If another person tells me I can’t say this, write that or do whatever, I’m going to take out my Desert Eagle point-o-five and shoot her [unless, as is statistically less likely, it’s a him].

The effect of the permeation of the fabric of society by people of certain tendencies, let’s say, is dire, truly dire. Political correctness can even be seen as the spurious end of the debate, not to be taken seriously. It’s actually very serious and most educated people would understand that it is through language that values are largely transmitted.

That’s why folk of certain tendencies infest education and the arts in droves and work their way into key positions of influence. The old Douglas Adams’ quip is apt about the robotic exterminators and the heroes themselves. I think it was Ford Prefect or Zaphod who said, ‘They care. We don’t. They win.’

It’s also politically polarized. Iain Dale MP’s acclaimed lists nicely divide people and so it is with PC. Therefore what I’m writing is grist for the mill for the right and by now, few but the stalwart left will still be reading. And this is the first point – the polarization, where once it was far more nebulous. People are divided as never before and as the PCers tighten their grip still further and strangle the life out of society, the right finally wakes up that it’s too late.

It’s possible to see where they’re coming from. Flo Wineriter, for the National Coalition for Democracy in Education, 108 Spring Street, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866, 2003, writes:

Few parents have ever questioned the school's role in encouraging the values of punctuality, fairness, health, courtesy, respect for property, neatness and the like. Humanistic educators believe schools also should encourage the democratic and humanitarian values of tolerance, self-respect, freedom of thought, respect for others, social responsibility and the like. Schools cannot and should not be "value-free."

It’s an idealistic panacea, a lovey-dovey, simplistic societal view and on the surface, providing all are given equal weight, it’s fine. But the reality is that the ‘educators’ involved carry baggage into the process; they have political and social barrows to push, e.g. black rights, tolerance for homosexuals and so on and the general mindset is bottom up, rather than top down.

To put it another way, these people are commendably championing the have-nots and the traditionally downtrodden and on the whole, they’d like to be seen as and probably are, really nice people. They’d be horrified at the way they’re being written up here. The problem is their absolute conviction that they hold the moral high ground produces a sort of intolerance to opposing viewpoints and a great willingness to accede to or even to push for the draconian measure on principle. For example:

In the United Kingdom, in 2005, a government think tank advised schools to replace the term "failure" for students who failed their exams, with the term "deferred success", so they would not "feel sad".

Another:

The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work [UK], states that it is not necessary to know English any more to become an English interpreter or to bring aeroplanes in to land.

These two examples will be labelled aberrations but aberrations they’re not. The controversy over the mayor of Sydney relabelling the Christmas Tree a Winter’s Holiday Tree so as not to offend minority groups is just another in a long, long list.

The mindset, and I was a card carrying member for many years so I understand it, is that out there is a pie – an economic pie. Doesn’t matter how it came about – it’s simply there and everyone has a right to a slice of it. Business people come at this from a different direction. Out there is a jungle and unless you equip yourself to cope, you fall by the wayside. You work long hours, ride the setbacks and slowly, slowly, build up goodwill and a clientele. Through this only is product and revenue generated.

Absolutely pointless to start speaking of fairly dividing the pie unless there’s a pie to divide in the first place. This is why the Americans’ first gauche questions of what field your in and how much you earn have some foundation. If your mindset is free enterprise, rather than welfare handouts, you create your own security. The boss didn’t miraculously become the boss – a hell of a lot went on behind the scenes and now he’s there, he has problems of a different nature.

This is what the left fails to understand. This is the mindset behind PC. And it is slowly dragging society down to a standardized mediocrity where one size fits all. Look, it’s not that we’re hard, unbending, cruel people who won’t give to charity or slip a pound to a destitute person. It’s not that we have no compassion. We have it by the bucketful for those who truly can’t – like the elderly. But for those of working age … well.

This is also where political tags of left and right go askew. Having qualified above as a neo-con, I support some degree of protectionism and of anti-trust legislation to protect sections of the populace. Just where would you place the entrepeneur Tim Worstall and his free market economics? Left, right, indifferent?

Some references on Political Correctness in Secular Education

· Education after the Culture Wars, by Diane Ravitch."The publisher explained that it was a well-accepted principle in educational publishing that everything written before 1970 was rife with racism and sexism. Only stories written after that date, he said, were likely to have acceptable language and appropriate multicultural sensitivity."

· Excerpts from The Language Police, by Diane Ravitch. "The sensitivity reviewers did what they were trained to do ..."

· Political Correctness, or, the Perils of Benevolence, by Roger Kimball. "The politically correct of our own day seek to bring about a moral revolution by changing the way we speak and write about the world: a change of heart instigated and embodied by a change of language."

· The Inequality Taboo, by Charles Murray. "The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media's fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record."

A different take on PC:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.

A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

—Theodore Dalrymple, author of Our Culture, What's Left of It