THE IDIOCY OF ABASEMENT TO THE UMBRAGE POLICE

The celebrity actor Benedict Cumberbatch has said he is "a complete fool," an "idiot," "thoughtless" and that he is "devastated" for having inadvertently used the term "colored" to describe black people on a US talk show.

It’s depressing enough that he felt the obligation to apologize. But what’s worse is that he felt the need to do with such groveling self-abasement.

Yes, we all know why he did it. It’s Oscar nomination season coming up, Cumberbatch is a possible contender for his portrayal of fashionably autistic, gay code-breaker Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, and Hollywood is notoriously PC and squeamish about issues to do with race.

But if anyone who owes anyone an apology, here, it’s not poor put-upon Cumberbatch but the noisome professional offense-takers who by seeking to make political mileage out of such achingly trivial issues are creating a climate of linguistic fear in which good people suffer.

First, that word "colored". Yes, it may be a little old fashioned. As Sarah Vine rightly notes it’s "The kind of thing your granny might say and which might compel you to lean over and gently whisper in her ear: ‘No one says ‘colored’ any more, gran. It’s not the done thing’. To which she might reply: ‘Really, dear? I had no idea.’"

What it definitely isn’t, though, is in any way malign or pejorative. Indeed, there was a time – back in the Seventies, when it was used pretty regularly and in the politest of company – when it would have been considered positively PC.

Second, the context. Cumberbatch was using the now-apparently verboten word in the course of a diatribe against the lack of job opportunities for ethnic actors in the UK film industry.

In other words, he was making a point of almost toe-curling bien-pensant rectitude. That his reward for this should be to be taken to task by the Umbrage Police is almost as absurd as if a Medal of Honor hero, having single-handedly taken an enemy machine-gun position, should then be disciplined for his cruel and unusual use of a bayonet.

Third, the hypocrisy. Are we to understand then, that from now on, the National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People will be changing its name to the National Association For The Advancement Of People Of Color? (Until such time, of course, when "People of Color" too becomes discredited and unfashionable, as no doubt it will eventually because that, unfortunately, seems to be the deal: today’s PC euphemism is tomorrow’s inexcusable racial slur).

This, though, unfortunately, is how the liberal-left rolls.  For as my friend Alex Wickham tells me, "Liberals are the new Puritans who want to control your life."

One of the ways they are achieving this is in their vexatious and aggressive policing of the spoken word – on college campuses, in the media, on Twitter, on TV chat shows, in schools, in books.

The purpose of this will be more than familiar to students of the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism and to readers of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It’s about generating a cultural climate in which no one feels quite comfortable to express themselves freely for fear, as Cumberbatch did, of breaking some new unwritten rule of which they weren’t hitherto aware.

It’s also, of course, about identity politics and power.  Which is what makes it so dangerous.

Any debate worthy of the name depends for its quality on the ideas expressed, not on the identity of the people expressing them. This is the essence of free speech: everyone should be free to express themselves on equal terms, without fear or favor; and everyone else should be free to applaud their argument or knock it down with a better argument.

And so what if someone somewhere might end up choosing to take "offense" at the ideas expressed?  This is far preferable to the alternative: a world where certain designated groups – transgenders, Moslems, government-endorsed climate scientists, whoever – are deemed so special as to above the rules governing everyone else.

Given the chance, they will almost always resort to the identity politics/language-policing/offense-taking shtick because the instinct is built into their DNA.

My attitude to these ridiculous people’s rules is much the same as the one I hold to this idea, currently fashionable in the Umma, that everyone – not just Moslems – should be subject to Islamist codes on blasphemy.

Since when? Who made that rule? Certainly not anyone worthy of respect.

Just look at the arrogance of this article written in the London Telegraph in response to the Cumberbatch story. It’s called The 9 Words So Offensive We Need To Ditch Them. Now.

(Don’t you just love that petulant, footstomping "Now" at the end?)

Among the "inappropriate" words that "we" would (apparently) like to see dropped "today!" are: gay, spastic, retarded, paedo, half-caste, cretin, dyke and special. ("Paedo" is slang for "paedophile" as the Brits spell it – as in: "Mohammed was such a paedo.")

These are words which, currently, the author sententiously informs us,  "many people struggle to fully eliminate from their vocabulary – even if they knew they shouldn’t really use them this way."

Who is this "we" is what I should like to know. Maybe there’s a reason why people struggle fully to eliminate these words from their vocabulary. Maybe it’s because they find them useful; maybe it’s because even – heaven forfend – they very much enjoy winding up prim, disapproving missies like the girl who wrote the piece; maybe they enjoy kicking against the PC traces.

Occasionally, my kids ask me whether a particular word they’ve used is offensive or not (usually in the context of: "This got me into trouble with my teachers. Is that fair?") and the answer I invariably give is that it depends on context. No word should be forbidden in all contexts. It’s just a question of how you use it.

And no one should ever abase themselves to the liberal fascists of the Umbrage Police.  We need an End to the New Puritanism movement.

British writer James Delingpole is the author of such "fantastically entertaining" books as 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, and Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work.

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