I HAVE A CONFESSION to make: I am not a victim. I do not even feel a little bit victimised. Life has dealt me a good hand of cards, and I am immensely grateful.

I tell you this just in case you were listening to the Today programme yesterday, when Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the Independent columnist and a high priestess of political correctness, made the scurrilous accusation that I was claiming victim status. Even if you were tuned in, you probably wouldn’t have heard the rest of the debate, about my pamphlet on political correctness, because the feathers were flying so furiously the producer cut off the microphone. After the show, Ms Alibhai-Brown refused to speak to me except to launch a tirade of personal abuse, leaving Today staff stunned. Gosh, it must be exhausting being so angry with the world.

So, now that I have you to myself, what what was my point? It was that PC started as a counter-culture attack on the dominant conservative ideology in the 1960s but has now risen to become the dominant establishment ideology, and in doing so it has become a heresy of the liberalism it first espoused. Rather than tackling intolerance, it now promotes intolerance, brooking no criticism and denouncing any critics. PC has a vice-like grip on public debate and policy making, setting out what can and can’t be debated, and what the terms of the debate are: anything or anyone who digresses from the PC script is automatically controversial.

The PC brigade feel this is all a price worth paying because PC is so very moral: it helps to protect the weak and vulnerable in society and protects them from the strong. Well, that is certainly its intention — and a good one it is — but increasingly not the practice. PC brought many benefits by combating bigotry — the world is indisputably a better place now than when PC started — but more often than not it now hurts those that it seeks to help.

Encouraging the vulnerable to see themselves as victims and to blame others for their problems, rather than to confront the true cause of their malaise, is often not helping them — it is condemning them to their plight.

This moral dilemma was illustrated by the Government’s announcement of the review of its out-of-control disability benefits system. Like all decent people, I want to support the genuinely disabled, but you don’t do that by creating a vast victim class of disabled people, and giving them a financial reward — all you do is encourage people on the margins to persuade a doctor to classify themselves as disabled, rather than encourage them to confront real problems, such as the lack of training.

The same applies to the underperformance of black boys in school — teaching them to see themselves as victims of white racist teachers is not to help them, but to discourage them and their families from looking at cultural attitudes to education that may be the root cause of the problem. That is not to say there are not racist white teachers; just that focusing only on that issue does not help black boys but hinders them. Telling Africa and Africans that its plight is the West’s fault because it won’t cough up enough aid discourages them from tackling the root cause of their poverty, which is bad governance.

By condemning everyone who disagrees with them in the most extreme terms — those isms — the PC brigade have succeeded in making us a nervy nation, with most people anxious about what they say or think. This has fuelled politics of denial, with politicians preferring to stick their heads in the sand rather than tackle sensitive issues. And again, it is the vulnerable who end up suffering.

The Government’s refusal to face up to abuse in the asylum system until it was on the verge of collapse was a gift to the people traffickers, fuelling the international smuggling of humans: much misery would have been saved if it clamped down early on. The reports into the Bradford riots made clear how local politicians didn’t dare face up to obviously deteriorating community tensions, instead letting them fester until they exploded.

For years, Whitehall refused to address the exponential rise in HIV caused by African immigration, for fear that admitting that it was an issue would fuel racism. But denying there was a problem not only allowed it to escalate, it also made it impossible to target help to African communities in Britain who most need it. Refusing to face up to the growth of radical Islam in the UK until it produced home-grown suicide bombers not only cost dozens of lives, it has also made the problem far more intractable. Explain to me please how playing down the Darfur genocide for fear of offending Arab Muslims does anything to help the black Muslims who are being massacred. Giving employment rights to women that aren’t given to men encourages employers to discriminate against them.

The EU commissioned a report on the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe, but the authors found that the main cause was an increase in attacks from Muslim youths. The Commission binned the non-PC report, and ordered a PC one that blamed the rise on white skinheads instead. But refusing to face up honestly to the true cause of growing anti-Semitism makes it impossible to combat it.

A little less political correctness and a little more old-fashioned honesty, a little less denunciation and a little more open-mindedness, will go a long way to improving the lot of many of the most vulnerable in Britain. None of this is to say that racism, sexism and islamophobia don’t exist and should not still be challenged. It’s just they are not the whole story. What the PC brigade cannot stomach is that it is the non-PC free thinkers who are in many ways now our true moral guardians.

Anthony Browne’s pamphlet The Retreat of Reason is published by Civitas

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