Unrepentant

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March 22nd 2017

I am wholly unrepentant.

There are famines in South Sudan and Nigeria. Mr. Trump wants to build a " Berlin Wall" across America. North Korea is taking the world to the edge of a nuclear Armageddon. Britain and Europe face Brexit and the greatest challenges that most people have faced within living memory and Ms. Sturgeon is hell bent upon destroying both the Union and, in the doctrinaire process, her own Country.

And what does a vociferous minority of the British public believe is worthy of comment? The fact that during a national radio programme a Member of Parliament referred, with great affection, to his team of staff as "girls"! As my wife, Suzy, who is one of those girls, observe d " do people really have nothing better to worry about? That did not, however, prevent this ' outrage' from " trending" at number seven on national social media!

On the day after this earth- shattering event another of my team, Mrs Debi Hill , who looks about twenty- eight but who, Nick Robinson elicited from her, is in fact forty eight and has worked with us for eighteen years, chose to appear on the same radio programme to say that she enjoyed being a girl. Set up - I use the words advisedly - was an -Americam lesbian ( her description) who is apparently a Professor at the University of East Anglia, calls everyone " guys" and believes that this was, indeed, the most important item on the news agenda.

This would be trivial and risible if there was not a dark side to it all. I was brought up, as have been my own children, to stand up and to open doors for ladies and to walk on the outside of pavements. These days many people use language that would be out of place in a dockyard and that is a fault of which I am sometimes guilty myself but I do not, through choice, engage in gratuitous offence. An archaic,approach to life, possibly, but courtesy costs nothing and generally more effective than abuse.

The dark side is that there is a body of extreme opinion that is represented by the ' politically correct' thought police that seeks to impose its will upon freedoms of speech and views upon all of the rest of us. It is they, not the majority, who are oppressive, course and bigoted and they must not be allowed to browbeat a way of life for which many of us hold dear and have fought, literally or through democracy, to protect.

It will not happen, of course, but it would be good to think that the same amount of effort and energy might be put by the followers of these sad doctrines, into saving starving children in South Sudan as they are prepared to invest, apparently, in trying to dictate and impose their terms are people who still enjoy freedom of thought and speech.

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