Category Archives: PC Corner

The British Lions

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For rugby union fans there are few better sights than the British Lions taking on one of the southern hemisphere giants every four years. This week sees the start of the Lions’ tour of Australia, which they last toured twelve years ago. For the players this represents the pinnacle of their careers and the anticipation will reach a climax when the first team steps out to meet the Australian national team for the first of three tests later this month. Yes, this is rugby union at its finest. It’s such a pity that it’s tainted by political correctness.

You will have noticed how I made reference to the British Lions rather than the modern “British and Irish Lions”. This is no disrespect to Ireland, who consistently produce some of the finest players in the world despite their relatively small population. The British Lions were, and are still, chosen from the best rugby union players in the British Isles, a geographical term as opposed to political or nationalist. The British Isles comprise Great Britain, Ireland, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight, the Channel Islands and many others. In total there are well over 6,000 individual  isles. 
However, it was decided in 2001 that this was unfair to the independent and sovereign Republic of Ireland and so the British Lions became the British and Irish Lions. This was nothing more than political correctness and an example of bored liberal bureaucrats sticking their oar in something that neither concerned them nor seemed to bother anyone else. Certainly, I personally have never met any Irishmen who objected to the name British Lions since they were fully aware that the word “British” was simply a geographical and factual reference to the islands which we all share rather than a slight on their own nation. It is for this reason that many people will continue to refer to the Lions as the British Lions.
Taking the politically correct argument further, shouldn’t the Lions’ title be extended to embrace the other nations who take part? Why should the term British be used to cover Wales, Scotland and England and nobody else? Shouldn’t they correctly be called the Welsh, Irish, Scots and English Lions (the W.I.S.E. Lions, now there’s a thought!). And what if the tour party includes players of Manx or Channel Islands extraction? Shouldn’t the title be extended to include them as well? Clearly this is ludicrous but no more so than the current name.
Rugby union like all sport should be a joyous celebration of skill, strength, athletic prowess and the exuberance of life itself. It has and never should have anything to do with politics and should certainly not be corrupted by political correctness. So come on you Irish, Welsh, Scots and English, come on you Lions, come on you British Lions! Have a great tour and make us all proud to be a part of the British Isles!

Prejudice or Political Correctness?

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If there’s one thing that rankles more than most in these days of excessive liberalism and political correctness it’s the rank hypocrisy and double standards of those in positions of power, whether it be politicians, trades union bosses or leaders of our professions.

Last month the Law Society Gazette reported that leaders of six of the solicitors’ “black, Asian and minority ethnic groups” have written to the Justice Secretary demanding an immediate investigation into the “continuing number of disproportionate investigations into solicitors from minority backgrounds”. Basically, they feel that their members, non-whites, are being victimised.
As a regular reader of the Law society Gazette I can confirm that there often do seem to be a large and indeed “disproportionate” number of non traditional English names listed among those disciplined for fraud, money-laundering, stealing clients’ money, dipping their fingers in the till or whatever.  In fact, sometimes you’d be forgiven for thinking that ethnic minorities comprised the majority of the legal profession so prominent and numerous are their names in the disciplinary lists.
My understanding is that the guilty are either exposed by the complaints of their victims or by random Law Society checks. However, just to ensure that the system is fair to all, I agree that there should be a full and open independent investigation into the problem. Following the conclusion of that  investigation the results should be published without censor or doctoring so that the truth is there for all to see.
The investigation of crime should always be free from prejudice and the duty of the police or any investigative body,  must simply be to find the guilty and bring him or her to justice. Race, nationality, sex or skin-colour are irrelevant and in a democratic society all must be dealt with equally. Where there is crime deal with it and bring the perpetrators to justice whoever they may be. Sometimes crime statistics may well prove to be unpalatable but denial and allegations based on politically correct thinking are not going to change the facts.

Sporting Politics

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I wonder, should we be surprised at the fuss caused by the appointment of Paolo di Canio as manager of Sunderland Football Club? His alleged political beliefs whether true or false have caused all sorts of outrage amongst the public and press and have led to Durham miners demanding the return from the club of a Trades Union banner (as though it were some sort of religious relic) and the resignation from the Sunderland board of the opportunistic ex-politician, David Miliband. It is all complete and utter nonsense but, no, we should not be surprised.

I’m afraid that this is just another example of our liberal national press whipping up a section of the population (usually referred to as a mob) into a state of righteous indignation at the thought that anybody with right wing leanings should achieve any level of power or influence. Such hypocrisy; and I thought we lived in a democracy!
Even if Di Canio is a Fascist- sympathising-Mussolini-loving-Roman-saluting crackpot with tattoos to match how on earth does that affect his ability to manage a football team?  Is he going to dress his players in Nazi uniforms and parade them, goose-stepping, on the pitch before each match?
No, of course he’s not. He is a football manager and nothing else. If I were a supporter of that football club I wouldn’t give two hoots about his beliefs unless, of course, he were to use his position to incite criminal activity. So far as I am aware, it is not an offence to harbour and express unsavoury beliefs no matter how far they might gravitate to the right or the left, though I have a sneaking suspicion that if his views were the latter rather than the former the fuss might not be so great.
Di Canio may or may not be a nasty bit of work with some wacko beliefs but if those beliefs don’t get in the way of his job shouldn’t we just leave him alone and judge him solely on how well he does that job? As for the press, haven’t they got better things to do? I understand there’s a bit of a crisis in North Korea at the moment.

Politically Correct Child Care

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The story, published over the weekend, about the Rotherham couple who have had their foster children taken away from them because of their membership of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) almost beggars belief. I say “almost” because, where our politically correct bureaucrats are concerned, nothing should surprise us any longer.

Even so, this particular story represents modern day political correctness at its most invidious. The couple concerned, foster parents for the last 8 years and thoroughly respectable and decent by all accounts have had their latest charges (three children aged under the age of 10) removed from them because the little dictators at Rotherham Council Politburo (sorry, Social Services) don’t like the fact that the parents are members of a political party deemed by the Council to be “racist” (a euphemism for anything right of centre).

So what? What on earth have somebody’s political beliefs got to do with their ability to look after children? Are you only fit to look after children if your political views are left of centre? Is there any evidence to show that these particular foster parents have in some way neglected or abused the children under their care and control? There appears to be no such evidence and the Labour controlled Rotherham Council, caring not one jot about the welfare of the children concerned, are simply politicizing child care.

Local authority Social Services should concentrate purely and simply on child welfare and particularly on the prevention of child abuse, an area where, let’s face it, they have not exactly performed with distinction over the last few years. This sort of totalitarian behaviour is more redolent of Stalinist Russia than modern England and I would bet £10 to a penny that if the foster parents were paid up members of the Communist Party the comrades in Rotherham wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.

I hope the Government appreciates the national outrage that this incident has provoked and takes appropriate action against the Council’s employees responsible for it. A strong message needs to be sent out to councils, bureaucrats and civil servants everywhere that we live in a democracy and, as such, our freedoms of speech, belief and association are sacrosanct and will be protected at all costs.

Clean up for Auntie?

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These are not good times for the BBC.  The once venerable institution seems to be lurching from crisis to crisis and the sad thing is that most of its current difficulties are undoubtedly of its own making.

The scandalous withdrawal of the Savile expose by the Newsnight programme a few weeks back and then the subsequent outrageous allegations of paedophilia made against an innocent public figure on the same programme were quite mind-blowing. The first was at the very least an act of gross incompetence by management and the second was an extremely poor piece of “investigative” journalism that quite simply beggared belief.

Any decent journalist – in fact any trainee journalist – knows that you should always check out your source and investigate fully all aspects of your scoop to avoid not just claims of libel or slander but also the possible destruction of an innocent man’s reputation. The fact that the innocent victim in this case, Lord McAlpine, has settled quietly rather than destroy the BBC in court is to his credit. However, no matter how the settlement has been reached, let’s not forget the other innocents in this story, those responsible for forking out the damages for the Corporation’s incompetence, namely us, the BBC licence payers.

This week saw the 90th anniversary of the first BBC radio broadcast and one cannot help but think of the early aims of the BBC to “inform, educate and entertain”. The BBC still does an awful lot right and is much respected both in this country and in many parts of the world. Many of the BBC’s dramas, documentaries and current affairs programmes are of the highest quality and the fact that the beleaguered director-general of the BBC, George Entwistle, was forced to resign following a savage grilling by his employee, John Humphrys, on the Radio 4 Today programme, is to the eternal credit of the BBC’s ethos. Can you imagine such a thing happening in China, Russia or in fact almost anywhere else in the world?

What is needed for the BBC is a weeding out of the incompetent, complacent, arrogant and politically correct management who have led the Corporation to this sad state of affairs. Replace them with a determined, focused, disciplined and responsible management hierarchy capable of leading a team of good quality enthusiastic  journalists and within a short period the recent disasters will be consigned to history. Don’t  let’s give up on Auntie just yet, she just needs a bit of a clean-up and face lift and all will be well once more.

Employment Quotas

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At last , some sense on the subject of employment quotas!  Women and Equalities Minister, Maria Miller, has publicly rejected the idea of quotas for women in British company boardrooms and has stated her opposition to the European Commission’s plan to force large companies to ensure that 40% of their executive directors are women. As the Minister said, “Women want and expect to reach the top on merit, not because of political correctness, but because of economic reality”.

I’ve always thought that the whole concept of quotas and targets for the employment of different classes of people is both patronising and misguided. If somebody is promoted to a position of authority just because they are, for example, female,  black, disabled or whatever how are they going to receive the respect of their peers who have achieved their positions on merit?  The only thing that matters is whether you are good enough. English law already provides protection against discrimination whether on the grounds of sex, colour, race, religion, nationality or disability. This is vital in the public sector and none of the above should ever be a bar to anybody seeking to advance themselves.

In the private sector it’s a different ballgame since market forces and rules will always apply. If a company or individual is not good enough then neither it nor he will prosper. Any commercially minded employer wishing to compete in the market place will want to employ the best available staff. He will not be interested in what sex, nationality or religion his employers are just as long as they are good at the job. If an employer has six vacancies and the best applicants are all women, for example, then he’d be a fool not to employ them.

Excellence is the only thing that matters and if your staff are not as good as those of your rivals then pretty soon you are going to struggle to be competitive and stay in business.  It’s pure market sense, it’s common sense and in the dog eat dog world of big business there’s no place for sentiment or political correctness.

The Evil Side of Political Correctness

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One of the most disturbing aspects of the sex gang trial verdict last week was the amount of denial by both police and politicians. The facts of the case were truly brutal and disturbing and anybody who followed the trial could not fail to be simultaneously angered and sickened.

The undisputed facts were that a gang of nine Pakistani Muslims systematically raped and abused forty seven young white girls in Rochdale over a period of several years. The ringleader was jailed for 19 years with others receiving varying sentences.  Investigations continue and it is feared that the number of perpetrators and victims could be even greater. This predatory sexual grooming of vulnerable underprivileged white girls by gangs of Pakistanis is not just limited to Rochdale either.
The problem then is what to make of those facts and what to do about them. The first step is surely to accept the facts and to accept that the crimes are indeed racial in spite of what the mouthpieces of political correctness may say to the contrary. All of the men convicted, bar one (and he was evidently an Afghan asylum seeker) were Pakistani and all of the victims were white.  That is fact.
Of course, we are strangled by political correctness in this country and the feeling that we must somehow treat non-white criminals differently from white criminals. Much of this arose from the MacPherson report into the police following the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the 1990s and to an extent it is understandable. The Metropolitan Police undoubtedly made some grave errors in the Lawrence case and they were rightly castigated for it.
Whilst the police should always be careful to be completely open and not show favour or prejudice to any person or group they should not go so far as to treat any person or group with kid gloves. A criminal is a criminal irrespective of the colour of his skin, his religion or his political leanings. To accept anything else goes against everything that our legal system has ever stood for.
Many people, white and non-white, Christian and Muslim were outraged by the comment of the Labour MP Keith Vaz that the problem “is not a race issue” and one leading Muslim, Mohammed Shafik, chief of the Ramadhan Foundation accused Vaz of “playing an insidious game”. One of the problems with exponents of political correctness is that they are so blinkered by their warped principles that they cannot see beyond them, or maybe they just see what they want to see. By denying the facts they are creating unnecessary racial tension and are inflaming feelings against all Muslims. They are playing into the hands of the far right who need no excuse to attack ethnic minorities such as Muslims, the vast majority of whom are no doubt law abiding citizens equally outraged by the Rochdale case.
A final thought, what would Vaz and his politically correct supporters have to say if the situation was turned on its head and white gangs of sexual predators were raping and abusing  innocent young Pakistani girls. Would it be racial then, I wonder? I think we know the answer.

Easter Madness

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Yesterday the Home Office approved a statement by the Equalities Minister declaring that Christians have no right to wear a cross or crucifix at work and must restrict the practice of their religion to their private time. The statement went on to say that if employees do not accept this then they are free to seek employment elsewhere.

This statement was delivered to that great upholder of modern morality and ideals, the European Court of Human Rights which is hearing the case of the BA employee who was dismissed for refusing to take off her crucifix whilst working for BA way back in 2006. She was, of course, reinstated following a public uproar and is now seeking to establish a legal right for any like-minded employees to wear a crucifix at work.

Two things come to mind here. Firstly, we are a democratic country (in theory at least) and surely anybody, whatever their religion (Christian or otherwise), should be allowed to wear any pendant or item of jewellery as an expression of their religious beliefs.

Secondly, although many of us do not lead particularly religiously orientated lives this is, by law, a Christian country and the head of State, the Queen, is also the head of the Church of England. How can it be unlawful therefore for any denomination of Christian to wear a cross or crucifix in the United Kingdom?

Can you imagine a country such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt, for example, preventing its citizens from wearing articles of faith at the work place? No, of course not. Yet again, this is another example of British political correctness gone mad.

On a lighter note, and with reference to the blog on computer hacking (March 30th), I received another email purportedly from the Zenith Bank International PLC in Nigeria advising me that a lady came into the bank advising them of my death and providing them with my instructions to hand over to her the proceeds of my bank account containing US$ 2 million! They urged me to let them know “Are you truly Dead or Alive?” I must do this within 3 days otherwise she can take the lot. Presumably if I tell them that I am indeed alive they will ask for my bank details so that they can wire the monies to me!

What a crazy world we live in! Anyway, Happy Easter to everyone with or without crucifixes. Must dash, I need to reclaim my $US 2 million!

…….Is No Life At All!

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Like many people, I suppose, I am still saddened and sickened by the events relayed in Friday’s post. I find it hard to believe that we have sunk to a level where we have allowed the zealots of fear and political correctness to put petty rules above the saving of a human life.

Of course, as a lawyer I can see the sense in rules and regulations and even an element of supervision of the people by the State (without it there is anarchy) but what we must not accept is interference bordering on control by a Nanny State. It is patronising and demeaning, removing as it does the responsibility for our own actions and thoughts. Truly, we have now reached the Orwellian vision described in “1984” a book that should be compulsory reading for every free thinking person.

There is always an element of risk in life, there has to be. If people didn’t take risks how would we develop? There would be no inventors or explorers, no scientists and no rebellion against the stifling conformity of traditionalists. Free thought and action is what has enabled the human species to survive and progress. There is a poem called “To Risk” which should be sent to the Health and Safety departments of every local council and company in the country. You can read the poem on Google but the last few lines are worth quoting –

“To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the
Greatest Hazard in life is to risk nothing.
People who risk nothing, do nothing
Have nothing, are nothing.
They may avoid suffering and sorrow
But they cannot learn, feel, change,
Grow, love and live.
Chained by their attitudes they are slaves:
They have forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.”

(PS. I’d like to credit the poem to somebody but several people appear to claim it as their own. Anyway, whoever wrote it, they were surely right!)

Life Without Risk

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An inquest took place this week into the death of a man who drowned in a lake in Gosport, Hampshire. When the emergency services arrived at the scene the man was lying face down in the water but a witness said she didn’t think he’d been there long and told the crews that if they hurried they might be able to save him. It was at this moment that the scourge of the modern age, Health and Safety, reared its ugly head.

Whilst a policeman and a paramedic wanted to jump in to try to save the man they were ordered not to do so, the inquest was told. The reason given was that emergency personnel are specially trained to deal with specific types of emergency and if the emergency is outside of your area of expertise then you are not allowed to intervene; too much of a risk, presumably. In this case the officers concerned were only trained up to level one meaning that they could only enter water that went up to their ankles (no, I’m not making this up), and what was required was the expertise of a level two officer who is trained to enter water up to chest height.

Since no level two officer was present the officers who were there were told to stay on dry land. Eventually the level two officers arrived and when they, heroically no doubt, entered the water they discovered that the man was dead. The water, by the way, was three feet deep.

Nobody knows for sure whether or not the delay prevented the victim from being saved because nobody knew for sure when he drowned. However, a doctor told the inquest  that it was possible that he could have been saved if he’d been taken out of the water 10 minutes after falling in. This is not the first such incident involving the strict rules and regulations of Health and Safety.

A couple of years ago a woman fell down an Ayrshire mine shaft and was left there for 8 hours because the winch, present at the shaft, was only to be used to save rescue workers. When the emergency services eventually reached her she was dead. A year or so prior to that a young boy drowned in a Wigan pond because the police officers arriving on the scene were not authorised to enter the water.

It is almost beyond belief that this should be happening anywhere let alone in this once great country of ours. No comment is necessary since the facts speak for themselves but I will say that modern Britain’s obsession with risk management, quality control, health and safety and all the other examples of politically correct nonsense are slowly choking the life out of us; quite literally in some cases.