We have often remarked on what difficult times these are for the
art of parody. If he is to be successful, a parodist must be able
to count on his audience’s ability to distinguish clearly between
the parody and the reality being spoofed. The triumph of
political correctness has long since blurred that distinction.
Whose ideological antennae are sensitive enough to register
accurately the shifting claims of victimhood and entitlement?
A mayoral aide in Washington, D.C. uses the word “niggardly” in
conversation with a black colleague; the colleague takes offense
because he thinks “niggardly” is racist; the aide promptly
offers his resignation, which is accepted. True or parodic
exaggeration? True, all too true.

“Racism,” of course, is something it behooves us all to worry
about constantly, never mind that the word is a neologism so
recent that it failed to make the 1970 edition of The Oxford
English Dictionary. But what about “ageism”? There was a time,
not so terribly long ago, when the term “ageism,” to the extent
that one heard it at all, was used as a joke. No one took it
as a moral failing. But that was before “ageism”
was enrolled in the index of impermissible attitudes, and federal
legislation was passed to prohibit it. When the culture of
victimhood really took root
in the early 1990s, one heard various
wags complaining about the treatment of the “vertically challenged,”
i.e., short people. Very funny that, until Smith College caught
up with the jest and decreed that henceforth “lookism”—the
heinous belief that some people are more attractive than
others—was prohibited. You see how hard things have become for
parodists. Indeed, we begin to wonder whether they as a group
might not qualify for endangered minority status, since they are
clearly victims of an institutionalized prejudice that threatens
not only their language, history, and tribal customs, but also
their very survival. We hope that the next Congress, whatever its
party complexion, will find time to address this important issue.

In any event, although this sort of political correctness
initially seemed to be primarily an American phenomenon, it
quickly spread to other countries. It took root most thoroughly in
countries, like Canada, that exist essentially as appendages of
the United States. (Of course, politically correct Canadians are
reflexively anti-American, but then so are most politically
correct Americans.) At first, habits of irony and common sense
helped to inoculate Britain against the virus of political
correctness. But Tony Blair, the least ironical prime minister
in recent history, largely neutralized those defenses. For the last
several years, Britain has been playing an aggressive game of
catch-up in political correctness.
Today, it rivals and perhaps even surpasses the United
States in its devotion to all things PC. If there were an
Olympics of political correctness, Britain would be in contention
for gold in nearly every event.

But wait: let us apologize for using the term “Britain.” After
all, a four-hundred-page report just issued for Tony Blair’s
government tells us that the word “British” has “racist
connotations.” If irony were still allowed, it might be thought
ironical that this report, “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain,”
was prepared by a think-tank named the Runnymede Trust. After
all, Runnymede was the meadow where King John, in 1215, set his
seal to Magna Carta,
a founding document in the development
of that glorious, freedom-nurturing institution, British common
law.

Well, we used to be able to think that it was glorious and
freedom-nurturing. These days one cannot be sure.
In any event, “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” instructs us
that if there is one thing worse than being British, it is
being English.

To be English, as the term
is used, is to be white. Britishness is not ideal, but at least it
appears acceptable when suitably qualified, such as Black British,
Indian British, British Muslim and so on.

There is one insuperable barrier: Britishness, as much as
Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racist connotations.
Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being
British, but it is widely understood that Englishness is racially
coded. The unstated assumption is that Britishness and whiteness go
together like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There has been no
collective working through of the imperial experience.

The absence from the national curriculum of a rewritten history of
Britain as an imperial force, involving dominance in Ireland,
Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, is proving to be an unmitigated
disaster.

“Rewritten history”? Indeed, among the many recommendations made
by “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” is the demand that
British history be “revised, rethought or jettisoned” in order to
meet the requirements of “inclusivity.” The report makes many
other recommendations—it calls, for example, for race equality
and “cultural diversity” inspections in schools, and suggests
that television franchise holders be required to appoint a
specified number of Blacks and Asians.
Expanding on the
recommendations
after the report was released, Lady
Gavron, vice-chairman of the commission, said “It would have
been great if Prince Charles had been told to marry someone
black. Imagine what message that would have sent out.”
(Told to? What if Lady Gavron had been “told to” marry a Tory?)

It is unclear exactly how Tony Blair’s government will deal with
the recommendations contained in the Runnymede Trust’s report.
Vigorous criticism in The Daily Telegraph and elsewhere has led
the government to distance itself somewhat from elements of the
report. But initially it was greeted with enthusiasm. “This is a
timely report,” Mike O’Brien, the Home Office minister said,
“which adds much to the current debate on multi-ethnic Britain.
The Government is profoundly committed to racial equality and the
celebration of diversity. We are a multi-cultural society.”

Of course, Britain has always been a multicultural society. But
until recently it has had the wit to subordinate questions of
race and ethnicity to the common project of national identity. As an
editorialist for the Telegraph noted, “it is our common
nationality that allows us to define Britishness
in civic, rather
than racial, terms.” Bikhu Parekh, emeritus professor of
political theory at Hull University and chairman of the
commission responsible for the Runnymede Trust’s report, has no
patience with this sort of integrationist model. “The term
integration is misleading,” he said, “as it implies a one-way
process in which ‘minorities’ are to be absorbed into the
non-existent homogeneous culture of the ‘majority.’”

Leave aside the bad grammar and tangled
logic of that sentence, with its
misused “as” and spectacle of phantom absorption. What about the
substance of Lord (as he now is) Parekh’s recommendation?
Any process of assimilation is a two-way street; but is
the integrationist model, with its goal of fitting minorities
into the language, customs, and values of the majority
society, really such a bad one? What is the alternative? One vivid
alternative is provided by Bikhu Parekh’s native India, where the
caste system dealt with the problem of different ethnicities and
classes in a very different way from Britain. There are a lot of
negative asides about Britain’s imperial history in the Runnymede
Trust’s report, but which was worse: Britain’s stewardship in
India, which brought modern technology, education, common law,
and an end to practices like suttee to a backward country, or
the murder and mayhem that left a million dead after
the Brits, under intense pressure, allowed the Indians to try
to govern themselves?

One editorialist described “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain”
as “sub-Marxist gibberish.” It is that, but it is also a perfect
example of what the journalist Minette Marrin calls the
“Indignation Industry” at work. As Ms. Marrin notes, not only does
indignation—unlike its close cousin, guilt
—provide “intoxicating
floods of righteous excitement, even (oddly enough) when it
is
directed at oneself,” but it also provides employment. Like
America, Britain is now at the mercy of “an immense army of
commissions and quangos and workshops and quality assurance teams
and guidelines committees and interdisciplinary evaluation groups
and re-evaluation advisory bodies and joint consultative boards,
all in hot and indignant pursuit of an ‘ism’ of some
kind
—heterosexism, racism, handicapism, anything.”
“The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” is a perfect specimen of
political correctness in action. Like all such products, it has
the odd effect of making parody simultaneously more difficult and
more necessary. It also makes unflagging criticism absolutely
imperative.