From: GDHDTHSHS@SDSRSF.COM   
      
   Liddle, ex-editor of BBC's Today programme, on the heart of the Wanky Left -   
   he likes that Retreat from Reason booklet...   
   He puts PC and wanky leftism down to self-interest: too simple, but he makes   
   some nice points:   
      
   Spectator 21st Jan   
   The politics of Pleasantville   
   Rod Liddle   
      
      
      
   There is a sort of golden crescent in London - and they should start doing   
   guided tours of it for those of us who don't live there. It begins way out   
   west in leafy Ealing, swings north and east to Notting Hill and Holland   
   Park, traverses the gentle inclines of Hampstead, Highgate and Primrose   
   Hill, touches the funky little hem of Crouch End and then ends - where   
   perhaps all life should end - in Islington, N1. Even if you have never so   
   much as visited London, you will be immediately familiar with the names of   
   most of the above mentioned 'villages': they have become bywords (and in   
   some cases even adjectives) for various powerful cliques of people:   
   Hampstead thinkers, the Notting Hill Tories, the Primrose Hill set of   
   coked-out celebs, Islington's beating heart of all that is New Labour. But   
   these demarcations, although fun and containing a germ of truth, ignore the   
   bigger picture: these places are sociologically, demographically and   
   politically identical. They should really be seen as a whole, for they are   
   the Pleasantville from wherein the rest of us are ruled; a glorious band of   
   red-brick or Georgian villas containing clever, implacably active and   
   creative little middle-class monkeys from the media, politics, academia,   
   advertising, charities and the law. Chattering agreeably at one another over   
   a nice, sharp bottle of Sancerre. And some Fairtrade olives.   
   There are, to be sure, small differences in the tone of each 'village'.   
   Ealing, for example, is where the BBC's top producers end up when they're   
   too well off to stomach the grime of Shepherd's Bush or Kensal Rise. Genteel   
   Hampstead is, by now, slightly de trop (although house prices must have   
   risen when the exciting columnist David Aaronovitch moved in a year or so   
   back). Islington - by which I do not mean Dalston, but Barnsbury and Upper   
   Street - is also beginning to feel a little, you know, 1997: too few Polish   
   restaurants and too many Spanish. But by and large, the extremely affluent   
   inhabitants of this ten-mile swath of the capital have far more in common   
   than that which divides them. Whatever their politics, their core values are   
   identical - and, crucially, at odds with much of the rest of the country.   
   Just recently I read Anthony Browne's excellent treatise The Retreat of   
   Reason: Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern   
   Britain. Browne's pamphlet is a polemic against the manner in which   
   intelligent, honest debate is suffocated by political correctness. He   
   alights upon several areas where the politically correct view of one or   
   another social issue is universally held to be inviolable and yet is   
   factually incorrect. Africa's problems, for example, are really down to bad   
   governance, not the legacy of imperialism. Black boys do badly in school   
   because of anti-educational tendencies within the culture from which they   
   emanate, not because teachers are failing them. And so on. Browne misses a   
   few similar examples - of which more later - but his analysis, that these   
   are examples of a quite magnificent, deliberately delusional state of mind   
   seems to me wholly accurate. So too his comment that political correctness   
   'started as a reaction to the dominant ideology, [but] it became the   
   dominant ideology'. I was less taken with his explanation for the historical   
   roots of PC, which he traces back to the European Marxists of the 1920s,   
   Lukacs and later Habermas and so on. This strikes me as a sort of political   
   correctness of the Right - invoking poor old Marx every time something quite   
   ghastly occurs. In fact, far from being indirectly to blame, Marx might   
   actually help us on this occasion. Did he not assert that the base   
   determines the superstructure, that social relations were invariably   
   dependent upon economic relations? It is the one thing Browne omits in his   
   pamphlet - the notion that our ruling elite embraces political correctness   
   because it is economically (and by extension socially) advantageous for it   
   to do so. Which brings us back very neatly to Crouch End.   
   If you are affluent enough to live in the golden crescent, you will be   
   insulated from the terrible woes visited upon us by mass immigration,   
   multiculturalism and the like: further to that, you will actually benefit   
   from them. Your experience of the immigrant community will be limited to the   
   astonishingly cheap Polish nanny or cleaner you now employ - 'she has a PhD   
   from Katowice university, you know' - and the staff of a few of quite the   
   most delectable restaurants on the high street. You will know plenty of   
   Asian and black British people, however - and quite probably pride yourself   
   on so doing. There's Marvin, who runs an account at OB&M, for example, or   
   Parminder, who worked on that BBC2 programme about amphetamines. Your   
   multiracial friends, by and large, have precisely the same political and   
   social disposition as you. They will not stab you for your wallet, blow   
   themselves up outside your place of work or insist that we wipe Israel off   
   the map. (Employ economic sanctions against it, maybe, but not actually kill   
   everyone there.) Your toddlers will not be required to undertake painful   
   shots against TB as they do a few miles away in my manor, Southwark and   
   Bermondsey, and in Tower Hamlets - and you may still cleave to the view that   
   TB is, as the PC view disingenuously has it, 'a disease of poverty' rather   
   than an illness entirely imported from the Third World. When your children   
   go to school they will not be the only white faces in their classes and you   
   might tell yourself, reassuringly - bearing Marvin and Parminder in mind -   
   that you really wouldn't mind if they were: after all, we're all the same,   
   aren't we? (Forgetting for a moment that Marvin and Parminder are pretty   
   fluent in the English language and their children don't wear sackcloth and   
   ashes for reasons of religious dogma.) You will walk along the high street   
   and exult in the exotic difference, the profusion of nationalities plying   
   their wares (though you'll be grateful there's still a nice European deli).   
   You won't resent the fact that your neighbourhood has been transformed   
   beyond all recognition and that you are in unfamiliar territory - because it   
   's been transformed in a nice way and, in any case, it's not really, if we'   
   re honest, your neighbourhood at all, is it? Your family's from   
   Beaconsfield, isn't it? You only moved to Notting Hill six years ago. Hey,   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)