It is a slim, expensive booklet, working out at 10p per page, and it will sell poorly - thinktank pamphlets always do. That's a shame, because Civitas's latest publication, The Retreat of Reason: Political Correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain should have a bigger audience. It crystallises the stuff of a hundred tabloid editorials and the complaints of a thousand hard-done-by taxi drivers. You can read an approving summary in today's Daily Express, but its thesis, roughly, is this: political correctness is inhibiting free and intelligent debate in Britain.
The author, Anthony Browne, is a Times correspondent and therefore not accustomed to using footnotes. That, too, is a pity, because there's much that needs to be sourced. Browne is pretty good at crediting the people he agrees with, or who he thinks would agree with him (Ibsen, Tom Paine), but there's a lot here that needs standing up. "Men's legal retirement age is five years older than women's," he says on page 60. It used to be, but women born after 1955 will retire at 65 - or, more likely, 67.
"When the successful, affluent, powerful Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was ritually murdered in the streets of Amsterdam for insulting Islam, the politically correct, including the Guardian and the Index on Censorship, automatically sided with the comparatively powerless Islamic Dutch-Moroccan killer." When, and how, the Guardian sided with Mohammed Bouyeri is not explained, and a trawl through the Guardian's archives does not help, either.
Browne goes on to write that coverage of the 7/7 bombings was "obliterated" by "saturation coverage" of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. "The reason was simply that the terrorist attacks, although a far more important story, didn't fit the politically correct agenda, whereas the killing of a vulnerable immigrant by a powerful police force did." Page 36: "The national lottery has been reduced to a fund to promote political correctness." Statistics would be welcome here.
In a single paragraph on page 63, Browne writes that political correctness has until recently "silenced any non-academic debate about alternatives to a free-at-the-point-of-use, taxpayer-funded, state-owned monopoly ... Political correctness is literally killing people". It's at these moments, when Browne's analysis tips into paranoia, that he weakens what would otherwise have been a useful primer on the grievances of the anti-PC lobby and a stimulus to debate about what the term might, should or could mean.
Commendably, Civitas has made The Retreat of Reason available free in PDF format. Take a look and judge for yourself.
