It has been a bumpy ride for sensitive souls this past week. There has been so much going on that might possibly have offended them that I hardly know where to begin.
We have had a Somerset vicar offending Japanese visitors to the village of Bishops Lydeard by making feeble jokes about autumnal nips in the air; and numerous doctors offending old people by calling them “crinklies”.
We have had a Bournemouth councillor offending homosexuals by suggesting that Noah (of the Ark fame) would have been legally obliged to take in same-sex animal couples had he been operating in 2006; George Osborne offending autistic people by suggesting they have something in common with Gordon Brown; Boris Johnson offending fatties by using the word at all; Jack Straw upsetting Muslim women at his surgery by asking to see their faces; a publishing company removing all references to the “ British Isles” from its atlases for fear of offending Irish schoolchildren; and, perhaps most ridiculous of all, the Metropolitan police banning the use of the word “yob” in case it offends the hoodie-wearing classes.
With so many wounded feelings and near-misses out there it’s astonishing, really, that the entire country hasn’t ground to a halt.
But it hasn’t, has it. Apart from the usual chorus of auto-complainers, nobody seems to have turned a hair. If the crowded streets of west London are anything to go by, the human race — Muslim, gay, autistic, Japanese — seems to be chugging along together quite smoothly: occasionally, from across our reservoirs of hurt, even managing to smile at each other.
Nobody smiles much at the lawless laddies, it’s true. Thanks in part to so much police sensitive awareness training, lawless laddies seem to have been abandoned to a parallel universe of their own, where hardly anyone dares to establish eye contact with them, let alone risk hurting their feelings with a grin.
Actually, that’s not the point. Does anyone seriously believe a knife-wielding yob gives a flying fig what we call him? Of course he doesn’t. I wish he did.
It’s not just the yobs. On closer inspection it’s hard to see how any of this week’s supposed targets would have had valid cause to complain. We don’t know how many homosexuals were copied in on the Bournemouth councillor’s hated Noah’s Ark e-mail. But it strikes me as faintly preposterous to suggest that they would have been too fragile to take a joke — not against themselves, note, but against the absurdities of equal opportunity law.
It was a Tory councillor who wrote the e-mail, by the way, and a couple of Liberal Democrat councillors who chose to object to it so publicly. A case of genuinely hurt feelings or of political point-scoring? You decide.
Ditto the “row” over Osborne’s autism joke about Brown’s endogenous growth-theory tendencies. The left-leaning author Nick Hornby, who has an autistic child, was quick to cry foul. He made an uncharacteristically po-faced statement about disabilities not being funny.
Yet, oddly enough, he didn’t complain when his brother-in-law Robert Harris made a similar comment about Brown in this newspaper only a few weeks earlier. Why? Might it possibly have been because Hornby spotted an opportunity to make a dig at the Conservatives? I think so.
As for the vicar’s “nip” joke — having spent my childhood two miles from the village of Bishops Lydeard I would be astonished if a Japanese person had ever, in all its dozy history, found himself anywhere near the place, let alone paused there long enough to read the vicar’s newsletter.
As it turns out the loudest complainer, who is calling for the poor vicar to resign, is not a Japanese tourist but David Onamade, head of the Somerset racial equality council. Having made such an unholy fuss, he now finds himself on a marvellous platform from which to justify to council taxpayers his job, his salary and his pension. Perhaps that is coincidental. I’ve no doubt he would say it was.
I don’t know how much Japanese people mind being referred to as “nips”. Not much, I expect. They have a long history and a proud culture, as do we. And I don’t mind in the least being referred to as a “pom” or a “rosbif”. Do you? Does anyone? Of course there might exist, somewhere, a Japanese individual with unreasonably tender sensibilities who finds it painful to be referred to in such a way. In which case Onamade, by drawing national attention to a bad joke in a village newsheet, has succeeded in upsetting them quite unnecessarily. Shame on him. I think he should resign.
We’ve got to a point now where the Auto-Offence Brigade — most of them professional, many of whose salaries you and I are paying — have us so edgy that we dare not question anybody’s “right” to take offence at anything, regardless of truth, humour or logic. They yell so loudly and so brutishly that it’s hard for the rest of us to hear ourselves think.
When footballers “dive” — roll around the grass in paroxysms of affected agony after bumping into an opposing player in the hopes of getting him sent off — it is the diver and not the other man who gets shown the red card. I wonder if we shouldn’t instigate a similar system for these blubbering offence-takers who seem to cause nothing but bad blood and who waste so much of our time.
Politicians suspected of taking offence unjustifiably should have their whip removed. Novelists should have their books boycotted. And as for that great army of publicly employed equality officers — whose original purpose must once have been not to stir up trouble but to try to smooth relations between potentially antagonistic factions — I think this country would be a more peaceful, less paranoid and more genuinely tolerant place if we got rid of the lot of them. Might save us a couple of bob, too.
- Posh Spice is interesting because she looks so unstable and because one gets the feeling that at any minute her amazing bosoms might be going to explode. Even Princess Di is still vaguely interesting because she might have been murdered. But Kate Moss? I am bewildered by people’s fascination with her. She has fabulous cheekbones. She gets spots, goes to parties and, er, from what I understand, she has a useless boyfriend.
Her promotion to Modern Day Goddess since being caught with a rolled-up note in her beautiful nostril isn’t just bewildering, it is faintly depressing. So I was delighted to learn that Jane Shepherdson, the woman responsible for making Topshop what it is today, is reported to have resigned from her post in protest at Moss coming on board as a designer.
Moss gives every appearance of leading a thoroughly vacuous life. She isn’t cool and, for heaven’s sake, neither is cocaine. It makes people incredibly boring and it makes their breath smell.
