Last week the actor Laurence Fox appeared on the panel of the BBC programme "Question Time". In response to a comment re Duchess of Sussex from an audience member widely considered to have been planted by the BBC he was accused of being a “white privileged male”. His reply, “I can’t help what I am, I was born like this, it’s an immutable characteristic, so to call me a white privileged male is to be racist — you’re being racist.” was well received by the audience.
And that whole sorry episode reminded me of a conversation just before Christmas ten years ago with a colleague from Wales who told me that after she had told a person summonsed from a support unit at court to go back from where he came from [the particular office] and get the correct information a complaint of racism was made insofar as the individual was Estonian and the implication was that he should return to Estonia. It is scarcely credible that this nonsense was taken seriously and that my colleague had to explain herself. Of course the matter was dropped and the complainant was pacified.
Now ten years later I begin to wonder if the circumstance of my former colleague were to be repeated whether she would still be on the bench or would have become another victim of political correctness gone overboard. But that we have come to such a state of intellectual fear in this country where even the most straightforward of remarks can be so misinterpreted and worse still the complainants are afforded the status of having been verbally abused to placate those who would foster a culture of perpetual conflict amongst us; not the perpetual conflict envisaged by George Orwell in "1984" but the perpetual fear of causing offence resulting in silence instead of comment and inwardness in place of social contact.
No comments:
Post a Comment