A man in Cornwall was attacked by a woman from Cornwall's "racism and equality council" for telling "anti-Irish" jokes. The silly thing about all this is that the man telling the jokes is an Irishman......
LITTLEJOHN: Good evening, I'm from ethics, in case you couldn't tell!
13th September 2007
Daily Mail
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (fighting Political Correctness and Liberal Left-Wingers)
At last, I've cracked it. I'm now officially an ethnic minority. I suppose it was only a matter of time before they got round to Essex boys.
Up until now, those of us born in God's Own County have been denied the protection of the race relations industry.
We've been fair game for every smear and insult going. As I wrote in my book You Couldn't Make It Up, 14 years ago: "I was born white, male and in Essex. In 20 years' time, any baby answering that description will be found in the bullrushes.
"I'm assumed to be racist, sexist and philistine." (I don't think they'd invented 'homophobia' or 'Islamophobia' back then.)
Along with Old Etonians, white men from Essex are about the only section of society it is acceptable - nay, even compulsory - to vilify.
Not any more, though. I hadn't realised we'd made protected species status until I read yesterday the story of the Irish Catholic who was forced to resign his editorship of his village magazine after being branded "racist" by the Obergrupenfuhrer of the Cornwall Panzer Division of the Diversity Nazis.
His crime? Telling Irish jokes. More of that later.
But buried away down the page was the revelation that this wasn't the first time he'd fallen foul of the equality gestapo.
Denis Lusby, a shopkeeper from St Breward, near Bodmin, had earlier been reprimanded for including a couple of feeble Essex Girl jokes in his 56-page monthly.
Ginny Harrison-White, the humourless madwoman who runs Cornwall's race police, complained that the jokes could cause offence to people from Essex who may have settled in the West Country.
Thus, natives of Essex have taken their place on the list of persecuted persons, presumably just after Eritreans and Eskimos (although I've got a vague notion that you can't call Eskimos 'Eskimos' any more, either).
Now it is undoubtedly true that some Essex jokes, especially Essex Girl jokes, are indeed offensive, sexist and downright disgusting.
I should know - I wrote most of them, along with my old friend Mitch Symons.
Between us, under the pseudonyms Ray Leigh and Brent Wood, we knocked out about 250 of them in three or four days in Mitch's office above a burger bar in Chiswick, including a learned introduction from Professor Theydon Bois, principal of the Romford Library of Video.
It was one of the best tickles of both our otherwise undistinguished literary careers.
If not money for old rope, then the Official Essex Girl Joke Book was certainly money for old jokes, some of which had been doing the rounds in different forms for donkey's years.
I seem to remember we sold well over 100,000 copies in about a fortnight before the Christmas of 1991. The bookshops of Essex did a roaring trade.
We didn't get a single complaint, although a few of the dopey birds at the publishers affected faux feminist outrage at the whole concept.
Now we have an entire industry devoted to taking offence on behalf of other people. So it makes sense that Essex boys and girls have been designated worthy of special protection.
Yet I'd never have discovered this, had it not been for Cornwall's answer to Millie Tant hounding the unfortunate Mr Lusby.
She said the Irish jokes were deeply insulting to members of the 'travelling community' with whom she works.
What exactly does she do? Is she a member of a freelance Tarmacing gang? Does she go from door to door selling lucky heather? Does she spend the day sorting through stolen lawnmowers, scrap metal and setting fire to old car tyres? Is she a supplier of agricultural red diesel to those members of the community who drive brand-new Range Rovers and Mitsubishi Shoguns?
Does she have an illegal office in a caravan on the local cricket pitch or someone else's orchard?
In the unlikely event of any member of the 'travelling community' subscribing to Mr Lusby's magazine, would they really have been incensed by a couple of lame gags - any more than people in Ilford were likely to take to the streets over the one about the difference between an Essex Girl and a walrus. (Don't ask.)
Why does Cornwall even need a diversity and equality unit, other than to put otherwise unemployable Guardianistas on the payroll?
Last time I looked, Cornwall wasn't exactly a hotbed of multiculturalism. I don't suppose Sloane Rangers surfing at Rock count as an oppressed minority, but you never know. Does Ginny also do piskies, as well as gipsies?
I wonder if she's been watching Hell's Kitchen over the past week. If so, she would almost certainly have been appalled at Marco Pierre White's deployment of the word 'pikey', an alternative term used occasionally to describe members of the diddicoy community.
The problem ITV faced was that if they kicked Marco, the host, off the show, there wouldn't have been a show, so he got away with it.
Mere contestant Jim Davidson, on the other hand, could be relied upon to Act As Known. He was shown the door for uttering the word 'shirtlifter' which upset a particularly sensitive homosexual, who apparently was once on Big Brother.
So they got a 'homophobia' row rather than a race row. Trebles all round.
That's what Jimbo was there for. It's why they would have paid him six figures towards his serial alimony commitments.
As it happens, that could have been me. They asked me to be on Hell's Kitchen, presumably so I could be presented as the threeheaded BNP/racist/sexist/Little Englander/homophobe caricature of Left-wing media page fame.
As I was not born in Essex yesterday, it was an offer I felt able to graciously decline.
So please spare us the mock horror. Jimbo did precisely what the script required, just as the preposterous Jade Goody delivered on Big Brother.
Put a thick pig in lipstick in a goldfish bowl with a sophisticated Bollywood actress and it's only a matter of time before she blurts out the P-word.
Some racial abuse is acceptable, however. Complaints about Trevor McDonald describing Bernard Manning as a 'fat white bastard' on a comedy show were rightly rejected, probably on grounds of factual accuracy.
But they should never even have been entertained in the first place. Anyone with nothing better to do than ring up and complain about a light-hearted, probably scripted aside, from the charming Trevor, should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
Some people get away with the most appalling abuse. If you're Left-wing enough, it is assumed that you can't possibly be racist. So the vile Ken Livingstone can spit anti-Semitic hatred at a Jewish reporter, or tell a couple of developers to push off back to Iran, and walk away scot-free.
Livingstone's most disgusting barb was directed at Trevor Phillips, of the racial equality commission, whom he accused of pandering to the BNP.
To my mind that was as bad, if not worse, as hurling the N-word at him.
The false accusation of 'racist' thrown about by Livingstone and other Leftist thugs, some with their own newspaper columns, is spiteful and can be damaging.
Boris Johnson is getting the full bucketload right now, simply for challenging Mayor-for-Life Livingstone. The London Labour Party, in league with the Guardian, is coating Boris with hateful smears of 'racism'.
Yet loud-mouthed Muslim rabble-rousers are free to yell 'filthy kuffar' and 'infidel' with impunity and Livingstone invites preachers of hate to City Hall as 'honoured guests'.
Even if sticks and stones break our bones, words can still be hurtful. We must sometimes mind our language - but that doesn't mean we need a vast state apparatus of purse-lipped madwomen to police parish magazines which publish Irish jokes.
Still, no doubt now that I'm an ethnic minority, too, I'll be getting an easier ride in some quarters.
As the Bard of Upminster, Ian Dury, wrote: "Good evening, I'm from Essex, in case you couldn't tell.
My given name is Dickie. I come from Billericay. And I'm doing very well.
Maybe that should be: Good evening, I'm from Ethnics.
dailymail.co.uk
LITTLEJOHN: Good evening, I'm from ethics, in case you couldn't tell!
13th September 2007
Daily Mail
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN (fighting Political Correctness and Liberal Left-Wingers)
At last, I've cracked it. I'm now officially an ethnic minority. I suppose it was only a matter of time before they got round to Essex boys.
Up until now, those of us born in God's Own County have been denied the protection of the race relations industry.
We've been fair game for every smear and insult going. As I wrote in my book You Couldn't Make It Up, 14 years ago: "I was born white, male and in Essex. In 20 years' time, any baby answering that description will be found in the bullrushes.
"I'm assumed to be racist, sexist and philistine." (I don't think they'd invented 'homophobia' or 'Islamophobia' back then.)
Along with Old Etonians, white men from Essex are about the only section of society it is acceptable - nay, even compulsory - to vilify.
Not any more, though. I hadn't realised we'd made protected species status until I read yesterday the story of the Irish Catholic who was forced to resign his editorship of his village magazine after being branded "racist" by the Obergrupenfuhrer of the Cornwall Panzer Division of the Diversity Nazis.
His crime? Telling Irish jokes. More of that later.
But buried away down the page was the revelation that this wasn't the first time he'd fallen foul of the equality gestapo.
Denis Lusby, a shopkeeper from St Breward, near Bodmin, had earlier been reprimanded for including a couple of feeble Essex Girl jokes in his 56-page monthly.
Ginny Harrison-White, the humourless madwoman who runs Cornwall's race police, complained that the jokes could cause offence to people from Essex who may have settled in the West Country.
Thus, natives of Essex have taken their place on the list of persecuted persons, presumably just after Eritreans and Eskimos (although I've got a vague notion that you can't call Eskimos 'Eskimos' any more, either).
Now it is undoubtedly true that some Essex jokes, especially Essex Girl jokes, are indeed offensive, sexist and downright disgusting.
I should know - I wrote most of them, along with my old friend Mitch Symons.
Between us, under the pseudonyms Ray Leigh and Brent Wood, we knocked out about 250 of them in three or four days in Mitch's office above a burger bar in Chiswick, including a learned introduction from Professor Theydon Bois, principal of the Romford Library of Video.
It was one of the best tickles of both our otherwise undistinguished literary careers.
If not money for old rope, then the Official Essex Girl Joke Book was certainly money for old jokes, some of which had been doing the rounds in different forms for donkey's years.
I seem to remember we sold well over 100,000 copies in about a fortnight before the Christmas of 1991. The bookshops of Essex did a roaring trade.
We didn't get a single complaint, although a few of the dopey birds at the publishers affected faux feminist outrage at the whole concept.
Now we have an entire industry devoted to taking offence on behalf of other people. So it makes sense that Essex boys and girls have been designated worthy of special protection.
Yet I'd never have discovered this, had it not been for Cornwall's answer to Millie Tant hounding the unfortunate Mr Lusby.
She said the Irish jokes were deeply insulting to members of the 'travelling community' with whom she works.
What exactly does she do? Is she a member of a freelance Tarmacing gang? Does she go from door to door selling lucky heather? Does she spend the day sorting through stolen lawnmowers, scrap metal and setting fire to old car tyres? Is she a supplier of agricultural red diesel to those members of the community who drive brand-new Range Rovers and Mitsubishi Shoguns?
Does she have an illegal office in a caravan on the local cricket pitch or someone else's orchard?
In the unlikely event of any member of the 'travelling community' subscribing to Mr Lusby's magazine, would they really have been incensed by a couple of lame gags - any more than people in Ilford were likely to take to the streets over the one about the difference between an Essex Girl and a walrus. (Don't ask.)
Why does Cornwall even need a diversity and equality unit, other than to put otherwise unemployable Guardianistas on the payroll?
Last time I looked, Cornwall wasn't exactly a hotbed of multiculturalism. I don't suppose Sloane Rangers surfing at Rock count as an oppressed minority, but you never know. Does Ginny also do piskies, as well as gipsies?
I wonder if she's been watching Hell's Kitchen over the past week. If so, she would almost certainly have been appalled at Marco Pierre White's deployment of the word 'pikey', an alternative term used occasionally to describe members of the diddicoy community.
The problem ITV faced was that if they kicked Marco, the host, off the show, there wouldn't have been a show, so he got away with it.
Mere contestant Jim Davidson, on the other hand, could be relied upon to Act As Known. He was shown the door for uttering the word 'shirtlifter' which upset a particularly sensitive homosexual, who apparently was once on Big Brother.
So they got a 'homophobia' row rather than a race row. Trebles all round.
That's what Jimbo was there for. It's why they would have paid him six figures towards his serial alimony commitments.
As it happens, that could have been me. They asked me to be on Hell's Kitchen, presumably so I could be presented as the threeheaded BNP/racist/sexist/Little Englander/homophobe caricature of Left-wing media page fame.
As I was not born in Essex yesterday, it was an offer I felt able to graciously decline.
So please spare us the mock horror. Jimbo did precisely what the script required, just as the preposterous Jade Goody delivered on Big Brother.
Put a thick pig in lipstick in a goldfish bowl with a sophisticated Bollywood actress and it's only a matter of time before she blurts out the P-word.
Some racial abuse is acceptable, however. Complaints about Trevor McDonald describing Bernard Manning as a 'fat white bastard' on a comedy show were rightly rejected, probably on grounds of factual accuracy.
But they should never even have been entertained in the first place. Anyone with nothing better to do than ring up and complain about a light-hearted, probably scripted aside, from the charming Trevor, should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
Some people get away with the most appalling abuse. If you're Left-wing enough, it is assumed that you can't possibly be racist. So the vile Ken Livingstone can spit anti-Semitic hatred at a Jewish reporter, or tell a couple of developers to push off back to Iran, and walk away scot-free.
Livingstone's most disgusting barb was directed at Trevor Phillips, of the racial equality commission, whom he accused of pandering to the BNP.
To my mind that was as bad, if not worse, as hurling the N-word at him.
The false accusation of 'racist' thrown about by Livingstone and other Leftist thugs, some with their own newspaper columns, is spiteful and can be damaging.
Boris Johnson is getting the full bucketload right now, simply for challenging Mayor-for-Life Livingstone. The London Labour Party, in league with the Guardian, is coating Boris with hateful smears of 'racism'.
Yet loud-mouthed Muslim rabble-rousers are free to yell 'filthy kuffar' and 'infidel' with impunity and Livingstone invites preachers of hate to City Hall as 'honoured guests'.
Even if sticks and stones break our bones, words can still be hurtful. We must sometimes mind our language - but that doesn't mean we need a vast state apparatus of purse-lipped madwomen to police parish magazines which publish Irish jokes.
Still, no doubt now that I'm an ethnic minority, too, I'll be getting an easier ride in some quarters.
As the Bard of Upminster, Ian Dury, wrote: "Good evening, I'm from Essex, in case you couldn't tell.
My given name is Dickie. I come from Billericay. And I'm doing very well.
Maybe that should be: Good evening, I'm from Ethnics.
dailymail.co.uk
