Let's Try Again

Rod Liddle writes:

It is a screed of visceral loathing about the white working class, and, I have to say, I rather enjoyed reading it. I don’t agree with a word of it, but the woman clearly feels passionately and the piece is well expressed, except for a mistaken reference to anti-maccassars (which are surely lower middle, not working class). I think there’s room for that sort of sentiment in Fleet Street and I suspect a lot of her implacably middle class readers, white and black alike, agree with her. Even if they do not I still think she is within her rights to speak her mind.

However, let’s apply the PCC criteria to her claims. Can she “demonstrate” that the white working class “vote for fascists”? I thought they tended to vote Labour. Only a couple of hundred thousand people voted BNP at the last election, out of a white working class which consists of at least 20 million people. Can she further “demonstrate” that the white working class are “always wretched and complaining”? (And can you imagine what trouble would befall her if she said the same thing about the black working class?) Can she “demonstrate” that the white working class hold views which are “stupid or vicious” and also “demonstrate” that they comprise “the scum who drop shit and firebombs through letterboxes….” Can she “demonstrate” that the progenitors of the race riots were the white working class, as she asserts? I thought Mosley and Enoch were toffs? Wasn’t it the white working class represented on the OTHER side of those riots, too? In the form of the Labour Party, and the CP - the then parties of the working class? Can she “demonstrate” that it was the white working class that “kept darkies out of pubs and clubs and work canteens”?

I don’t think she can. I think she is pouring hatred upon a large community of people based upon the actions of a minuscule minority and, further, is blaming the wrong people. But if the PCC don’t require the woman to “demonstrate” the veracity of these claims, then we will know that its judgment in my case was made purely on specious and censorious grounds of political correctness. And incidentally, they have already rejected a complaint about her piece on the grounds that she is known for her “trenchant views”. That’s enough, in her case, is it? Let’s try again.