No Political Correctness Here - Part 2

Another outing of an occasional column.

There remains no Political Correctness at large in the UK. There is nothing to see. Nothing whatsoever. Move along now.

Mick Taylor, chairman of the Nottinghamshire branch of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, said: “There has been an accusation that some words have been said that may have caused offence to a career criminal if he had been present, even though he wasn’t.

“This is a man of the criminal fraternity who has a number of convictions. So it does seem ludicrous that we have to go to these levels, but that is the way life is now.

“This was a private conversation between colleagues and surely people have got a right to that? A personal view is that if no members of the public or work colleagues have made complaints, then I question the need for disciplinary action.”

This is possibly not strictly true: if an officer has done something badly wrong, there should be no need for a complaint to trigger disciplinary action. The question here is more pertinent: Did any officer actually do anything wrong?

To put it another way, in order to be offended, the pondlife, err...

man of the criminal fraternity who has a number of convictions

would need to show that the moniker "pondlife" is unreasonable or somehow not fair. I would also suggest that he would need to show that he has suffered a real loss as a result. I suggest that that is going to be rather tricky, given that this

man of the criminal fraternity who has a number of convictions

has, err....,

a number of convictions.

Indeed, an application of common sense would suggest that this whole disciplinary process is ludicrous. I should have thought that the factually indisputable description - "a man with a string of convictions, a career criminal" - is about as damning as you can get. This is not denigration of a group. It is not bigotry, because it is not an unreasonable assessment applied unfairly on the basis of a warped view of group characteristics. It is an objective assessment of one individual and does not apply to anyone else.

Thus, the only possible way that a disciplinary process could be worth the effort is if we ignore completely the objective fact that our "victim" is a career criminal, and as our favourite baby-eating fascist bastard says:

To the politically correct, truth is no defence; to the politically incorrect, truth is the ultimate defence.

that would require the rules of politically correct truth to be in force.

But that can't be the case because there is no Political Correctness in the UK at all. Anywhere. Just a figment of our fevered neo-con warmongering racist imagination.

Update:

How galling that it should be AN AMERICAN to tell us all that this is a load of tosh.

Step forward the inimitable ninme in the comments below:

I can't get over how hilarious it is that everyone's so wound up over the word "pondlife". I kept thinking "pondlife" was a euphemism used to hint at what he really said, then when it started to dawn on me that that really is what he said... Well. Raise your hand if you've seen the Simpsons where they go to London. Way to play to your stereotypes.

I couldn't agree more. Except that I don't because PC doesn't exist.