Political correctness gone mad...

Norman Tebbit, a former minister in the Margaret Thatcher government, talks about political correctness gone mad...

Tebbit makes the small crowd of 31 whites and two browns laugh, think and accept. He paints the picture of a Britain in crisis, a Britain that has become hilariously ridiculous in the name of fairness, equality and general safety standards. He is angered by the reluctance of a few local government bodies to print the word 'Christmas' in their greeting cards fearing that other communities might be offended. In the recent past, town halls have called the festival 'Winterval'. In England these days, Three Wise Men become Three Wise Women, and on occasion, Baby Jesus in the manger is a girl. Gingerbread Man is now Gingerbread Person. The words 'manpower' and 'mankind' are not used anymore in some organisations. And, in the face of increasing gay rights, when a councillor joked that Noah could not have taken only animals of the opposite sex into his ark, angry members of the council demanded that he be sent to "compulsory equality training''.

Two years ago, Burger King changed the swirls on its ice cream lids after one man complained that the swirls resembled Allah in the Arabic script. Last year, the Greater Manchester Police advised its officers not to arrest Muslims at prayer times during Ramzan. The Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council banished from its offices the image of Piglet from Winnie The Pooh so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities.

Schools too are turning paranoid. In June last year, a primary school in Midlothian decided to change the name of class sections from 1A and 1B because it feared that students in 1B might feel inferior to students in 1A. It changed the names to 1AR and 1AP, after the teachers' initials. In another school, a teacher sang, "Baa baa green sheep" for obvious reasons.

So it is easy for Tebbit to appear wise as he slowly describes what the country has become. "The English way of life,'' he says, "is in danger." He commiserates with a BBC radio presenter who got into trouble a few weeks ago for saying that she could not see black people in the dark. In a radio discussion on the need for children to wear reflective clothing on the road, she related an incident that occurred the previous night when she almost ran over a black man. He was in dark overalls and dark hat. "It's lucky he opened his mouth to yawn and I saw him,'' she said. In no time there was pandemonium at the switchboard. Such things cannot be said anymore in England. By a White.