Apropos of my last post and the Honourable Member (in its double entendre sense) for Monmouth, David - with a nonentit-’e’ Davies - Laban Tall has kindly popped up in the comments and pointed me towards this fine example of David’s unquestioned commitment to equality and tolerance.

Sunday, August 28, 2005 - More PC nonsense

A story in the Telegraph revealed that a £48000 lottery grant is being used to make a film about the “traditions” of gypsy travellers.

The film will be shown to schoolchildren in Hampshire. I have written the following letter to the chief executive of the Lottery.

If my application is unsuccesful (as I suspect it will be) it might at least prompt them to think about the double standards they apply when handing out barrel loads of cash to groups who want preferential treatment.

Copy of Letter to Carole Souter Director Heritage Lottery Fund 7 Holbein Place London:

I am writing to you in the hope that you might see fit to consider my interesting, vital and culturally-relevant application for a grant from the “Your Heritage” scheme.

Following on from the £48,000 you gave for the production of a video aimed at giving schoolchildren a greater understanding of the culture and traditions of “Gypsy Travellers,” I am very keen to commission an equally “useful” and “informative” piece of film that will serve to educate said “gypsy travellers” on some of the ancient traditions and communal practices of another group of people, who we might called “settled folk”.

I use the term to describe that large group of people in Britain who opt to live their lives in houses or flats. Although large in number “settled folk” often face prejudice and misunderstanding from gypsy travellers when they come into contact with them.

I should like my film to focus on such issues as the importance which the “settled community” place on property rights, their rigid adherence to an ancient code which they refer to as “planning regulations,” and the time honoured custom of clearing up one’s rubbish. Should time allow we could also include a section about the cardboard circle which settled folk purchase annually from post offices and use to adorn their vehicles - known as a tax disc.

The film could then be distributed to traveller sites across the country to give travellers an insight into the customs of the settled community. I am sure you will agree that this film will be as worthwhile and relevant as the one currently being made in Hampshire. I look forward to receiving confirmation that you find this project acceptable and will ask a film maker to get in touch.

Now I could make a few smart arse observations about pot and kettles, living in glass houses or ‘you’re a fine one to talk’, but instead I think I’ll simply borrow a word or two from John Cooper Clarke:

What kind of creature bore you
Was is some kind of bat
They can’t find a good word for you,
but I can…

TWAT.

If, as Jay Leno suggested, politics is showbusiness for ugly people, then parliamentary conventions such as private members’ bill and early day motions must be something akin to Warhol’s oft-cited aphorism about everyone having ‘fifteen minutes of fame’.

The majority of EDMs and PMBs often seem to be little more than a convenient means for a back-bench nonentity to stick their head above the parliamentary parapet in the vain hope that someone might just notice their existence…

…and so it transpires that this week’s honourable meerkat is one Claire Curtis-Thomas MP, who appears to have been the MP for Crosby since 1997, not as if anyone outside Crosby appears to have noticed this, and her particular bete noir, which she’s currently hawking around the press after the fashion of a mendicant friar, truns out to be ‘Lad’s Mags’ and the Daily/Sunday Sport, which she thinks should be consider pornography and consigned to the retail purgatory that is the newsagent’s top shelf.

As to exactly why Claire has suddenly chosen to the let the outside know of her existence, one can only speculate, although one has to wonder whether the impending disappearance of her constituency in the next tranche of Boundary Commission changes might not just have a little something to with it, not least as the seat that will replace Crosby - Sefton Central - has all the appearances of being a Tory-Lib Dem marginal.

Other than that, it appears Claire’s most notable achievements since becoming an MP lie in her being one of the few engineers in parliament, and possible the only female engineer, coupled with stints on the Science and Technology, Home Affairs and, since the last election, Trade and Industry Select Committees and the unenviable record of being parliament’s most expensive MP in 2003/4 and second most expensive in 2002/3, much of which seems to come down to her racking up some pretty hefty postage bills. However, and to be scrupulously fair, a qucik look over her voting record at They Work For You turns up a few pleasant surprises, notably rebellions on ID cards, where she voting against the creeping compulsion aspects of designated documents, so she does have one or two things to recommend her.

All that, however is by the by as what I’m really interested in her is her ‘topshelf campaign‘, out of which, just this week, she’s scored herself a short op-ed piece in the Indy - which, amazingly, isn’t stuck behind their usual  pay-per-view - plus a piss-poor fluff piece by Zoe Williams over at the Graun, which prompted this nicely constructed evisceration by Matt at Fisking Central (via Antonia).

Now, as regulars might know, MoT is hardly a bastion of political correctness, not because your erstwhile commentator is a seething bundle of isms and ists but simply because I really can’t be doing with all the po-faced euphemisms and other mealy-mouthed bullshit that goes with being PC, even if it does sometimes get me into trouble as, from time to time, I get readers who can’t really tell is I’m for real or just being deliberately ironic in some of my comments.

So, for starters, if Claire is looking for an argument that’ll convince me that the likes of Zoo, Nuts and FHM should be consigned to the top-shelf she’d be much better served by playing on the natural sense of curmudgeonliness that all folks of my age begin to develop - in short, if teenage lads want something to wank over then I don’t see why they should have it any easier than I did at their age or be deprived of the opportunity to learn a valuable skill in the process; that of distracting the newsagent while one of your mates shop-lifts a copy of Fiesta.

Kids today, they just have it way too fucking easy.

That aside, the problem I have with Claire’s campaign is not that I object to here put forward the idea that some sort of age restriction on access to Lads Mags might not have some merit but rather that she doesn’t seem to entirely clear exactly what her campaign is really all about.

The obvious parallel to draw here is between this Claire and the other, rather more well-known Clare (Short) and her campaign to get the tits off page three of the Sun - although she might have been better served in trying to get the twats out of News International… but that’s another story.

The thing with Clare Short is that while I can’t say I agreed with her campaign, simply from the standpoint of not being comfortable with anything that smack of official censorship, at the very least I could respect where she was coming from. Clare’s objection to ‘page three’ was consistently based on her feminist beliefs and principles, so you knew exactly where she was coming from on this issue and why and you could, therefore, respect her views purely on that basis alone. The whole thing was commendable honest, clear and completely above board.

The problem I have with our latter day Claire is that it’s not possible to say the same - drill down into Indy article a little way and you find much the same feminist-inspired arguments about the ‘objectification as women’ that were the hallmark of the other’s Clare’s ruckus with the Sun over a decade ago, which is fair enough, if that’s what she really thinks.

Trouble is, when it gets to the sound-bites that’s not Claire’s line at all - no, when there’s a headline to written it’s stuff the feminist principles cos I’m really only doin’ it for the kids…

Now, again, if Claire, or anyone, genuinely thinks that the content of Lad’s Mags and the Daily Sport is a bit too strong for unrestricted public comsumption by minors then that’s fair enough - its a valid line of argument - but it’s not one that necessarily sits well with the whole principled feminist view of the whole situation.

The fact is that you don’t have to see what some people would consider to be ’soft porn’ as being exploititive or demeaning to women in order to take the view that it not really the kind of thing that you want to be seeing kids get hold of, so it really makes no sense at all to conflate that view of things with a more generalised objection to porn based on a view that:

Women in these publications are shown only as cheap, contemptible sexual commodities, fit to be subjected to a range of exploitative, violent and degrading activities.

Okay, so might reasonable for society to prefer teenage lads to grow up with a rather more positive view of women but I’ve still never quite seen the logic behind the contention that something that’s intolerable because its allegedly exploitative, violent and degrading suddenly becomes tolerable, or at least more tolerable, simply on account of a birthday.

It’s probably more of a realistic line of argument to say that some of the stuff in Lad’s mags, definitely in to top-shelf stuff, tends to create a rather unrealistic set of expectations when it comes to sex, although probably no more so than the kind of strange expectations that school sex education is science lesson did back in my day, wherin the actual mechanics of intercourse tended to be decribed hurriedly in terms of the penis entering the vagina, following which ejaculation occurs - probably no to far from the truth for most lads the first couple of time, but you would have thought they might just have got around to mentioning the wiggling it about a bit stage in-between…

…which is the bit that most lads picked up courtesy of the traditional art of shop-lifting for ‘jazz’ mags, because the only time you’d hear any talk of thrust in the classroom was during a physics lesson.

Then again, the whole legal framework around sexuality and pornography is raddled with hypocrisy anyway. Sex is legal at sixteen - with consent, obviously - but porn, even of the old-school soft porn variety is a no-no until you hit eighteen, which seems to me to make no sense at all unless the period from 16 to 18 is supposed to be some sort of apprenticeship stage where you’re expected just to stick to the basics - I’m guessing that thrust gets a mention in school sex-ed classes these days - before moving on to the advanced stuff a bit later on.

The other slightly sureal aspect all this for me is the suggestion that there’s somehow an equivalence between the likes of FHM and the kind of mags you actually find on the top-shelf in newsagents. That may well be the case in relation to WH Smiths, which I can’t say I recall ever really carrying a significant range of top-shelf stuff - Playboy and Penthouse always seemed to be the limits for Smith’s - soft porn, sure, but also soft-focus and with a few ‘artistic’ pretentions. Rarely, if even, can I recall ever seeing Smith’s selling even the slightly stronger brit-porn mags like Fiesta or Mayfair… you had to shop-lift in John Menzies to pick up those.

Head down to your local independent newsagent, these days, and things look very different from when I was I was teenager.

Back then, pretty much as much as you could get away with in terms of pictorials was the classic ’solo girl giving the shagpile an airing’ look - to get hold of anything more explicit without a trip down to Soho in those meant you were limited to a strictly black and white magazine called forum, which was about the size of one those booklets that Reader’s Digest used to post out in obscence quanitiies, nver to be read by anyone with the merest shred of personality. If you taste’s ran to anything more exotic then either got lucky with the latest ‘Reader’s Wives’ or you could forget it.

These days the dividing line between legal and illegal in terms of what you can get away with on the top shelf seems to be a matter of couple of millimeters’ this being distance that the tongue is required to remain away from actually touching the stiffy, and the range of different material on offer in your average newsagent cum convenience store - straight, gay, fetish ,etc - seems to be enough to exhaust even the most dedicated consumer, and that’s without even touching on the whole realms of satellite porn channels and, of course, the internet.

These things are relative, of course, but even the most in-your-face Lad’s mag is still as far, if not farther from, the kind of stuff you find on the top-shelf, these days, than page three was from the average top-shelf mag of 20-25 years ago.

Let’s be frank here - and I don’t mean that twatty government-fiction of a Frank, either - if what you’re genuinely concerned about is kids getting hold of explicit material then you’d be better off legislating to ban the supply of internet connections to parents without a mandatory piece of net nanny software and the training to configure the fucking thing properly - getting all fired up over the nipple count in the current FHM is really just pissing in the wind on this one.

Somewhere off the back of all this there’s a sensible and adult debate to be had about pornography and its position in society, the kind of debate that looks at liberalising some of the present regulations on content while putting in place effective and sensible restrictions on access, and most importantly of all, as with what should be the approach to  prostitution, providing adequate protection in law for industry workers.

Somwhere is all that, there may well be room to consider whether anything can be done to channel society’s routine surfeit of overheated teenage testosterone in the direction of a somewhat more positive view and appreciation of women - but if there is something that can be done then I very much doubt that’s it going to revolve around sticking Lad’s mags on the top shelf - you’d think that by now we’d have all got the message that prohibition simply doesn’t work.

If anyone’s looking for an idea that might have some effect, then I’d suggest you think more in terms of the growing market for porn aimed primarily at women, much of which is being made by women producers and directors and which tends to offer an much more naturalistic and in most respects romantic/erotic view of sex and sexuality than the usual kind of ‘let’s see how many orifices we can fill and get the camera in real close’ kind of stuff that dominates much of the material that’s produced, directed and aimed at men.  As a good friend of mine noted a while back, when she’s watching porn with her girlfriend (and no, that’s not a typo) they can tell within the first few minutes of scene whether the director was male or female without checking the credits simply because, as she put in her usual forthright manner, ‘real dykes just don’t shag like they do in the movies’.

(I ought to say, in addition, that based on personal experience of the university I attended, there was no quicker or more effective means of getting well-rid of any illusions or pretensions of political correctness than a weekly drinking session in the SU bar with the girls of the LGB Soc, most of whom could, on their own, out un-PC a battallion of Royal Marines and who were all the best drinking buddies for it - so there…)

Who knows, maybe there a partial answer somewhere in that - keep the age restriction on the more extreme stuff at 18, maybe even up the restriction to 21 on really in-your-face material, but allow 16-17 year olds to have access to the kind of naturalistic, genuine, erotica that’s becoming increasingly popular amongst women, the kind that depicts sex as mutual, and dare I say, loving experience. If anything, its much more logical response than simple prohibition to the Claire’s question about:

what message does it send to boys and young men about the value that society places on women? 

Is it not better to give a postive message that values sex and sexuality than no message at all - especially if one believes that what teenagers see in magazines, on TV or on the internet has any significant influence on attitudes? Who know, given, a slight more enlightened view of such things and you might even end up, for the first time in British history, with a generation of young men who not only know what a clitoris is but where to find it and what to do with it when they get there - which has to be a improvement over the current situation.

Like it or not, porn is, these days, a bona fide industry - you may not like the product but you can’t pretend either that there isn’t a massive.and highly lucrative market for or it or that, these day, there aren’t a hell of lot of women making a damn good living out of it at all levels of the industry and not just from being the product itself - all of which makes the kind of obvious gesture politics of Claire’s top-shelf campaign look rather banal and futile, however well intentioned it may be.

It appears that Trevor Phillips is in one of his making a complete arse of himself moods yet again, if this report from the Meeja Grauniad is anything to go by…

Writing in the Beeb’s in-house, Ariel, Phillps has argued for an amendment to the Race Relations Act requiring the Beeb to publish information on training, retention rates and complaints, as well as data it already provides on targets and recruitment, clearly having failed to notice that the BBC is covered by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for everything except for information held for purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature - so he could just submit an FOIA request like everyone else and save the trouble of adding yet more unnecessary legislation to the statute books.

However, its not just information that Phillips is after, as he goes on to explain here…

The duty would make them subject to regulation by the CRE in terms of their programmes for promotion of ethnic minorities - to some extent, the balance of what they broadcast and to a large extent, what they do on training and how they treat different ethnic groups among their staff

So the CRE want to regulate the Beeb, which is supposed to be an independent and impartial public service broadcaster, in terms of programming and employment - to what end exactly?

Apparently, this one…

The BBC currently employs 10.2% of its staff from black and ethnic minorities, and 5.2% of its senior management. Targets for the end of 2007 are 12.5% and 7% respectively.

Mr Phillips said the BBC’s targets were still too low.

"It’s fine for [the BBC director of television] Jana Bennett to aim for a 10% target on screen, of characters and contributors, because that chimes with, or even exceeds, the percentage of minorities in the national audience.

"But on employment, the pool from which the BBC draws two-thirds of its staff [in cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester] is one-third ethnic minority.

"Do the sums: 10.2% is way underperforming. It’s not hideous, but it’s not good."

Now hang on a minute there, Trevor, what’s all this the pool from which the BBC draws two-thirds of its staff [in cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester] is one-third ethnic minority all about?

For one thing, the Beeb, being a national broadcaster, is likely to attract applicants for any number of positions from across the whole of the UK - it might be likely that applicants for admin jobs, etc. would be mainly local but for many of the technical jobs and particularly jobs in journalism, production etc. the actual pool from which the Beeb draws its employees will be the whole of the UK and maybe, even, beyond. There are plenty of people out there looking for a career of some sort in the broadcast media who will, and do, relocate to take a job at the Beeb, so on that basis alone you’re stretching the point with your one-third ethnic minority population line.

Then there’s the little matter of commuting to take into account - if one is talking about the potential ‘pool’ from which an employer might draw his employees, that pool is delimited not just by the city in which the employer is based or has a workplace but by the effective distance that potential employees are willing to commute to work. Birmingham, which of the example given is the city I know best, may have a minority population of just under 30%, but if one looks at the figures for the West Midlands Region, which one could reasonably regard as the commuter area for Birmingham, this figure drops to 11.2% - in which case 10.2% is hardly underperforming by much and if the Beeb hits its 12.5% target it’ll be overperforming by comparison with the regional statistics as a whole.

Phillips then goes on…

Mr Phillips said BBC News was in danger of failing to address its black and Asian audience because of the under-representation of ethnic minorities.

"There’s a whole panoply of rules that govern BBC journalism, all directed to one end, which is to tell the story fairly and comprehensively," he said.

"People tend to focus on that in party political terms, but actually, in modern Britain, the more serious bias is about whether huge chunks of the community are not having their voices heard or their perspectives addressed.

"Newsrooms which are monocultural are in danger of being like comedy that isn’t funny. Without cultural knowledge, you don’t ask the right questions.

"You can be the most brilliant interviewer, but if the team that’s briefing you has no idea about the influence of South Asian culture [in] west London, you can conduct interviews there in the most profound ignorance of what most matters.

"This is not about doing the job better, it’s about whether you can do the basic job at all."

Okay, Trevor. I can go for the bit about the importance of cultural understanding and sensitivity in approaching and working in minority communities, after all I’ve been doing just that on a regular basis for the last ten years or so, even though I’m white.

It’s actually not that difficult, in my experience, to work in minority communities if you have right attitude which, generally speaking, comes down to treating people with a basic degree of respect, not making assumptions and not being afraid to ask questions and let yourself be guided by the community you’re working with. You can get a long way simply by treating people as human beings and sometimes, as an ‘outsider’, you can get further in some matters than someone from the ethnic background of the community you’re working in either for practical reasons; i.e. you’re seen as being neutral and an honest broker with no particular agenda or axe to grind, or because you’re exempt from some of the cultural forces and social mores of that community and given rather more latitude than someone who they consider one of their own.

There are advantages and disadvantages that come with working inside your own community, whichever community you’re from. You have an edge in understanding the social and cultural values of your community, but some of those values may mitigate against your work, especially as a journalist, where such affiliations may lead you to compromise your objectivity out of a desire to present your community in the best possible light. You may even yourself under greater social pressure to gloss over issues as an insider than you would as someone coming from the outside, for the ‘greater good’ of your own community.

So while a monocultural newsroom is, on balance, rather limiting, it doesn’t follow automatically that employing individuals from a particular cultural background in order to match local demographics is necessarily a major improvement - it may be, it may not, depending entirely on the individuals you’re employing, their skills, knowledge and experience and how well they do the job.

However, that being said, what the law says explicitly is that discrimination in employment is permissible only where there is a genuine occupational requirement to discriminate on grounds of ethnicity, gender, disability etc. and I dubt very much that 30% of the jobs at the BBC would meet the test of there being a genuine occupational requirement for an individual from a minority community, even allowing for the usual ways in which the law is quietly circumvented - i.e. by specifying that candidates must possess one or more specific community languages - having worked with many ethnic minority voluntary organisations over the years, I’m rather an old hand at working the system, but that’s another story - and as Chair of the CRE you know that as well as I do.

So what’s the real game here, Trevor? You know as well as I do that it isn’t going to happen, not least because if there’s the remotest sign of the government caving in to this demand then both the Equal Opportunities Commission and Disability Right Commission will be wanting exactly the same type of oversight over the Beeb.

But then you know that as well, don’t you, Trevor? Because this is all just part of the turf war leading in to the creation of the Single Equality and Human Rights Commission, just a bit more jockeying for position and bigging up your own organisation in an effort to grab the biggest possible slice of the pie when all three commissions are merged together.

And that’s what pisses me off more than anything else here - you’re not on the level, you’re just playing the same old political games and it doesn’t really matter that somewhere out here in the real world there are going to Black or Asian kids with their heart’s set on a career in broadcasting who might just be naive enough to believe that you’re actually serious and putting up these idea because you’re in it for them, and not just for yourself and the status of the CRE.

That’s the real price of tokenism like this - you raise false expectations and then piss off to the next bit of game-playing without a thought for those who might have believed you were going to something for them, only for them to find that when push comes to shove, you’ve done nothing at all and never seriously intended to anyway.

Back in my own university days, pretty much the only attention that the Student Union paid to its various clubs and societies was to use them as a means of exercising their slightly perverse sense of humour during Fresher’s week.

Fresher’s week, of course, meant the obligatory ‘Fresher’s Fayre’, where the Union bars would be temporarily turned into an kind of jumble sale for interest groups trying to attract new members from the naive and newly unwashed ranks of new entrants, which amounted to little more than give each of the clubs and societies a table to decorate as a ’stand’ and leave them to get on with it.

The humour in this half-arsed ritual lay in the perverse pleasure that whoever was responsible for allocating these stands took in allocating them in such a way to accentuate the various natural rivalries that existed between certain societies.

So it was that, as a matter of course, all the political societies would be grouped together, with the Tory club flanked on either side by as many hard left groups as humanly possible, leaving the various Trotkyists and Communists with the dilemma of not knowing quite whther they should be arguing with each other or joining forcing to give the Tories in-between a hard time.

Similar arrangements were made in relation to the relgious societies, which inevitiably resulted in the Pagan Society and the Christian Union being parked next door to each other. Chuck in the little matter of putting all the music clubs in the same bar, much to the chagrin of everyone by the Rock Society who were the only club to ever figure out that they could easily dominate proceeding by the simple expedient of hiring a sizeable PA for the event, when all the others relied on whatever portable system one of their members had managed to buy from Dixons over the summer, and you should get the general picture - the purpose of the Fresher’s Fayre was less about recruiting new members to societies and more about building up a nice solid reserve of friction and resentment to take the various clubs through the upcoming year.

I mention all this only as preamble to the latest apparent addition to the annals of ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’, the decision of the Birmingham University Guild of Students to disavow its Evangelical Christian Union and freeze its bank account after its apparent refusal to open up its voting membership to people of all religions.

Now, at other times this might create something of a dilemma - what with me being a committed atheist and no great lover of religions in general. But this is not an issue I find particularly difficult, for as much as I have no particular time for religion, I have even less time for idiotic bouts of hypocritical authoritarian bullshit, which appears to be what’s going on here.

Still, before going off the deep end I thought I’d see if I could find out in more detail what’s actually going on an unearthed this from the Guild’s minutes:

“The Evangelical Christian Union has been derecognised as per TITLE H Appendix VIII Mandatory Clauses of Standing Society and Society Constitutions.

Explicitly

1.3 If there are any contradictions between a Society Constitution and any of the mandatory clauses, the Society shall cease to be recognised by the Guild.
The Evangelical Christian Union constitution limited membership by requiring all members to sign a doctrinal basis and explicitly the mandatory clauses (because the Guild constitution does) require that a society be open to all members of the Guild (i.e. they cannot be prohibited based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, beliefs etc). Secondly they did not allow all members to run in the elections for their committee, but rather the current committee nominate their chosen successors (and have the capacity should they choose after 2 weeks of advertisement to allow nominations from the rest of the society at their discretion). Again this is significantly different from the clause saying all full members are eligible to run for committee positions in an AGM. Therefore the Evangelical Christian Union (BUECU) was derecognised�?

Now there are two points raised here which merit consideration. First is the matter of membership being open to all Guild members regardless of gender, sexuality, etc. Looking through the Guild’s own constitution and related documents, it certainly does appear that it operates an unnecessarily severe and proscription regime, one that is lacking in simple common sense.

Societies that wish to apply restrictions to membership have to obtain an exemption from the Guild - only two such exemptions are in force at present - yet common sense dictates that a Christian group should be able to restrict its voting membership to Christians, much as a Muslim group would restrict its voting membership to Muslims or a political club would not giving voting rights to people who are not members of the political party to which it relates.

As such this argument is absurd because it creates conditions in which the Christian Union could be taken over and run by non-Christians, just as if applied to the letter, you could have a Labour club runs by Tories and a Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Society where none of the members are actually Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual.

The only justification I could see for citing this a grounds for derecognition is is the ‘doctrinal basis’ cited is unnecessarily proscriptive and discriminatory - i.e. it specifically and unreasonably excludes people from membership for reasons other than their faith or puts unnecessary constraints on legitimate religious beliefs, i.e. if it excludes Catholics, Methodists or Non-conformist Christians.

Unless this is what’s happening here then in this respect the Evangelical Christian Union have good reason for complaint as it represents a triumph of the rule book over common sense.

The second point, regarding the Christian Union’s particular version of ‘democracy’ has altogether greater merit - a system in which the outgoing committee is permitted to annoint its successors and only open itself up to selection if it’s short of bodies to fill all the avaialable places, and then only when it feels like it, is not a democratic system at all, and as the Guild insists that its societies should operate on a genuinely democratic basis this point clearly justifies their decision to derecognise the Christian Union.

On that basis, there is rather more to this story than simply ‘politial correctness gone mad’ although if one is honest, the Guild can have no real complaint about getting bad press over this issue due to its failure to apply a common sense approach to the matter of membership, which has clouded what should otherwise be a strightforward issue of a rule breach on the matter of internal democracy.

If Birmingham’s Student Union has any sense, which remains to be seen, it should revisit its own rules and put in place regulations which allow for a little more common sense latitude in the matter of restrictions on open membership - i.e. it is entirely reasonable for a single faith religious group to restrict membership to believers provided it makes no other discriminatory restrictions, much as it is reasonable that political societies should restrict membership to those who share a particular political outlook, or women’s groups should restrict membership only to women.

Clubs and societies are, after all, only a formalised expression of the concept of community and like all communities their are times when what the community needs is space to debate issues and make decisions for the community without having the rest of the world looking over its shoulder. The sensible solution, if the Guild wished to retain the principle that membership of societies should be open to all is to permit societies a form of associate membership without voting rights which allows those ‘outside’ the community to register their support and participate in the soceity without inhibiting the ability of the society to confine matters solely to voting members where it is necessary to do so. All the Guild need to then is monitor societies to ensure that such privileges are not being abused in a discriminatory fashion.

It’s not difficult if you think things through and take a reasonable, common sense view of things. It also avoids being caught out indulging in hypocrisy when, at the same meeting which remitted the appeal against the derecognition of the Christian Union back to for further consideration by committee, motions such as this are passed:

Motion: suspension of students from Matthew Boulton College

Guild Council Notes:

1. On Friday 6th January two students at Matthew Boulton College in Birmingham, Assed Baig and Darrell Williams were expelled for distributing a student newsletter they had produced.

2.The newsletter contains the students’ views on the war in Iraq, student apathy and several criticisms of college policy. It is in no way offensive.

3.They have been given one week to appeal. A protest has been called for Friday 13th January 8.30-10am and statement of support has been launched.

Guild Council Believes:

1. Students have a right to organise, to express their views on political questions and to criticise their institutions policies and practices.

2. These students were acting within their rights ad should not have been expelled

3. The expulsion is jeopardising their academic progress as they are unable to obtain a college reference necessary to complete their UCAS applications and will not be able to sit their exams.

Guild Council Resolves:

1. To support the protests on Friday 13th and 27th January

2. To sign the petition in support of the ‘Matthew Boulton Two’ and encourage students to do the same.

3. To send a letter of support to the students.

4. To write to Christine Braddock, their college principle, to question their expulsion.

5. To assist their campaign for re-instatement in other practicable ways.

Like many other bloggers I’ve noted and given some thought to the debate on political correctness triggered by Anthony Browne’s pamphlet for the right-wing think-tank Civitas, ‘The Retreat of Reason’. I will get around to commenting on Browne’s actual work in due course but in the mean time I spotted this post from Robert Sharp which all but demands immediate comment by virtue of incorporating the statement below:

To repeat: The purpose of Political Correctness is a noble one. It seeks to refine our political debate. It identifies and eliminates discrimination in our everyday language. Inconvenient[l]y for Civitas and Anthony Browne, some of this prejudice exists within the traditions and social mores of British Civil Society, the homogenising behemoth that they exist to defend. They therefore see Political Correctness as a threat, and they go on the offensive. This is truly a tragic irony, as they succeed only in holding back a force of progress, one which seeks to weed out Britain’s prejudices, and recognise its historical mistakes. Only when that process is complete may we call ourselves ‘Great’ once more.

I wonder if Robert realises or appreciates just how sinister a concept he’s putting forward when he talks of the purpose of political correctness being to identify and eliminate ‘discrimination in our everyday language’ for there is far more to this particular idea than merely the removal from common parlance of certain words - such an idea strikes at the very concepts those words express.

It seems strange, in some respects, to have to resort to a source more reactionary even than Browne in order challenge Robert’s assertion of a ‘noble purpose’ for political correctness, yet here such a thing is entirely necessary and one must turn to Joseph de Maistre:

la pensée et la parole ne sont que deux magnifique synonymes

‘Thought and words are only two splendid synonyms’ argued Maistre in what was, at the time, a remarkable and original insight.

How do we think?

We think by using symbols, symbols which make up an articulated vocabulary - the most basic of which are words. One cannot think without recourse to symbols (words) and yet one cannot invest or create such symbols without being possessed of the ability to think. The use of words cannot have been ‘invented’ articifically any more than the ‘use’ of thoughts as the two are identical.

This concept has profound implications when applied to the question of political correctness and particularly when applied in the context of seeking to eliminate discrimination in everyday language for by eliminating discrimination in language we also, logically, eliminate the idea and concept of discrimination from thought. If we have no language to describe, define or express discrimination then we can have no such concept at all.

Some may see that as a good thing, if one eliminates the language of discrimination then one eliminates the concept of discrimination and in doing so one, logically, eliminates discrimination itself.

A noble purpose? Perhaps, but one that is deeply misguided and dangerous.

Were we to eradicate the very concept of discrimination we would lose, in the process, our capacity to understand that concept, and with it the capacity to understand that portion of history that relates to or relies upon an understanding of that concept and through that a part, if not most of our understanding of who we are and of how we came to be the people and the society we are today. It is not merely the case that the concept of discrimination disappears from everyday life, it disappears also from history; not only does discrimination cease to exist but it can never have existed as we would have no conception of what it it, what it may mean, or have meant, nor of how to understand it.

This is something that George Orwell understood all too well in his creation of ‘newspeak’ in the novel 1984. If someone - the State in Orwell’s novel - can control language and can eradicate words that are considered undesirable, then that someone can control the thoughts of a population, they can, quite literally, make certain ideas and concepts not just disappear but cease to exist, cease to have ever existed.

The underpinnings of political correctness, if taken to the level of Robert’s suggested ‘nobel purpose’, quite naturally lead on to the concept of thoughtcrime - what political correctness seeks to weed is not ‘Brtain’s prejudices’ but the very notion of prejudice itself; the ‘homogenising behemoth’ here is not the ‘traditions and social mores of British Civil Society’ but political correctness, which seeks to enforce on society a totalitarian uniformity of thought and concept entirely at odds with the concept of liberty, free expression or even of humanity.

There is little to choose between Robert’s ‘noble purpose’ for political correctness and the equally noble purpose expressed in Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ wherein Alex is ‘cured’ of his capacity for violence by means of aversion therapy. however, as Burgess goes on to demonstrate, stripping Alex of his capacity for violence strips him, equally, of his humanity to the extent that he becomes incapable of functioning effectively in the real world. Ultimately Alex’s personal ’salvation’ cones not at the hands of the doctors who take away, forcibly, his violent urges but only after his capacity for violence is rekindled and he chooses, of his free will, to turn away from violence.

Violence, prejudice, discrimination - all are part of the human condition, facets of human nature without which we would cease to be human at all as surely as if were were to lose our capacity for compassion, our belief in liberty or our ability to think and communicate.

That which distinguishes the civilised man (or woman) from the barbarian is not that the civilised man lacks the capacity for violence or prejudice or discrimination but that they understand that capacity all too well but choose of their own voilition not to exercise it. That decision, that moral and ethical choice, can be made only if one is possessed of concepts of prejudice, discrimination and violence is, therefore, equally possessed and capable of using the symbols (words) needed to express that concept.

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Footnote:

None of the above should be construed as necessarily supporting Browne’s thesis in his book, much of which appears, to me at least, to be little more than a poorly constructed and long-winded bout of quasi-ideological whinging by a reactionary old git.