SURVIVORS OF 1980s Britain will remember the term, “loony left”, which was used by the conservative press to mock the insane ideas of the Labour movement. As a label it had the virtues of simplicity, alliterative memorability and, above all, accuracy.
The loony left were characterised by their obsession with things we’ve now become accustomed to: gender and racial identity, the limitless “rights” of minorities, a neurotic desire to police everyday language and a profound contempt for British and Western culture.
The papers revelled in stories ranging from the true to the outright false about councils declaring themselves “nuclear-free zones”, banning the word “black” from nursery rhymes, forbidding staff to make “wife” jokes and so on. But even when the stories were blatantly untrue, you couldn’t help feeling that in some way they could be.
At the time I was living in the north and voting Labour (mea culpa – but at least I learned and turned, unlike many people) and thought the loony epithet was a complete fiction. Until I moved to London. There I found the left were indeed loonies, many of them more concerned about the rights of Nicaraguan peasants than working class families in Southwark. This impulse to “privilege” the foreigner over one’s own countrymen is deeply rooted in Labour mentality. Just in the last week Harriet Harman, one of the key loons of the eighties and a permanent nematode in the body politic, has been praising immigrants who send their benefits back to their families abroad as heroes to be encouraged, possibly with tax breaks subsidised by the rest of us.
At the time King of the Loons was Ken Livingstone, head of the Greater London Council. Among the victorious blows he struck for the proles of London was flying the ANC flag over the GLC and inviting IRA murderers for tea and biscuits. Deprived later by the Peace Process of the Irish corpse wagon Livingstone was last seen hitching a ride on the caravanserai of Islam. May the followers of the Prophet (peace be upon him) deal with him the way they frequently deal with the infidel.
‘The march of the sex loons continues unabated…’
A couple of decades on and the looniness is now commonplace; just a couple of years ago in Boston Lincolnshire County Council replaced pelican crossing signs that said “green man” with ones that said “green figure”. “Man” is bad, you see, because it’s gendered and that might offend non-men, whereas “figure” is inclusively equal and non-discriminatory. Lincolnshire County Council is Conservative, by the way.
The march of the sex loons continues unabated and we’ve just witnessed the success of the gay marriage putsch, together with hand-wringing about the oppression of the plurally-or-ambivalently-gendered. And prodded by the EU the politicians are “debating” whether to compel companies to take on more female directors. That’s in the absence of any evidence this will improve performance or profits, of course. There are small failures to be grateful for: not many women go around calling themselves “Ms” any more or complaining if you call them ladies.
The obsession with identity rolls on, although the old paradigm of black and white has faded into the background to be replaced by concern for “travellers” (gypsies to you and me), the dangers of islamophobia (as opposed to the real dangers of islamism), and a general polarisation between immigrants and the much-reviled indigents.
So, too, are equality and diversity embedded in the legal framework of society. Henceforth we are all equal, except some are…oh well, you know the rest.
This is where Thatcher and her colleagues failed: totally, dismally, catastrophically. They allowed Political Correctness and its corruption of the language to enter the culture, mainly at local level, and it has proliferated ever since. The leftist ideologues and educationists poisoned the country from inside and the EU poisoned it from outside. Now we are all made to suffer from the hysterical hypersensitivity it creates and the institutional bullying employed to enforce it.
That’s how we end up with Cameron, whose statement at Thatcher’s funeral “We’re all Thatcherites now” must surely have been intended to provoke the left rather than enunciate a truth, since his own worldview is thoroughly PC even if his background isn’t.
“We’re all loonies now,” is what he should have said. Except you can’t use the word “loony” any more. That would be offensive.
