Ed West

Is privatising BBC3 as bad as Isis's destruction of Nineveh? That was the wonderfully trolling headline on a Stewart Lee piece in the Guardian over the weekend. He was making the point that even though BBC3 was not to his tastes it should be preserved because the Beeb is ‘the greatest cultural achievement of any 20th-century democracy’ and such diversity was part of its remit: In the wake of the licence freeze, the BBC plans to move the youth channel BBC3 online and halve its budget. As a middle-aged, middle-class man, I hate pretty much everything on BBC3. Snog Marry Avoid is just one of many BBC3 show titles that resist parody. The channel has the creepy vibe of a sleazy art teacher trying to coax sixth-form girls into the pub. But BBC3 isn’t aimed at me.

My mum once told me about a man she knew who’d come from a poor background and had no luck finding a job. He’d applied for over 400 positions but never got a response, but then he made one change to his CV and the next job he landed straight away. What did he do? He used a friend’s address, a friend who lived in a neighbouring postcode. The point of her story was that perseverance and lateral thinking will win out in the end, but what I took from it was that employers tend to choose people on arbitrary grounds. Postcodes are just one way in which employers use direct or indirect discrimination to get the right person, because when they’re going through 300 applicants firms are bound to use shorthand of some sort.

Owen Jones writes in the Guardian today on the subject of trans rights, making a revealing statement in the process. He says: ‘In truth, debates over the latest scientific research are of little interest to me: what matters is that the happiness, security and even lives of a minority are at stake, and all too little has been done about it.’ I’ve no desire to get involved in this particular debate, partly because I don’t know enough and I also don’t want to spend ten years getting harassed and threatened like Julie Bindel. One should never underestimate the threat of violence in shifting public debate, not just in religious matters.

Why has political correctness proved so enduring? This is the subject of cover pieces in The Spectator by Brendan O’Neill and Damian Thompson, which follow an article by American liberal columnist Jonathan Chait on the subject. We tend to think of political correctness as something from the late 1980s and early 1990s but in the internet age it has become more powerful than ever. Chait’s point is that - as Gerry Adams might put it - it hasn’t gone away you know. This is puzzling because much of the ideology is quite extreme, hysterical or absurd (microaggressions?) and extreme movements tend to burn themselves out or become ridiculed out of existence. The reason for PC’s survival and expansion is curious.

Germany is on its feet again, ja, so what can go wrong? This week Good Germans have been taking to the streets to counter-protest the PEGIDA (the Bad Germans) and their ‘anti-Islamisation’ rallies that began in Dresden; Europe’s media is horrified, if also slightly fascinated, with the clear subtext being ‘if the rest of Europe can’t go in for flag-waving there’s no way you lot can’. Not that media hostility will make much difference, I imagine; across western Europe the anti-politics movement is also anti-journalism. Large numbers of people feel that the broadcast and broadsheet media gives an inherently distorted account of multiculturalism, which its journalists view as a tenet of their faith, a faith most Europeans don’t share.

Roger Scruton writes in today’s Daily Telegraph, a sentence that in itself fills me with a sense of Wa – harmony, order. He writes: ‘Whether or not our political class has the ability or the will to control immigration, we have to accept that many of the millions who have come to this country in the last two decades are here to stay, and will need to be housed. Without a massive expansion of the housing stock, prices will continue to rise and the pressure on planning laws and infrastructure will become increasingly difficult to manage. As a result we face a question that concerns every resident of Britain, and which must be addressed with true public spirit: how we should build.

There are not that many things I find more irritating than Europeans getting on their high horses about America and the subject of race, violence and inequality. Everyone seems to have an opinion about the shooting of Michael Brown, most of which contradict what the actual witnesses and forensic evidence showed in the grand jury hearing; among these are a French government minister, who felt able to distract herself from her own country’s miseries, and Paris’s increasing resemblance to a toilet at a third division football ground. It’s partly America’s fault that it has told its own narrative to the world so well, including its racial struggle, and that this is cited by its enemies around the world.