truth about political correctness.
DID YOU expect the furore over the Queen Mother story?
I knew it would get attention. I had to think before putting it in the book — after all it was a private conversation. But it’s a good story and it makes a point.
I’m not sure if I wasn’t a bit po-faced in my reaction. A lot of people have told me I should have just laughed and when I recounted it at a literary festival the other week most of the audience did laugh.
WHAT IS political correctness?
It’s almost impossible to define. In the book I define it in terms of how it has been used. In Britain and the US it began as a tool of the
left associated with feminism and anti-racism. Then in the 1980s it became associated with identity politics as the left moved from
class-based activism to championing people previously denied rights, such as homosexuals. In both cases it was hijacked
by the other side as a term of abuse.
Though in the George W. Bush era in America there’s been a right-wing version called Patriotic Correctness — the idea that some things can’t be challenged post 9/11.
WHY DOES it elicit such strong views?
The term has become a focus for all sorts of things people feel awkward about in modern Britain, from outlawing conkers to the smoking ban. It’s
a sort of ideological hold-all into which people throw things that make them anxious.
Researching this book mostly involved just talking to people at work or at dinner parties. I’ve been ranted at a lot while putting it together!
DO THEY have political correctness in other countries?
It affects Britain and the US much more than the rest of the world. The French particularly
don’t get it and I put it down to the difference between our Puritan culture and the Catholic culture
on the continent — we’re more susceptible to strict codes.
It’s worth noting that the only people who have tried to ban Christmas are Puritans and
PC-ers.
WHEN DID it start?
The first example I found was a US Supreme Court judgment from 1792. But the first example of it being used in a modern sense is in 1970 by black feminist Toni Cade. It grew out of the late 1960s enthusiasm among the left for Mao’s
Little Red Book and the idea that there was a correct line on everything.
IS POLITICAL correctness a good or bad thing?
It’s better than we think it is, better than it’s given credit for. I gave a lecture recently and asked who in the room thought PC was a good thing and no hands went up.
But when I read out three individual stories from that day’s papers — the Formula One row over racism towards Lewis Hamilton, a story about French school books tackling stereotypes and Silvio Berlusconi’s comments about Barack Obama being “tanned” — everyone came out totally PC in their reaction.
There are moral and religious principles we’d like to be able to live up to but can’t. With PC it’s the other way round, we rubbish it but actually live up to it.
EXAMPLE OF political correctness as a bad thing?
I interviewed Peter White, the BBC’s disability affairs correspondent, who also
happens to be blind.
He made the point that he’d never stop me using any particular phrase — people get particularly bound up with whether to use “people with disabilities” or “disabled people” — because
he feels over-sensitivity about language distracts from debate about real issues.
We should be able to discuss issues without getting into a tangle about offending people with the terms we use.
ANY EXAMPLES of PC as a good thing?
When interviewing a retired general on Today about British troops withdrawing from Iraq, he said the issue of the police in Basra would be “the nigger in the woodpile”.
He apologised for using the term and I’m very glad that phrase is no longer deemed acceptable. In the dictionary of slang the N-word has about 96 entries, there’s a huge culture of discrimination associated with that word, some people don’t understand that.
WHAT’S BEEN the impact on language?
The changes in language reflect the changes in attitudes. There aren’t many words we no longer use in the name of political correctness and those that are no longer acceptable are probably best that way. I think it’s a good thing if we think harder about the words we use. It makes us more sensitive to whether we’re liable to cause offence.
But I find it annoying if worrying about whether to call someone chairman, chair, chairperson or even chairper-daughter — as has been suggested to point up the ridiculousness of the situation — distracts from the meat of a story.
Bulldozer once meant a man employed to beat slaves, but it would be absurd to try and ban that word now. Similarly there’s an idea that PC-ers would rather we refer to short people as “vertically challenged” but I’ve never heard that term used in anything other than an ironic way.
And ignorance accounts for some examples of political correctness gone mad. For example I heard of someone being
ticked off for using the word “niggardly” in a meeting.
WHY ARE there so many “political correctness gone mad” stories?
They encompass areas that make people anxious and catch the eye. They’re the ones people talk about. The trouble is a lot of them only contain a germ of truth but once they get into people’s minds they don’t go away.
A famous one is the case of Birmingham Council rebranding Christmas as Winterval. They did run a promotional campaign called Winterval, but they also carried on with Christmas traditions like trees in town squares and lights in the city centre.
Occasionally these stories are dangerous. One newspaper carried a headline “Christmas is banned; it offends Muslims”. But there was nothing in the story to support that claim. In fact Muslims are not offended by Christmas at all and, as well as Jews, generally think it’s a good thing that the nation gives up time to a religious festival.
ARE YOU PC?
I’m quite PC but I enjoy some very un-PC pleasures such as shooting pheasants and eating
foie gras. I work for the BBC, which is often painted as being painfully PC, but it’s painted as lots of things depending on your agenda.
A friend made a programme about police investigations into honour killings — in at least a couple of cases he’d heard the police hadn’t investigated properly because of political correctness. That was totally un-PC but it went out on the BBC.
I certainly wasn’t PC in my youth. I discovered some articles I’d written aged 19 while at university poking fun at feminism
in entirely unfunny terms. It made for painful reading!
But I think if anyone my age met their younger self they’d discover they held some views now considered un-PC.
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