November 19, 2002

I'm not so sure that

I'm not so sure that political correctness is a spent force in the US, as this author claims. He does have a point, however, that recent trends in British law and politics effectively pull the rug out from under an entire genre of British opinion journalism:

In America in the 1990s, I specialised in stories highlighting the horrors of political correctness. For a new correspondent seeking easy targets, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, and I am rather ashamed now of the relish with which I took aim...

We are now in the disastrous position of having imported wholesale all the once-fashionable baggage of North American political correctness without having a sufficiently flexible political system to rid ourselves of it. Because of the snuffing out of any conservative pulse in our de facto Blairite one-party state, we are still embracing a trend which is now being reversed in the country where it started.

In America, local congressmen can test popular support for quotas or affirmative action legislation by running against it, but this cannot happen here under the Westminster system. Nor is there a British judicial tradition of individuals challenging politically correct measures in the courts.

Perhaps we deserve this fate after sniggering so smugly at the United States for so long. And no wonder American tourists aren't coming to Britain any more. These days they must find us intolerably dull and earnest, with absolutely no sense of irony.


Irony? What's that?

Posted by Dr. Frank at November 19, 2002 06:01 PM | TrackBack
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