This case highlights the complete breakdown of the British sense of identity and the scuttle to grovel to new masters. No words are too harsh for the betrayal by the British establishment (journalists particularly) of their own country and people.

What is it that has caused so complete an unravelling of history, inheritance, independence and intelligence? I am absolutely baffled by it. Has some drug of which we are unaware been poured into the water supply? The sycophancy and self-degradation by public servants particularly, who have always prided themselves on their neutrality, is beyond contempt. We have not seen such squalid and contemptible behavious since imperial Rome.

Anyone who parrots the word 'racism' should immediately be locked away. They are just too obviously completely devoid of any mental faculties.

BBC2 (16/1/04) programme about advocate Di Stefano who gets people like Van Hoogstraaten out of jail by exposing careless processing errors by the Crown.
I'm left thinking that the civil servants are too busy honing their racial awareness skills to have time to ensure the production of a watertight case.

I too find it hard to understand the self-loathing and hysteria that grips so many public servants when it comes to dealing with race issues.

Hopefully, it's just a generational thing (I don't think that my 30-something acquaintances think this way), but I should welcome other peoples' views.

I tend to agree with you Sean...I think that we are perhaps seeing the cumulative weight of certain kinds of sloppy PC 'thought-systems' that have been instituted (particularly in the public services, for perhaps originally good intentions but which have brought about totally unintended results).

Someone the other day mentioned 'slippery slope' well, I don't consider this to be a downward projectory forever - I think that the slippery slope will even out, hit some level ground, and move into an incline on the other side of the valley.

THis is partly about pendulums swinging - away from the vacuum created after the decline of the 'deferential society'. The pendulum will swing back...

While I tend to agree about the idea of a pendulum swinging backw and forth, it could imply a very nasty reversal of policy at some future stage.

I wouldn't want to move from PC paranoia to its opposite - a system in which grossly abusive forms of behaviour went unpunished.

It can't be beyond the wit of man to devise policy structures under which people in positions in authority are expected to behave fairly, without being hauled over the coals for non-existent offences.

Sean,

In the days before PC it was known as fairness, justice and objectivity and was second nature to those in public life. Now we have hysteria, rants and persecution of any one who in any way questions this madness.

PC always strikes me as being very much like some weird religious cult promising salvation for the soul if only the white Christian-background people would abase themselves enough. Kind of like hairshirts for the 21st century.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the members of this independent-minded industrial tribunal. Our desperately conformist, hideously politicised administration will surely find ways of questioning their judgement and suitability for a renewed appointment.

Please don't blame the poor civil servants. I am one myself and we are on a hiding to nothing. Fear of post-Steven Lawrence institutional racism has produced institutional anti-racism that is just as pernicious in different ways.

You cannot produce virtue by legislation. In fact the criminalisation of unfairness saps, rather than fosters, the corresponding virtue. This we should pursue for its own sake, and not from servile fear of the zealots of the political correctness industry.

And at least you know where you stand with racists. It's the anti-racists that you cannot avoid falling foul of without prostituting your intellectual integrity. And if as a civil servant you speak the truth as Melanie has done, what price your job then?

Does it follow then Jonathan that many civil servants are prostituting their intellectual integrity? All the evidence available to me (as a now ex-civil servant) is that they are. That is what is so exceedingly worrying.

Michael

I am afraid that the answer is yes. Many are forced to bow to Rimmon, and it is extremely worrying. That is why we need people like Melanie to speak the truth without fear.

I am a prison officer with over 20 years service and I was delighted with the tribunals ruling, but I fear it is just one isolated outbreak of common sense. The official prison service response to the ruling say's it all.

Ridicule is the most effective way to combat this nonsense. Surely among the host of brilliant British satirists and comedians there are a couple who could create a TV series that mercilessly mocked PC and its adherants. But then getting the BBC to air it might be problematic.

Susan,

Interesting comment. I have often found it richly ironic that PC-zealots often seem to believe in and institute the same closed and 'unquestionable' thought system and with a similar puritanical fervour as their forefathers from the Mayflower did their religious fervour. These two strident and constrasting traditions almost mirror eachother in Anglo-Saxonic countries (partic parts of the UK, parts of the US and New Zealand (for some reason more than Australia). PC just does not exist in the same way in continental Europe where there has always been a more realistic (hypocritical?) ability to compromise on people's 'shortcomings'(whether political, personal, sexual etc) as long as they are 'nice people' and to bend rules accordingly.

The personal and societal aspects amd effects of zealotry (particularly in societies with a political culture of apathy) could provide enough interesting material to keep a blogger busy 24/7!

Slatts,

"Ridicule is the most effective way to combat this nonsense"

Agreed. Although gays are often portrayed as being very straight-laced when it comes to people laughing at PC (and indeed a small minority are), I saw some hilarious turns on the comedy circuit in the late 1980s parodying 'Badgey Dykes' (ie lesbians of a certain type festooned with badges affiliating
them with every PC cause imaginable) - however, this humour is often best done by people from the minority group itself (same with Jewish or black humour) otherwise it can become a bigots charter (look at Bernard Manning's jokes to see what I mean).

Also, parodies rarely work on TV - because they are too sophisticated and cannot compete in the TV ratings game. Look at AbFab for example: it is less a clever parody of the excesses of fashion PR types one of whose daughters is more straight-laced than mum - than a pantomime of grindingly obvious pantomime of 'shocking' behaviour and is grossly puerile. What a wasted opportunity...

I think that PC is a trend now but it will soon back fire. We are being ruled by the 'flower power' people of the sixties - but this kind of nonsense will soon come to an end - if you look at public opinion after Kilroys article, the politicians will begin to feel that they can no longer pamper to the minority view if they hope to stay in power. Politicians change like the wind. Just look at Neil Kinnock the great anti-european labour leader in the early eighties now a european commodant. The prison authorities, like any civil servents should be apolitical, they are there to enforce the laws of the state - not to make their own up. Role on a Labour defeat then we may get back to a country which respects its people (All of them)

I am looking at your predicament from a distance. But I do have concerns as half of my family lives in England. Between the thrust of forcing all women to don the veil in public, and walking with your eyes down and breathing shallowly to not offend anyone with a harsh breath I am saddened the England that I love is gone. I am not sure you will ever see her again, even with the change of direction of the pendulum.

"Surely among the host of brilliant British satirists and comedians there are a couple who could create a TV series that mercilessly mocked PC and its adherants."

Sounds like you need a British version of "South Park."

I am bewildered how we have become sovietised in the UK - the british liberal tradition of defying authority, independence & freedom to speak your mind & embarass the authorities has gone.

it is an ill wind that blows no good - tony blair follows the slobodan milosovick guide to PR and wife cherie has certain things in common with slobos other half - ruthlessness being the main one.

britannia has packed up and gone home - when QE2 dies all we will be left with is memories of greatness. they have tried to airbrush out the achievements of empire but even the thought police are not that powerful.

Today Britain is a neurotic quagmire of mediocrity and most of its citizens aspire to emigrate or retire abroad - as michael caine says in get carter 'it's a cr@phouse'

I think of the UK as the great british dustbin - a transit camp for those trying to get into a decent country like canada, the US, or Nz.

Cliveyboy,

"Today Britain is a neurotic quagmire of mediocrity and most of its citizens aspire to emigrate or retire abroad - as michael caine says in get carter 'it's a cr@phouse'"

Jeez, when I read things like this I truly wonder what the posters are doing in their daily lives...perhaps you might consider 'getting one'?

David, It is of course true that Bristain remains a desirable country to live in (there is ample evidence of its attractions), but is also true that over the last decade its citizens have become notably narcisstic, self-obsessed, and given to displays of noxious emoting (Diana and her aftermath, the endless demands for inquiries and 'closure', which is never allowed to take place). The famous 'stiff upper lip' is nowhere to be found any more. As to mediocrity, I guess it has been true pretty much since Brunel that whilst we may be very good at starting we are hopeless at finishing (railways anyone?).

As to the fed-upness of many citizens and the desire to let away from all the hysteria and breast-beating that seems to be our daily bread (unless you can ignore the media) then for that too there is plenty of evidence in the travel, emigration and second-home abroad figures. Unless your circle is itself of a particularly narrow kind David I would have thought that you too would have come across people who are so-minded.

You are of course right to try and take a positive view, but that does not justify overlooking and dismissing the many reasons that there are to be discontented with 21st century Britain - and the valid concerns about what all these phenomena say about our future.

Michael,

I have my own theories of why this state of affairs has arisen and they are not in the mainstream of thinking (at least not as far as this website is concerned!).

I think that it is a complicated mixture of variables that has led to a no-man's land that is somewhere between the secure and predictable social life of Britain as existed under the deferential society and the future Britain that will have to adjust to the vacuum created by the demise of the deferential society, the huge changes in the economy, religious life, community life, political life etc.

Throw into this a new establishment in which all the elites are out of touch with what the citizens want and in which there are expectations that just cannot be met - and politicians who consistently claim that they can meet them - and you have a huge deficit between what most people regard as 'ideal' and the current reality. Add to this a popular media that celebrates the trivial, simplifies the complex, distorts the truth and likes to find easy scapegoats for complex problems and you have another layer of distortions.

Add to this that the public services are not providing people with what they want (education, health, law and order) and seem to be incapable of doing so - and politicians who seem to be incapable of changing them - and you have a recipe for constant dissatisfaction among the electorate.

Add to this that so much of what used to be 'simple' under the deferential society (political processes, provision of services via the public services) has now become very complex for ordinary citizens to understand let alone influence and has become infested with vested interests that create huge barriers to entry for new ideas etc.

Add to this 'globalisation', 'the constant pressure of technological change', 'stressed-out citizens under pressure constantly to meet targets and deadlines on over-crowded transport routes over which they have complete dependence' and, even though the British are wealthier than ever they would appear to be unhappier.

Add to this the decline in religious belief (and the codes of conduct which were, under the deferntial society, widely accepted as being the right guiding codes for all citizens and which were largely followed and reinforced by all citizens) and the void that has become apparent in people's ability to make sense of their lives in a deep existential way.

When you mix all these up together you have a recipe for all the current confusion and complaint and denial about contemporary British society and the advocation of solutions that will merely make matters worse...

IN fact it is worse: there is no longer an English vocabulary that is intelligible and understandable per se to the majority of people: so many words in relation to 'issues' are loaded with significance and meaning that they did not previously have. Therefore, even simple communications have become far more difficult.

Those, for starters, are some of the reasons I think that contemporary Britain is in the mess it is in...

The majority of the British people have not changed it is the ruling elite who foster stupid laws to undermine freedom of speech that have changed the Britain that I once felt proud of. People have become totally disenfranchised by politics and political parties. This has turned the people in on themselves. Political debate is done in private so as not to offend. All political parties are the same (or very similar) therefore there is no-one to turn to. Perhaps the coalition forces in Iraq should liberate Britain and restore democracy here after they have finished there.

It will take a very courageous person who will be ridiculed by our left wing media to speak out for the people of Britain. Another frightening senario is that the people will turn to the far right in a desperate plea for help.

David,
You point to a great many issues that each deserve careful consideration. I do not have time to give them the thought that they deserve but I will make two comments. Firstly the deferential society had the merit that one knew to whom one deferred (or to put it another way to whom one had obligations and responsibilities). Our non-deferential society is completely at sea and is as unable to discern cause and effect as is a dog, responsive only to slaps and treats. That perhaps lies at the heart of so much of the disengagement and anomie that we see around us.

Secondly you do not mention the consequences of the wave of feminism that has completely overwhelmed our society previously run on masculine values. This has not strengthened society but weakened it, not because feminism is not a strength when melded with masculinity but because masculinity has been so comprehensively undone - not to say trashed - that we have become precariously one-sided in our 'orientation'. To refer back to the original source of this thread, a more masculine society would never have reacted to Mr Hammond in the way that the courts in fact did. We however, have become fearful of even intellectual confrontation, and seek to suppress (brush under the carpet in the old phrase) anything that raises uncomfortable questions. One cannot feel confident about the sustainability of such a society.

While fears can of course be exaggerated it seems to me that there are grounds for serious concern about what is happening to Britain - not least of course the fact that so many of us with concerns only whinge about them in blogs!

Michael,

You make interesting points. The point I was trying to make was that there are a number of variables that have created the current situation, they are complex, and there is no way of merely turning back the clock - rather in the same way as it is not possible to 'diss-invent' inventions.

The result, in my view, is that people will increasingly retreat into searching for their own solutions as individuals and as communities with other like-minded people. They will therefore tend to 'shop' for solutions to education, law and order and health and rely less on public systems. This is what one might term 'libertarianism' - I guess an extreme form of Thatcherism in which the state plays less and less role in the daily lives of people who are treated as adults in terms of their actions but take (and pay for the consequences) of their actions. Hence a 'libertarian solution' to health provision might be to say: if you smoke, drink, have unprotected sex that is YOUR right - but equally YOUR look out - you will have to fend for yourself given the consequences. This might ultimately be the only way of making people exercise responsible choices...

Well, the Norwich tribunal didn't quite, as Melanie states, "throw the book" at the Prison Service. They obediently pulled their punches and were themselves guilty of weasel political correctness. After making some forthright comments, they jump backwards to add: "This was a one-off incident: an injudicious remark by a man under stress with a good record over many years ..."

The implication is that expressing contempt for mass murderer of innocents Osmana Bin Liner is something that should be forgiven because it wouldn't be repeated. That expressing contempt for a man who chillingly and over a period of time organised the murder of over 3,000 people going about their lives and declared war on the entire enlightened West, was "injudicious" is remarkably emetic.

They started off well enough, but they just couldn't resist that officious craving to prove how inclusive and non-judgemental they are. As far as I'm concerned, those statements at the end trash their whole ruling. That's not how you kick ass.

Caroline

Glad to see you back - and in fighting fettle. I had similar thoughts myself about the lay-off line in the Norwich statement. The incident was a farce and has since become a pantomine. BTW, has the P.O. been allowed to return to his job? I would have thought that the actions of his superiors would make it very difficult for him to perform his duties effectively with their condemnation hanging over his head. Makes him very vulnerable to false accusations by the cunning cons who never miss a trick.

I read the original article and was initially heartened by the tribunals comments regarding the prison governer. Great I thought, sanity at last. However, the trubunal further stated, and this is not a direct quote, 'other sensible avenues were open to the governor such as sending the employee on a race awareness programme'. A race awareness programme because of a joke? No doubt to 're-educate' the man to feel properly disgusted with his hateful white attitudes. Not POLITICAL CORRECTNESS but political correctness.

Derek

Unfortunately those we talk about probably never read this type of blog. They are too busy composing the tracts for their next stage of Gramscian cultural hegemony. But no doubt they have to take Melanie into account, given her main platform.

Derek - You are kidding! I didn't see that! Then they're even more contemptible than I posted above. I sensed something officious and preachy about them, above, but this is a lulu.

Making a disparaging remark about a mass murderer who is sworn to destroy democracy and Western civilisation is a *race* crime? He couldn't disapprove of mass murder in its own right? The officer made his comment not because he was revolted and angered by what a spot of DNA formerly known as OBL had done, but because he was an Arab? Are they entirely serious?

And these are the twerps who opined that the Prison Board was out of touch with reality?

That prison officer should, of course, be instituting a suit for racism against the Prison Board and the Tribunal because they were essentially attacking him for being white and indigenous. Second, he should get his MP to investigate these individuals' employment contracts. Third, he should start a website for support.

How *dare* these jumped-up nobodies! The impudence!

Caroline,

We are ALL out of touch with reality. The principal reason we are so susceptible to PC is precisely that the reality of race cannot be acknowledged.

The English never wanted to share their country with (and in due course lose it to) the whole world. Why would they? No people seeks its own displacement and deracination. On the contrary, all the evidence is that we, like any other people in any other part of the world, feel most secure and most at peace when we live among our own kind. It could not be otherwise, whatever egalitarians say. Human bio-diversity - meaning race - exists as an extremely extended family which developed with separation and which, like any organism, seeks its own survival.

But such a clear and unambiguous anchor to reality has been thoroughly demonised, delegitimised, indeed criminalised. The most insistent and hectoring voices have filled the vaccuum with a false moral prospectus. They offend our senses but the language we might use to say so has been proscribed.

The problem for reasonable people is that stopping PC is not the end of it, but the beginning. For the pendulum that Michael and David referred to above is the one that will swing from the unnatural back to the natural, from acquiesence in deracination to the re-acquisition of racial singularity. And that would be a very great but also very terrible thing.

I hear what everyone says on this subject. And the diagnoses is clear. But what is the cure?

Jon

"I hear what everyone says on this subject. And the diagnoses is clear. But what is the cure?"

If my memory serves me correctly you have asked this question on different threads, from time to time.

I offer a one word,universal cure to your universal question:
Death!

"And these are the twerps who opined that the Prison Board was out of touch with reality?"

Sometimes one has to be pragmatic. The Tribunal's comments will make it that much harder for the Prison Service to appeal against the ruling.

The Tribunal's sympathies are, I think, pretty clear.

Thanks Frank that has cheered me up no end.

Guessedworker,

"The English never wanted to share their country with (and in due course lose it to) the whole world. Why would they? No people seeks its own displacement and deracination. On the contrary, all the evidence is that we, like any other people in any other part of the world, feel most secure and most at peace when we live among our own kind."

Speak for yourself. I, for one, would have little to live for if it were not for African or Latin American influenced music, North-African cuisine or Persian literature, for example.

Also, I would not enjoy the standard of living I currently enjoy without the mass influx of immigrants into Britain in the 1960s (whom re-ignited the UK economy)and the subsequent stream of people wanting to do jobs that the Brits are (to be frank) to lazy to be engaged in.

Furthermore, on a global scale, we cannot ignore that our own well being is intimately bound up with the suffering of others. We have no moral right to exclude people from our country whilst draining each and every availiable resource from their land with no environmental or ethical constraints. Not to mention the active role of the UK government in supplying arms (blatently used for internal repression) in countries such as Indonesia, Usbekistan or Saudi Arabia.

Anyway - There is no telos of "racial singularity" in nature. Surely, the broader the "gene pool" the better the crop. Your post is living proof.

I feel soiled by having responded to your vile, racist outburst but, what the hell.

Jon

It was meant to! It's when you realise that Death is the only only answer to all problems that you start enjoy what's left, despite the problems. It's a great life really - if you compare it with the only real alternative. Take care.

Hello Guy,

You sound as though you have an abiding interest in Arabic and Persian culture and, perhaps, spirituality. That's interesting but perhaps not the most encouraging starting point for a discussion about "politicheskaya pravil'nost".

However, on the three issues of substance you raise, I reply as follows:-

1) Commonwealth immigration from 1948 was not engendered by lazyness in the British workforce. It flowed directly from Bernard Montgomery's insistence upon a 500,000-strong standing army to face down the Soviets in Germany. That meant the continuation of conscription and, thereby, a paucity of workers for low-grade occupations.

Guy, are you conflating the nihilistic trade unionism of the '60's and, especially, '70's with the British "lazyness"? It seems so to me. But, obviously, that would be quite wrong.

In any case, what is your evidence that immihgrants fired the economy of that time? Please visit Migrationwatch where you will find some well-informed commentary on whether we ever needed or need now large-scale low-IQ immigration from the Third World.

2. Golly, what a confused, Monbiotic diatribe your fourth para is. Why on earth should the natives of English towns be dispossessed by Third Worlders because of the activities of arms companies abroad? What blood do said natives have on their hands? You are making no sense at all and really need to be a bit less of a bleeding heart, old chum.

3. I have an active, layman's interest in genetics. I am sorry, but your fifth para is deeply wrong. Human bio-diversity is a fact. Visit Gene Expression, a great US blog run by two brown guys. It will open your eyes.

Good luck.

The irony in all of this is that Osama Bin Laden & Co. don't pull any sticks about making all kinds of really, truly racist and hate-mongering remarks about Western people.

Which leads me to wonder how we are ever going to defeat them if we shackle any type of authority with this kind of ludicrous thought and speech control.

It's almost as if we are the new Jews who go cheerfully singing and sheeplike into the gas chambers.

I didn't realise that having an interest in cultural products outside our what...western? English? Anglo-Saxon? Viking? frame of reference constitutes PC.

If Melanie Phillip's "thought police" are anywhere it seems to be in the over-liberal use of the term "PC" to dismiss any questioning of rightist dogma.

Anyway, my point was that any society based upon "racial singularity" would be heinously cuturally impoverished. What could a "racially singularist" England offer - badly cooked food? Morris Dancing?

As for your apparently "well-informed" Migration Watch - they are nothing but a nasty bunch of right-wing propagandists whose agenda is even too much for David Blunkett to swallow. Their statistics have been challenged across the board.

The idea of people being "dispossesed" by immigrants is nothing but right-wing fantasy. I can think of few major waves of immigration that have literally "overwhealmed" a whole culture or people (for example, the mass influx of Chinese into Malaysia at the behest of the colonial powers). As it stands, immigrant populations in Europe span 2-5%.

As for my Monbiotic diatribe (thanks for the compliment BTW) - I think that these are the basic coordinates within which we have to think of the situation. We (and this means the yokel "natives of English towns" who at least by some sort of Lockean tacit consent cannot evade responsibility for deeds committed in their name)have to deal with the global imbalance largely (if not entirely) engineered by western powers.

Sorry, "old chap", for introducing morality into the equation but this is something which belongs exclusively to the domain of human self-consciousness and cannot be explained away with genetics.

Perhaps you could use your time more constructively by trawling through the websites of the BNP or US white supremacists. You may find some friends.