The only way to counter an increasingly PC world, is to satirise it, says Peter Mullen.

EDWARD Stourton is the most charming and gentlemanly of the team of broadcasters who present the BBC’s Today Programme – and by heck it shows throughout this book, which is almost pathologically polite.

Stourton must have a very sore bottom through sitting perpetually on the fence. He thinks political correctness is both “a powerful weapon against chauvinism and racism and a mark of what it is to be a civilised member of 21st Century humankind”

and that it is “a joyless ideology that crushes free speech, glorifies victimhood and stops children playing conkers.”

This is a very reasonable and polite view to take of a complex phenomenon, but Stourton’s treatment of the issue could sure use a bit more humour.

Whether you are for political correctness or agin, surely the best way to write about it is with your tongue firmly in your cheek? Unfortunately, a sense of humour is not Stourton’s strong point.

For example, he starts off with a promising anecdote featuring his audience with the late Queen Mother.

The great lady told him: “The EEC will never work.” Stourton’s response to this is immediately to want to correct her for not being up-to-date and correct – she should, of course, have said “the EU”. She told him why she thought the Common Market would never work: “...with all those Huns, Wops and Dagos”.

And Stourton’s reaction? “I am afraid I froze. The Nation’s Favourite Grandmother was, I thought, in fact a bigot, a prey to precisely the kind of prejudice which had driven the conflicts the European project had been designed to prevent.” Really, Edward? Have you never come across irony and mischief before? Did it not cross your mind for a moment that she was trying to wind you up? She clearly thought she would have some fun at the expense of a very po-faced, PC BBC man.

But Stourton has a point when he says that PC is a serious matter. It’s a pity then that his research did not actually carry him far enough to discover its origins. For PC is not an accidental mutation in the development of society and culture: it is a change in what TS Eliot called “sensibility”, in the unconscious presuppositions which, while they themselves go unexamined, form the values and manners of culture and society. I believe that PC originated in modern times in the work and ambitions of a radical political group, the Institute for Marxism which became known as the Frankfurt School.

Patrick J Buchanan in his book The Death of the West says: “Political- Correctness is cultural Marxism.

In a third of a century, what was denounced as the counterculture has become the dominant culture, and what was the dominant culture has become a dissident culture, an ideological state, a soft tyranny where the new orthodoxy is enforced not by police agents, but by PC inquisitors of the popular culture.”

The way to undermine the old order was to make its presuppositions un-sayable by banning certain words and expressions: that is what PC is.

There’s only one response to the PC ideology of cultural Marxism and that’s to satirise it – as Orwell did in Animal Farm – to send it up. Just as the Queen Mum was sending nice Mr Edward Stourton up.